What Had Become of Us (2 page)

You could have pushed the tree sideways.

I didn't . . . it didn't occur to me.

No. I just wondered. If he'd been just paralyzed . . .

He would have hated that.

We could wheel him around in a chair, I said. I thought about his helpless body, about undressing him, the heavy useless limbs, the limp curve of spine, like dead but not, just not.

With every tree he cut down, Pieter's body took on the shape of the stem. He leaned into his work in a kind of yearning posture. He rose as the tree passed its centre and began its fall. Then he shifted and stood and watched it fall, often pulling out his Drum tobacco to roll a cigarette even as the trunk crashed to earth. When the back of Erwin's skull broke away, when Pieter saw the brain was crushed and bits of bone had shattered like china into the mess of his brother, he did all he could. He acted pragmatically, picked up the cap of Erwin's skull and fitted it back as well as he could manage, unaware of the blood spillage. He nestled Erwin's head into his own lap, holding him together for some time, as if time would heal all wounds. Pieter kept his focus on Erwin's face; he claimed it took on an otherworldly beauty. He drew his hand over it and shut the glazed eyes. Then he stood up and in horror ran out of the forest in search of help.

I cut it perfectly. He wasn't there . . .

Then he was there?

. . . suddenly, out of nowhere.

I knew Pieter had the habit of checking the intended landing spot of each tree before he felled it. Once he waited for an hour to let a somnambulant hedgehog waddle out of danger's path. The tree that killed Erwin was destined to be left on the forest floor as compost. It had a parasitic ivy vining up its bark, rot running through the core. Pieter glanced over and waited for his brother to get out of the way, made an all-clear sign and waited for one in return, and then he nestled his shoulder into the trunk and sliced through the last remaining hinge of wood. What he saw when he looked up was impossible. Time had reversed, mangled itself, for now Erwin was back in the way of the falling tree.

Pieter brought me to the place where Erwin had died. Together we found the inconsequential stump. It aggravated me that the tree was not bigger or of a more exotic species. It annoyed me that flowers dared bloom, flowers that Erwin would never see or smell. The stump had already begun its slow decay; the sap had risen and congealed into hard droplets. Erwin had been chemically embalmed, wrapped in plastic, his legs and arms broken to fit into a standard-size coffin. He had been mourned and buried deep in a sandy pit in the oldest working graveyard in the city. One day when I went to pay my respects, I fell, half-intentionally, into a freshly dug grave near Erwin's tombstone. Deep in the ground, I grabbed to gain a hold along the edges, which only gave way, sprinkling my feet with sand and burying them. Pieter leaned over and laughed despite himself.

Going so soon? he said. Then, he jumped down with me into the grave. We lay down together in the bottom of the pit, our arms folded across our chests. We noticed artifacts of previous burials embedded in the walls, corroded metal crucifixes, a bashed set of dentures, little bones and shards of other bones, a necklace and a hearing aid. I climbed on Pieter's shoulders to get out of the pit and pulled him up until he could brace his knee on the earth's surface. The stone pathway out of the graveyard was an homage to those dead whose relatives could no longer afford the annual cemetery fee. The coffins had been dug up, the remains cremated, and the tombstones smashed and fashioned into a walkway. I skirted the inscriptions.

What could be more morbid than this? I asked Pieter.

It's just a practicality.

It's outrageous, bodies flung all over. Cats prowling everywhere.

Life goes on, Pieter said.

Even then, in the rawness of our loss, a transformation was taking place. The gap was closing in. We were quietly re-forming ourselves, nurturing aspects within ourselves and in each other that reminded us of Erwin. We were compensating, filling in the spaces he had occupied. Slowly, invisibly, he was returning to us by our sheer willingness to have him here.

I should have gone up to his room, with its unadorned simplicity — a waif walking naked through the damp chill and dark, willing the body warmth of my first bed to carry me to my second. I imagine the sex would have been rough and primal and seeking only the most primitive of human outlets, a speedy orgasm. It would be merely the closing of a circle, defining a part of my real relationship.

Pieter and I were still waiting for the crane in this godforsaken landscape, when I headed off into the destruction, hopping tree trunks and shimmying beneath giant, fallen trees until I was sure I was out of sight of the road and any other little hovel, barn, or house. I needed to find a secluded spot where I could take a shit. In the beginning, I'd found it awkward, this shitting in the midst of civilization. I judged wind direction and tried wherever possible, if not to hold it, to crap downwind. As time passed I sloughed off these concerns and acquiesced to my body; by then Erwin, had come to work in the forest with us. One night as the evening dark descended, Pieter, Erwin and I shat simultaneously, a trilogy, a trinity of defecation, calling encouragement from our separate spots across another tree-strewn farmer's field.

Soil of God, I said.

Take away the sins of the world, said Erwin.

Amen, added Pieter.

We marked our piles of crap with deadfall sticks from the trees we had cut that day, branches that the local people would later collect and bundle into faggots for their woodstoves and fire-places. I wonder now if they might have come upon our dumps as they worked and expressed their offence with shock and disgust, but I didn't think about that then. Pieter made the sign of the cross in the air — his thick workman's hand over the mound of feces.

