Late Nights on Air (36 page)

A one-hour blow, that’s all it was. The wind died down as they watched, the water went flat, and they kept looking and Ralph didn’t reappear. Maybe he was fine, probably he was fine.

They took Harry’s canoe, he thought to throw in a jacket and a length of rope, and set off down the lake, staying fairly
close to shore. Every few minutes Eleanor stopped paddling to raise her binoculars and scan the water. Gwen, with another pair of binoculars, walked the tundra above the shore. She had a whistle around her neck. She would blow the whistle if she saw anything, that was their agreement.

Alone on land, Gwen felt as she had on those Sunday nights when her parents drove her brother back to university and she spent several hours imagining the car accident that would leave her orphaned. Fourteen years old and the radio for company. She became aware that she wasn’t looking for a silver canoe at all. She had her eyes trained on the red canoe, not willing to let them out of her sight, but at a certain point she couldn’t see them any more.

Midnight, and it was perfectly still. The wind comes in the front door, it goes out the back door, and the house returns to a supernatural quiet.

Eleanor and Harry paddled and looked until their eyes hurt. The sun below the horizon, the light duskier, it was harder to see, and they lost track of time. “I’m not an artisan,” Eleanor remembered Ralph joking once. “I don’t make anything except commotion.” Which wasn’t true, but she loved him for saying it. This is too much commotion, she was saying to him. Please.

The landscape changed before her eyes. A movement here, a shadow over there, a hint of light, a shape that her eyes fastened on with such greed, such greedy longing. She was looking for Ralph and seeing nothing but ghosts. Her arms worked, her eyes were intact, but her soul was coming apart. And when she saw, finally, a spot of drifting orange
that receded and shifted and came into being, she recognized that she was seeing her future, and it was a future of infinite sadness.

They were on their way back. Gwen saw how the canoe was lower in the water and how their paddling was automatic, deadened, slow. She headed back to their campsite, stumbling, running. She would make a fire, she thought, she would make tea, she would make them something to eat.

Her hands were shaking but she made a fire, she got water boiling. She rummaged in the packs for tea bags and packaged soup, then went to the water’s edge. Eleanor stepped out of the canoe and dragged it up a little. Then Harry hauled it up the rest of the way.

It was the sound the canoe made on the gravelly shore that marked the end for Eleanor. She walked a few feet and sank to her knees.

Gwen drew her to the fire, helped her into dry clothes. Put a mug of tea into her shivering hands and remembered Eleanor saying once that nothing puts you together like a cup of tea. Eleanor lifted the mug. It hit her teeth. Gwen took it out of her hands and held it for her and Eleanor sipped. Gwen wrapped her arms around her friend, rocked her back and forth.

Later, Harry and Gwen lifted the body out of the canoe. Eleanor watched them lay Ralph on a stretch of sandy shore. She would never forget how they grew in stature before her eyes, head and shoulders above themselves. They took off Ralph’s life vest and there he was in his old shirt, and she
remembered his wedding shirt, the clean shirt he’d placed over her face, but she couldn’t remember where she’d put it and couldn’t rest until she remembered. Gwen found it for her, folded up, on a flat stone ten feet from the fire.

Harry went to get a nylon groundsheet. He came back and Eleanor was sitting beside the body. The sun wasn’t up yet. She was examining Ralph’s small hand in twilight that was bright enough to read by, if you had good eyes. A refrigerated hand. She stroked the back of it, turned it over, and studied the stiff fingers. They were asheny-blue, a little rough, still stained by nicotine.

Harry stood for a moment watching her. Her head looked like the heaviest of peonies after a rain, her body tilted forward over Ralph’s. And the thought came to him that it wasn’t just one person who had died, but all the filaments of life connecting that person to everyone he’d ever known and to every place he’d ever been.

