The Big Why (25 page)

They went to the hospital. There was a man waiting with a pitchfork in his chest. George started to describe his symptoms in metaphorical terms, but as soon as Alma said her husband was having chest pains they took him in. They studied his body for thirty minutes. He was okay. A heart attack, the doctor said, feels like a vise clamp on your chest. It crushes you.

But as they went home Alma thought about how she’d felt during that moment of fear. She’d thought, I’ve wasted my life. I havent lived enough.

Her attitude changed. And while she stayed with Gerald, she could not love him. So she left him. Perhaps for men it is not such a blow: years later Gerald found his way back to Jenny Starling.

Alma said to me after she left Gerald: Funny thing is this — if he had a chest pain now I’d think, Why didnt I stick it out with him. Why did I go so easily.

So in a way, Gerald’s joking at a party about Kathleen and me being finished, well, that precipitated the thought of finishing. We like to coddle the thought of ending things, even if those things are good. It’s the nature of sabotaging one’s own happiness. Jenny Starling’s husband had left her. Luis Starling. Before they’d married Luis had said, The next woman I’m with will be the one. Jenny had believed he meant her. But Luis Starling was describing the woman after Jenny.

After Kathleen had left me, that’s when Gerald and Jenny got together. Jenny said to me: I dont see what the problem is. Youve got me. Youve got me like this and the rest of the world too. Would you really be happy with me and two children and nothing else? Because you’d have to be faithful. See, I’m not going to do anything to hurt Gerald. I love Gerald and —

Yes, I said. I’m not saying anything about your predicament.

It’s not a fucking predicament.

Okay, your choice.

Kent, why do you have to see it that way? This is the situation. This is the way it is.

Oh, so that’s different from a predicament.

When I married Kathleen, my friends had quietly complained of her. And when I first moved to Brigus, she’d stayed with Gerald and Alma in New York. She received but did not exude. And Gerald had felt drained as one is drained after visiting a hospital. Except I had brought them the hospital. She was a ward.

But she was good with the children and now we would have a fourth.

Are you happy? she said. She was three inches from me.

It’s terrific, I said.

I was ordered into Judge Prowse’s temporary offices. He’d put on a dickey and his robes. His rooms were bare of ornament. Sun through high small windows. A cold woodstove and a pale oak desk.

Sir, you have been charged with assault.

He said it formally. And I realized he was being a professional now.

It was a prank, Judge. No one was hurt. Someone should have been hurt, but they werent.

You will come to a hearing?

I would find a hearing fascinating.

Fine. He got up and hung up his robes. You do any hunting.

I have been known to accompany hunters.

Well, come on then.

The Judge borrowed a rifle from Bob Bartlett’s father. It looked long and dubious. A gun to shoot seals with, William Bartlett said. We took it to a gravel basin to sight it in. I drew a portrait of Jim Hearn with antlers on the side of a wooden crate, paced off fifty yards, and fired three rounds. A bullet at fifty yards will hit the same target at two hundred yards, Prowse said, such is the trajectory of a rifled bullet. The sights were top-notch.

Mr Pomeroy had told Prowse that several caribou had been visiting the gardens and munching the tops of his turnips. If we got up at dawn and cruised down there.

I was up at five oclock and I walked down to wake up Prowse. He was putting a leg into his tweed knickers. He looked like an Austrian skier.

There is something cold and reluctant in my bones about getting up in the dark. But the thing is, it’s terrific to choose to get up early. This has to do with control, of course. In deciding what one wants to do.

Prowse loaded the rifle and we strolled out to the back acre of Pomeroy’s garden.

Want to carry that, son?

The word surprised me. I hadnt thought of the judge as much older than me. If your father dies while youre young he takes the standard with him and you forget to age. Or else you grow up immediately and bypass the idea of aging. So here was the judge, calling me son. I knew that he meant the word as an affectionate one. But it made me think that I was with a man who could be my father. That I was learning to hunt.

The rifle in one hand felt heavy and powerful. The sky was dark but promising. I stared at tree stumps. I picked out the rows of turnip and potato. I lifted the barrel and loaded the magazine. It made a loud metal shunking.

Prowse pointed at something. He gestured for me to give him the gun.

I stared at this flatness, this quiet stillness. Nothing moved. The bushes were heavy with dew.

Prowse: Just past that flash of marsh.

A smudge. The smudge was what caught your eye. I looked for the smudge and some tree branches moved across the far shore of the bog. The branches were not branches. They were antlers, and three quiet caribou jogged up to the edge of the garden and halted. They were alive and silent.

Prowse levelled the rifle on them. Then he knelt on one knee. He lowered the rifle.

We moved up with them. When they moved we moved. Then they heard us. Prowse sighted them again. And they trotted on. Suddenly he ran. He got far ahead of me and they froze. The first light was banking off their flanks.

We tracked them like this for another twenty minutes, a little deeper into the woods. I wasnt sure if Prowse was really considering a shot. He froze when they froze. He was enjoying this mimicry. I was breathing hard from the false shots of adrenaline. There was nothing in the world for me now except Prowse and these caribou.

We were a good hundred yards away from the three of them. But a clear shot. Prowse raised the stock of the rifle to his cheekbone. He levelled it at the neck of the stag. Then he let out a little whistle. A loud crack. Something struck my bare hand — it was the bright brass casing of the bullet. It had ejected from the chamber and struck me. It was hot.

Nothing.

Damn ya, he said.

He reloaded. The caribou turned their necks to look at us, curious. I realized then that Prowse was eighty years old and probably half blind. He squeezed out a second crack and the back of the stag slumped down.

You got him.

I got him.

