The Life of Hope (38 page)

Martha sliced the air with hers, warming up her muscles, loosening her joints.

“Go to the pen,” instructed Martha, “and get a pig. Get a nice fat one. Get the old sow!” The old sow was a grotesque creature that George called “Grace.” Pigs are ham, he reminded himself. George went around to the back of the barn where the pigs were kept. The old sow was asleep. George stepped into the pen, treading lightly to avoid stepping on the piglets (he did tread on a couple; they produced horrible shrieking noises, but Grace snoozed on) and crossed over to the sow. George tapped her on the back. “Time to get up, Gwace,” he whispered. “You aw
ham
!”

The sow woke up, alarmed and panicking. George gingerly gathered the creature into his arms. “Even Martha can cook ham.” The pigpen was cacophonous now; animals seem to sense
when one of their number is destined for the butcher’s block. George never heard the commotion from the other side of the barn.

Martha watched the figure stumble down and laughed a series of odd laughs, mostly a kind of harumph that she employed when amused by the brutality of the earth. She crossed her arms and looked like a schoolmarm about to deliver a stinger to a truant’s ear. “Well, well, well,” she said aloud. “La-dee-dah.”

Hope looked up from the ground. He held out his hand, crudely tourniqueted. “Look,” he said.

“Who’s done that?”

“Dekeyser.”

Martha nodded, chewing on her bottom lip. “It’s not all that serious,” she told Joseph. “Do you know, once we found a man in the harbor with gangrene in his leg. I chopped it off.”

Joseph Hope wasn’t sure what Martha was talking about, and then he remembered the Harbor Light Mission, the room full of unfortunates.

“I took a poker from the fire and cleaned the wound,” Martha reminisced. She shrugged. “Get up and go into the house. George can look after you.”

“Help me,” said Joseph.

Martha harumphed, bull-like. “I helped you once before. I pulled you out of the water and made you live. I don’t think I’ll help you again.”

“Get George, then.”

“George will be back soon enough. Just keep quiet.”

“I am your husband,” stated Joseph Benton Hope.

Martha picked up her axe. “Joseph,” she said, taking a step toward him, “you are an arsehole.”

When George returned, and saw what had happened, he dropped the pig. The sow fled into the night. George saw men coming, still distant. He took the axe out of Martha’s hands and said, “Go to yoh womb. Take off those clothes.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Martha.

George merely repeated, “Go to yoh womb. Take off those clothes.”

Martha ran for the homestead.

George took his own axe and wearily let it fall two or three times, for it was imperative that his own clothes become as bloodsoaked as his twin’s.

George had died inside, and no tears came.

I ran up to my room (Martha’s room; George had slept in the other) and returned with the workshirt from the antique wooden chest. I laid it out in front of Louis Hope and indicated all of the rust-brown patches. “Exhibit One, Your Honor,” I said to Louis. Louis picked up the garment and perused it in a sage and judicious manner. Then, inexplicably, Louis placed the shirt on his head, trying to fashion it into some kind of turban. I grabbed it away.

“What say you, Watson?” I demanded. “Have I not solved the mystery?” Deep down, I knew that I hadn’t. It seemed certain enough that George had not killed J. B. Hope, his twin sister had; the question remained, though, why? Hope had condoned, even coerced, the Quinton siblings’ incest, but in the final analysis could not be held responsible—the twins had to climb into bed together of their own volition (finally to produce the doomed Isaiah) and Joseph Benton Hope held no puppet strings on their human bodies—blood and semen cannot be mixed at a distance.

I needed outside help on this case. “Watson,” I addressed Louis Hope, “it is time to go fishing!”

I gathered together my gear (which included not only my rod and reel but the entire contents of Benson’s liquor cabinet, twelve or so bottles with a gulp left at the bottom) and then stopped, drunkenly wondering how both myself and a 700-pound monster could balance on the little blue moped.

Louis had the solution. He laboriously raised himself to his feet, teetering and tottering almost as much as I was, and then he scooped me up into his arms. Getting through the front door was a bit iffy, but once outside Louis could pick up some speed, and the speed lent him some equilibration, and Louis ran, holding me, all the way to Lookout Lake.

