The Last Woman (35 page)
He jabs at the fire with a stick, then tosses it in.
“All those years ago,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell me about the baby?”
“Oh God,” she says. Her body feels insubstantial, as though it might blow away. He is looking at her, at last, though not in the way she wants: his eyes burning. “I couldn’t have told you then, it would have hurt too much. It wouldn’t have done any good. Billy, I could not have had a baby.”
Desperate to be close to him, she scrambles around the fire. At once he stands up, and when she tries to embrace him, he moves away. Her heart is beating crazily, and she has a sense of them being tumbled about in some pocket of chaos, as if a wave had caught them. “Billy,” she pleads.
“I was only nineteen. I was already enrolled in art school –”
“You do whatever you like, I guess.”
“That isn’t fair! It wasn’t like that! You didn’t have to go through it –”
“There would have been – someone else now!” It tears from him with a half-choked cry. Speaking rapidly, touching him on the arm, she tries to make him see how it was for her: the fights with her parents, the agonies of doubt, the
impossibility
. But his gaze remains locked in the region of the fire: there is something adamant in him, set against her. Breaking away, he begins to pace up and down the campsite, turning, coming back to the fire, going off again. Finally he stops. “Richard came to the Island…”
She is astonished.
It happened four days ago, he tells her. “I figured he was coming to kick my head in, but he wanted to talk. Talked a lot about you. He said he’d never realized how bad things had been for you sometimes – that’s when he told me what happened. I acted like I already knew, but it
cut
me, Ann.” He pauses, closing his eyes for a few seconds. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this place in me.
Raw
. Nobody was allowed to touch it. It was like he’d reached in there and squeezed it good.”
For a few seconds, he allows her to hold him. Then he breaks away.
“Where are you going? It’s almost dark.”
Not answering, he plunges down the bank, out of sight. A moment later, she sees him – his T-shirt moving rapidly along the shore path, then turning inland to climb like a
white travelling spark among the shadowy stumps and heaps of debris. Just under the summit, it winks out.
She wraps herself in a blanket and sits down by the fire to wait. She assumes he won’t go far, but really she doesn’t know, doesn’t know when he’ll be back, doesn’t know if they’ll get past this. It is all but dark now. In the open doorway of the cabin, firelight quivers on the handle of an axe. Some time later, she crawls into the tent and curls up on her bag. She dozes, then wakes to a distant grumbling of thunder. She slips outside and calls his name, but nothing comes back. Around her, the night seems as dead and still as if every living thing, even the wind and water, has deserted it.
She climbs inland, floundering through debris. Her flashlight beam stops at a small evergreen, pitched nearly upside down, and seeming, in the pool of her light, to have been caught out in some shameful act. The stars have disappeared.
Back in the camp, she adds fresh wood to the fire and again sits down to wait. Poplar leaves rattle in the rising wind.
Shivering, she retreats into the tent and, sliding into her bag, falls into a shallow sleep. She dreams she is being hunted by a vast, low-flying machine – like a steel shutter being drawn down the sky. If its searchlights find her, she will be sucked upward into its liquid, quivering mouth. She hides under a hospital bed, where a seagull has been caught in a trap. When she tries to free it, it pecks at her; she escapes down a corridor.
And arrives on a hillside, where she stands looking out over a landscape of forests and rivers – rivers and forests, as far as she can see – livid in an ominous light that roils on them like the roiling glow of hot coals. The wind is gusting and the ground trembles underfoot. She wakes suddenly. A cold wind is blowing at the tent – the walls are billowing, a bit of metal shivers wildly. From a distance comes the slow monotone of thunder. Someone is tapping at the roof.
It comes more swiftly now – drumming on the tent, hissing in the coals of the dying fire. Peering out, she can just glimpse something white moving, but when she leaves the tent, it has disappeared. The darkness is nearly absolute, there is only a faint, striated glow from the fire near her feet. The rain is coming more heavily now, a torrent under which she turns, crying his name.
Then at once he is there –
Many years later, near the end of her life, she will recall their trip to Silver. Much will have altered by then, and she will think that the world she is leaving is not so fine a place as the one she was born into. Of course, the old are notoriously disapproving, and the young must have their truth. Still, she will continue to find her own – in certain faces, in the shifting moods of Inverness, in sudden, ecstatic couplings of idea and colour. As for the events at Silver Lake, she will hold them as her passage into the second half of her life, less materially stable than what came
before but more open to the subtle flux – the deep current of ceaseless change – that sustains all things. And so one October afternoon, bundled up in her chair, she will receive for a last time the memories of their journey north: the long moment of their embrace in the rain, and the moment, two days later, when they paddled around a point and found themselves once more among the trees.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Cathleen Hoskins, Alix Bemrose, Aaron Lumley, Fred Bemrose, and Kathryn Bemrose. Also Jim Morrison, for his invaluable history lessons and social commentary; and my editor, Ellen Seligman, whose patience and skill continue to astonish me. To those many people, native and non-native, who over the years have communicated their love and knowledge of the wild places of this country –
Megwich
. Among authors, I am particularly indebted to Hugh Brody for his account of native hunting practices in his 1981 classic,
Maps and Dreams
, and to Rupert Ross for his penetrating 1992 study of cultural differences,
Dancing with a Ghost
.
The Last Woman
could not have been written without the contributions of these people. Its inevitable shortcomings are mine alone.
Thanks, as well, to the Canada Council for the Arts.
Copyright © 2009 by John Bemrose
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Bemrose, John, 1947–
The last woman / John Bemrose.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-318-8
1. Title
PS8553.E47L37 2009 C813′.54 C2009-901615-X
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
The Last Woman
is a work of fiction. Although certain aspects of the land claim described in the novel were inspired by various actual claims around the country, the book’s characters, events, and principal settings are invented. Any resemblance to the lives and characters of any persons living or dead is coincidental.
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