He knelt down and I came up to him. I waited for his advance. He put a hand on my shoulder.

Just wait.

He patted my shoulder and laid his back on the brush, the rifle across his knees. He chuckled. He was delighted with himself. He just lay there for a minute, then he got up.

Let’s get a bit of kindling from under that brush.

Why’d you whistle?

Theyre skinny when theyre front on. You have to make them turn their head.

We collected some old dry boughs and built a fire. Prowse walked to a brook and came back with a wet kettle. It made the fire hiss. We flaked out there in the fresh sun. The bushes full of dew then drying out. Water bubbled out the spout.

Now a cup of tea.

We drank the tea. About twenty minutes had gone by. Prowse then got up. There was nothing to see.

He was up by that birch stand, wasnt he.

I thought he was over by the brook more.

We walked towards the far end of the bog. The stag lay there on his side, his big white belly exposed.

If someone shot you, he said. And he started running after you. What would you do.

I’d run.

You got to give the animal time to die. Give him peace and he won’t run far. He’ll sit down and rest and end up bleeding to death. He won’t even know it happened till he closes his eyes.

But as we got closer the caribou jerked his neck and lifted a hoof. It was a wild, thrashing hoof motion near my head. It could have slit my throat.

Prowse put the rifle to its ear and squeezed. A crackling as if the world had broken. He opened the breach and handed the gun to me. Dont lose it, he said.

He removed his pack. He plunged a knife into the caribou’s neck and rummaged through the neck to bleed him.

Help me get him on his back.

He put a front leg over the antler tines, to get him balanced. Then slit through the hide to the breastbone and down to the penis sheath. He avoided puncturing the gut. In the pack was a small saw — a tenon saw. He handed it to me.

You know how to handle one of these fellows.

Me: I’m afraid I’ve only accompanied hunters.

Saw through the chest.

We had to work fast. The bright stomach and organs spilled up. They were fresh and clean. I worked deep into the body and scraped at the pelvic bone. I sliced with the knife some hitches to the chest. The organs were warm. The hoofs were black blades. Four bits to a hoof. This gutting was getting to me.

Did I tell you I was vegetarian?

No one’s asked you to eat anything.

The neck and chest were open now. Prowse cut through the windpipe and slit a hole in. He pushed a finger through and hauled the windpipe down. It was like hauling an inner tube out of a bicycle rim. The guts followed. He stopped, shifted his feet, and carved deep down into the chest, loosening it all. He sliced the diaphragm.

There’s a bit of pelvic bone, he said, that needs to be sawed through.

Green intestines pushed up like links of sausage. He carved around the anus and sloughed the guts out. I helped him. They poured out over the caribou’s side. The guts were outside the body now. The body was gutted.

How quickly an animal can be reduced to meat. Essence rubbed out. This should be a time for mourning, for prayer, and yet all we can do is rush to get this great animal out of the morning heat.

Prowse sliced down between the second and third ribs. Then sawed through the backbone. He cut off the head. Now there were two halves. He removed an inch of fur from the backbone. Then tipped up the rear half and I sawed down through the marrow of the vertebrae. The bone was warm and pliable and peeled away from the saw. We did the same to the front half.

Want the antlers?

I chopped out the antlers. Fragments of skull splintered like coconut. I was crazed now with the butchery. I turned back to the organs to rescue the heart. The heart was a small pyramid and it covered the platter of my hands.

My watch was smeared in blood. It was nine oclock in the morning and we were done. The whisky-jacks arrived to peck at the guts. Prowse handed me a green apple and we sat and ate apples. The green against the blood on my fingers.

So what are you going to do with your half?

Pardon?

Of the meat. If youre not going to eat it.

I’m just your scout, Prowse. I’m your labour for getting this animal out.

Give some meat to Hearn.

Youre a very forgiving judge.

We each hoisted a quarter on our backs and walked it out. We used the leg as a lever, hide side on our shoulders, draping an arm over the ankle.

Handy, isnt it? The leg.

We went back for the other half. Then we hung the quarters in the Pomeroy shed. Mrs Pomeroy was happy for us and delighted with the meat. She inspected it thoroughly. You did a good job with it.

I explained that I was giving a quarter of the meat to Tom Dobie. Of course, she said. I want Tony Loveys and George Browiny and Dr Gill and Marten Edwards and the Bartletts, I want them all to get a steak or a roast. I want anyone who wants one except Jim Hearn.

She laughed at that. The judge, he likes to get a bit of gaming in.

The next morning he showed me how to skin the meat. I peeled the velum off the antlers. Tom Dobie took a quarter for his mother. A good meal of fresh, he called it. He brought it over in his wheelbarrow.

Kathleen made a picnic. She packed a suitcase with French glasses and English plates. It was the day of my hearing. She chose the small forks and a bottle opener. She had a thermos of cocoa and there were five sandwiches. We were each to have a sandwich and I would finish the crusts of the children’s. I like the crust, as long as there’s a bit of something still stuck to the bread. I like the remnants of things.

We decided to make it into an adventure. The family, in a chain of hands, walked over the Pomeroy fields to Bunker’s Hill and built a cairn. The stones had a streak of quartz in them like a salt lick. I stood on the cairn. This is our naked man, I said. We have climbed the highest unclimbed peak in the world.

Rocky: Uppy uppy.

Me: Okay downy downy.

When we ate the sandwiches, I opened Kathleen’s sandwich and sprinkled salt on her tomato. We both love salt. I did not know she was watching me. But then I saw her lift the bread off mine and rub her fingers above my slice of tomato. Salt. Yes, it was things like this that made me love her. And perhaps I looked at her in a way that made her feel I was promising things. And when you promise someone and they love you, they will trust you.