George Quinton refused to speak in his own defence at the trial, so that task was taken up by the Reverend Doctor Ian John Robert McDougall, Barrister and Solicitor. He presented the case that Hope, the worst libertine since the Marquis de Sade, had it coming in spades. Several of the Perfectionists took the stand, De-la-Noy and Skinner and even Mr. Opdycke, all of them saying that George was a good-hearted man and must have had overwhelming provocation; they mourned their dead leader, they said, but George was their friend. Finally it came out at the trial what Dekeyser had done at Lake Look Out (the Coroner had pieced together Joseph Hope like a jigsaw puzzle, and mentioned in his testimony that he seemed to be missing a piece) and the general belief was born that George Quinton had dispatched Hope in order to end his suffering. Still, most people survive the loss of a finger, and hacking a man to death because he suffered this injury seemed imprudent. Besides, Canada was a young country, and had only sent a handful of men to the gallows. George Quinton was sentenced to death.

The Hangman did not calculate George’s body weight well, and on the first dropping the noose snapped. George Quinton fell onto this butt and then looked around sheepishly. “Sowwy,” said George Quinton.

Sometimes life, and the living of it, gets a hold of you, bounces you up and down—and ain’t that fun? That’s what happened when Louis Hope and I arrived at Lookout. My insides turned queasy, and a smile stumbled across my face. I did imitations of animals; coyotes, owls and fish—yes, I did an imitation of a fish—and the only way I could settle myself down was to pretend I was the host of a television program, sort of a cross between “The Red Fisher Show” and “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.” I whistled the theme song (Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise”) while I assembled my gear. Louis wandered down to the water’s edge and paddled around. Louis pulled out a crayfish and lifted it up to his good eye. After a moment’s examination, Louis Hope popped it into his mouth.

I stripped, explaining why to the cosmic television audience, telling of Ol’ Mossback’s hypersensitivity. “I know that Red Fisher doesn’t usually get naked when he fishes,” I admitted, “but Red’s not usually fucked up, over and sideways, either.”

Louis turned his attention to the rocks along the shoreline, pulling them up and playing with all the creepy crawlers and hoppity toads.

I showed the viewers my Hoper. “If anyone knows how to catch Mossback, it’s Isaiah Hope, because he and Mossback were good buddies.” I tied the lure using the improved double clinch knot, taught to me by my friend Edgar the axe-murderer.

There was mist dancing on top of the water, and here and there the mist formed into columns that rose to a height of twenty feet and shimmered. I understood why some tribes once thought these formations to be gods and spirits. They would have been fools if they hadn’t thought that.

The moon was still up, sharing the morning with the sun. The moon was big and silver and gorgeous.

Just before the actual fishing portion of the show got under way, I had a solemn duty to perform. “Friends,” I told them out there, “Jonathon Whitecrow has passed away. He didn’t beat the odds.” I shrugged in imitation of Whitecrow, as if to say, “That’s okay, God. You keep throwing shit and we’ll keep picking through for the good bits.”

Then I stood up, raised my rod, and cast. I’ve only done one thing in my life with grace, and that was it. I’m sorry everyone had to miss it. Even little Louis Hope was turned away, busily ingesting the wild kingdom.

The magnificence of the scene smacked me on top of the head and punched me in the belly. “God, this is beautiful!” I told the viewers. “My sweet Jesus, it is beautiful.” My cast was subtle but purposeful, like a fish. The reel hummed as the Hoper flew. “Friends, there’s a phrase, a Latin phrase,
nil admirari
.” The Hoper hit gently. I let it sink. “It means not finding anything wonderful or beautiful. I guess it’s some kind of disease.” I began the retrieval, not a smooth one, rather a jerky, spasmodic tugging that was therefore more imitative of life. “I just wish some of you could join Louis and me, naked in Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. It is very wonderful. It is very beautiful.”

My retrieval stopped abruptly. “Say now, friends, I seem to have tied into a rock or fallen tree or something. It happens to the best of us. Ugh! Son of a gun, it’s not going anywhere. Come on, now. I can’t get stuck, I’ve got serious fishing to do. Oh-oh.”