Eventually he persuaded Eleanor to leave Ralph’s side. He led her up to the tundra to a makeshift bed he’d prepared—their thin insulite mattresses and sleeping bags. She crawled into hers. He and Gwen lay on either side of her, inside their bags and under a tarp. She began to talk then, wondering about Ralph’s final minutes, how long he suffered, how much, and Harry said it would have been very quick, he would have drifted off in a stupor. If only I’d gone with him, she cried. She meant that if they’d been together, two in the canoe, it never would have happened. And what did happen? The wind came up, yes, and the lake was wide and long, but how had he overturned? We’ll never know, said Harry. He got into trouble,
we’ll never know exactly how. Don’t blame yourself, he said. Nobody’s to blame, said Gwen.

Harry and Gwen slept a little. Eleanor lay awake. After a while she eased herself out of her sleeping bag and went down to the water. It was wrong to leave him alone. He lay wrapped in Harry’s groundsheet, a broken body, and she sat on the shore beside him. So cold to the touch when she pulled the nylon sheet away from his dear, lost, clean-shaven face. She found herself repeating the 23 rd psalm and why it should give her comfort under the circumstances she couldn’t quite fathom, since she felt real bitterness too. She’d lost her father too soon, she’d lost Ralph even sooner. But she murmured to herself the words about the valley of the shadow of death, the house of the Lord, and she felt situated in a larger place, so large it held every possible thing, including all the minutiae of every kind of pain.

The sun came up and with its warmth the mosquitoes came alive and Gwen stirred and Harry slept on. Gwen joined Eleanor and they walked together along the shore, listening, waiting for the Twin Otter to arrive. Around seven they heard it in the western sky. Gwen went to wake up Harry and found him folding the tarp, rolling up their sleeping bags. Then they went down to the shore and prepared themselves for the last part of their journey.

They noticed the wind, of course. The stillness of the previous night seemed hallucinatory now. It had been perfectly calm for how long? A few hours? Long enough to fool Ralph into going out alone and too far. Now they knew that the only reason it was calm was because the wind was shifting. The
stillness fools you, because it’s never really still. The stillness is the time before the change.

Grey clouds on all sides. Blue sky with cumulus clouds above.

And then the Barrens were far below them, glowing in the sun, all vast and distant and bronze. The body of Ralph was inside the body of the plane, which was bouncing over the body of the world, and Gwen reached for a motion sickness bag and quietly threw up. Ralph’s canoe was in the plane too. The pilot—older, experienced—had brought reality of a different kind into their midst. He’d said they should find the missing canoe. He used the word
evidence
. There would be questions, because there had been a death. He and Harry had set off in the float plane and it hadn’t taken very long to spot what the sun had already picked out. The glinting canoe had drifted almost to shore, not far from where they had found Ralph floating face down in the water.

WHERE THEY HAD BEEN WAS SO VAST
, and Ralph’s death so unforeseen, that their sense of the ordinary died with him. The normal grasses of life never quite grew back. On the day they returned from the Barrens, there was the official business of death. The police took Ralph’s body to the hospital, where he was examined by the coroner. For the other three, there were questions by the police and statements to sign. There was Bill Thwaite with his microphone. By late afternoon they were so exhausted they returned separately to their homes, where each of them had a variation of the same almost surreal experience. Harry reached for a can of coffee on his kitchen shelf, then stood marvelling at this simplest of things, a wooden shelf at eye level. Gwen stood in her bathroom, enraptured by the dusky light emanating from the porcelain sink and the warm water flowing from the tap. Eleanor listened spellbound for a moment to the whispering slide of wood on wood when she opened and closed a dresser drawer.

Gwen, it was, who phoned Harry to say that no matter what Eleanor thought she wanted, they shouldn’t leave her alone. They arrived at her door soon afterwards, only to find Teresa already there. Teresa, who had kidded them quite rightly about not knowing enough, knew exactly what to do.
She got them talking and their impromptu wake began, hours of stories about the trip, about Ralph. His foibles, his turns of phrase, his stamina, his passionate heart. Around midnight, half-crying, half-laughing, Eleanor said, “Some men will do anything to avoid a wedding.”