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, line started stripping off my reel. “That tree or rock looks like it’s rolling or something …” There was a short but violent burst, and for a split second the air was full of noise. Then silence again, a moment of it, during which I said to my viewers, “Tell you what, friends. I don’t think this is a rock or a tree. I think …”

The line exploded off the reel, and I was pulled toward the water. I managed to get both hands on to my rod, and I was hanging on for dear life. The line screamed away at a dizzying clip. I went to adjust the drag. Another short burst of irrefutable energy hauled me even closer to the lake. I caught my heels on the rocks and pulled backward, the tension so strong that I was soon leaning almost perpendicularly with my back to the earth.

I had to thumb the line. I placed my pudgy digit on to the whirling reel, slowly applying pressure. My thumb immediately became burned and blistered, but I had no real choice in the matter. And then a force pulled me upright, and then further, and I realized that in a second I was going to be pulled into Lookout Lake. There was a sensation of weightlessness, and I prepared for the ice-cold slap of the water.

It never happened. I remained suspended in the air. Louis Hope had caught me. He had his huge baby-fatted arms wrapped around my waist.

“Attago, Louis!” I bellowed. “You hang on to me while I play this sucker!” I could feel Louis brace, solidifying like a mountain.

My thumb was carved to ratshit, bleeding profusely, but I had managed to slow the creature’s progress. I had almost run out of line, and I judged that the fish had almost run out of lake.

Then, abruptly, my line went slack. “FUCK!” I hollered, assuming that he’d broken free. But some strange power still smouldered in my gear—I tried to feel the energy of the lake. “Yikes.” I realized. “That motherfucker’s coming back at us!” I cranked at my reel for all I was worth, my wrist aching and sore. Just as I got the line taut, the fish broke the surface of the water, rising into the air and writhing like a demon in death, trying to throw the hook. I eased up on the rod, still holding tight to all of the fury, and finally the fish dropped back into Lookout.

And it was Ol’ Mossback.

“Round One to me,” I whispered, all of my body gloriously atremble, “but that baby’s got a few more tricks up his sleeve.”

Slowly and methodically Mossback started stripping line from the reel. I looked in the direction it was headed, wondering what the Fish had in mind, and finally I detected the distant dark shape under the surface of the water. “He’s taking us into a log,” I said aloud. I couldn’t stop him. Both my drag and my bloody thumb would prove ineffectual against Mossback’s singleminded determination. Louis’s breathing, high above me, was loud and rapid. “Louis!” I screamed. “Run!”

Louis took a couple of awkward steps forward.

“No! That way! Away! Away from the log! Away from the fish!”

Louis stopped himself, wobbly, and then started off in the direction I’d steered him. His first few strides were splay-footed and clumsy, but soon he had some speed up. Louis ran, unmindful of the rocks and shrubberies, and after some moments I felt the tension ease up in my gear. “It’s working!” I told Louis. “Keep going!”

Louis was actually running with something resembling agility, his fat toes pushing lightly off the earth. “Come on, Louis baby …” I whispered, and I began to pump. “Pull up, reel down,” I reminded myself. The first pull upward was excruciatingly painful, my arms seizing up with lactic acid and spasms. I refused to let myself realize that this action, which brought as much physical hurt as anything I’d ever done before, would have to be repeated countless times if I wanted to land Ol’ Mossback. I pulled up again, my arm muscles screaming. There was momentary relief in the reeling down, but then it was up again, a pull that brought a muffled scream into my throat. In some moments I was completely exhausted, my energy depleted, but I fired the nerves and synapses and contracted the muscles. I pulled up, I reeled down, as Louis Hope carried me across the world.

Louis’s breathing was huffy and puffy, my body longed for death, but Ol’ Mossback was slowing. Something was going to give out eventually.

Toward the end, I remember watching Ol’ Mossback as he allowed himself to be pulled to the surface (the moment’s respite would grant him strength enough for another flight toward liberty). His eyes were huge and silver, and had nothing to do with humanness.