After the others left, she got into bed and slept for twelve hours. When she woke, she went into her kitchen, discovered the fruit and cheese and bread and ham that Teresa had put in her refrigerator, made herself a small plate of food, and nibbled at it. Then went back to bed and slept four hours more. During that time she had a dream. She was in her father’s study on the second floor at home, stuffing paper into a big hole in the wall. She was preparing to sell Ralph’s books. She pulled forward a small table, moved the other furniture to one side, and felt a breeze, a cool lake breeze coming from somewhere. She went out to the hall landing, then headed downstairs, and on the stairs she felt the breeze even more. Suddenly the front door blew open and Ralph was there in the sort of detail that cannot be recaptured in waking life. She went to him and pressed her face against his neck and felt his whiskers. She could smell him and feel him. He wasn’t big, but he had bulk, muscle. She didn’t want to let him go, but she wanted to look at him. He was wearing a red and black flannel shirt, a T-shirt underneath it, his old baggy pants. His grey hair was mussed and plastered to his forehead, and his face was flushed from recent exertion. She told him how overjoyed she was to see him again, and his face brightened and he intimated that she shouldn’t worry. Then he said something more, something important. He was passing on the secret of life and she began to realize she was dreaming. But that isn’t
what woke her up. She woke up because she was crying. For a while she lay in bed, going over the dream, struggling to remember what Ralph had said. But she couldn’t.

The next day, as she reached for the hairbrush on her dresser, she experienced a visitation of a more mundane kind. She looked in the mirror and saw her mother.

You pass a photograph on the piano, she thought, a picture of a family member, a face utterly familiar, but bearing no relationship to your own. And then a stranger comes along and sees the resemblance you’ve overlooked. Staring in the mirror, she was her own stranger, noticing in her altered face something more recognizable than herself, the expression of worn-out grief she had seen on her mother after her father died.

Later, she sat down and wrote to her. I’m back from the trip I told you about, the trip Dad would have loved to make. But something happened. Four of us made the journey and only three of us returned. She related everything in detail. She wrote, I find myself thinking of you a great deal.

A week and a half later, she would read her mother’s reply. “Something punishing has happened to you,” her mother wrote, and Eleanor was struck by the aptness of the word. A single word balanced atop a mountain of feeling.

After the close-knit intensity of the trip, and the closer-knit shock of Ralph’s death, Gwen settled back into herself, into work, and it felt wrong. It tasted off. Compared to Harry, the
new young manager was a pipsqueak, she thought, who never looked you in the eye. His only interest was the new building, or so it seemed. Earlier in the summer, construction had started on a building site on the outskirts of town, far removed from the heart of Yellowknife. Things were well underway, and if plans went as scheduled, they would move out there next June. Everyone around her, it seemed to Gwen, was on edge, poised to see what openings television would bring, and how they might advance themselves.

At Ralph’s funeral there had been hymns and old songs and they’d spoken to her in some way she didn’t quite trust. They filled her with what she thought of as easy emotion, and made her feel vulnerable. The church they’d used for the service was Eleanor’s church, and the pews were filled, not with Ralph’s family, which was scattered and distant—he had an ex-wife and no children and only one surviving sister—but with his friends from the radio station and from town. “There is a Balm in Gilead.” “Unto the Hills.” She listened to Eleanor’s quavery, thin voice, a little embarrassed for her, and ashamed of being embarrassed. But why should things be censored and simplified, she thought. Why should Ralph’s death be softened, when it was shockingly hard, and sweetened by hymns, when he wasn’t a religious man, not that she’d been aware of. For six weeks they’d shared a canoe and she’d come to know just how strong and stubborn he was, and how gentle and erudite. He knew more things by heart than anyone else she’d ever met. She pictured him now, wrapped in a groundsheet, hoisted like a gunny sack into the float plane.