In nomine dictum, strontium heilige aarden in Gloria, Aaa-men. Shit, holy earth. Glorious father in the heavens. Aaa-men.

From my contrived wilderness privy, now, I could see Pieter surveying the destroyed forest. Behind him the nuclear chimney was like a decapitated minaret, the thin line of drifting smoke the only sign of its true purpose. Its grey concrete austerity had a monastic stillness; the forest, too, was still that morning, except for the creatures skittering about in search of safe haven. The light at that time of the year rarely opened up the sky but skimmed the clouds and bounced away back upwards. It was a diffusion — the edges of the rain-threatening clouds were a perplexing, pollution-build-up yellow. I made my way back to him over and under the felled forest.

A farmer had hobbled by. He was a small, bent, elderly man with lines etched on the lines in his face, the onset of cancer splotched along his nose, and rot flourishing in his few remaining teeth. He wore blue rubber clompen; smears of fodder and dung from the morning rounds covered his overalls. When he saw me heading over, he tipped his cap, h'lo.

Hi.

He glanced out at the destruction.

Whad'ya know? he said, turning back to Pieter.

It's a job, said Pieter.

Better you than me. Stront werk, that's what it is.

The winds had raged with such a ferocity that the earth seemed to react sympathetically to our loss. At the peak of the storm, Pieter and I had huddled in bed. Seeking warmth or unity, we made love, a lick from the neck down and down to his penis. A bumblebee slammed itself repeatedly into our bedroom window, so we let it in. It nestled into a warm corner of the frame, making a confused effort to sting the glass.

Pathetic fallacy, I had said

It's not so bad, said Pieter.

Not you, I said.

We lived in an old manor house on the Prinsenhof. The tower spire on the old beer-hops factory attached to the house pierced the gathering sky. It was wrought for beauty more than function and would totter and fall as the winds reached their height. I wished the bee was Erwin slamming into the window, trying to come back. Even if he was only a bee, he could sting, make honey, let us know he was all right, alive.

I used to bring coffee up to Erwin in bed and wake him up by placing my cold hand on his sleep-warmed shoulder. He twitched me away as a horse does an insect, with a neural shiver. His eyes opened as the smell of coffee registered, and he smiled. His light blue eyes had the translucent quality of a sub-equatorial ocean. They gave off a buoyancy that is hard to describe.

Thank you, he said.

Is it good?

I sat next to him on his bed and marvelled at his beauty, at the pure awakening loveliness of him. We chatted in English, laughing at the way he put words together, more and more and more words in a hopeless attempt at meaning. I could easily have slid under the covers, my body curving into his, our skin rising excitedly to the touch; I did not.

Oh my god, I said to Pieter one night early on. He's better than you in every way.

Maybe not every way, Pieter said, sliding his hand between my legs, fingers searching through the wet. As children, Pieter and Erwin had been inseparable. Their mother had even dressed them identically, despite the fact that they were born a year apart. The familiarity of their brotherliness was reassuring to me (what returns a touch might have, now he's lost?).

Pieter and I went to bed when our eyes sunk closed at the table from reading, the wine having seeped into our dreams even, and we would huddle up close on the makeshift bed installed where an ancient toilet had once been. We were desperate to draw heat from one other in the frigid coastal humidity. We would murmur love adages in broken languages, and we would fuck. Loudly clipping each stair with his feet, Erwin would go upstairs to his room, where he occasionally had a houseguest but most nights didn't. I would think about him making the lonely trip there to his cold, empty bed. Stupidly, I was unable to fathom the way in which his loneliness was a creation of our union.

There is a photograph I took of Erwin and Pieter. They are singing together in the yellow light of a dozen candles, the woodstove open for still more light. Pieter and Erwin are leaning into one another, both wearing rust-coloured sweaters knit by old girlfriends, canvas caps — the light turning these to haloes around their heads. If I suspend my disbelief, time stops there. They look, even on close inspection, like Siamese twins. I said this once to Erwin as we stood about in the forest one day, waiting for Pieter to fell more trees so that we could de-branch them. Erwin was smoking and swatting at me playfully with his wool scarf, wrapping the scarf around my legs and trying to trip me.

You are like Siamese twins, you and Pieter.

What's so good about the Siamese?

You know, Siamese twins are joined in body.

Ha, he said, yes. We could be joined at your hip.

I knew how to examine a branch on a felled tree and expertly remove it. Sometimes this involved slicing twice or more, sometimes from below, the chainsaw blade cutting along the curve here and then there; the tree would almost sigh as it was relieved from the tension in which that branch held it, and then it would shift into a calmer position. We cleared each forest as if we were in a ballet, dancing around each other, making short work of each tree until the field lay littered with branches, and the crane or the skidder could pull our immaculate logs into an ever-growing pyramid.

Three hundred cubic metres per day. It's amazing, I said.

Each day a little more, said Erwin.

No. There must be a threshold. If you go too fast, the pattern will be disrupted and it will lack beauty.

So?

It isn't worth it, then, I said.

What's beautiful about a felled forest?

Something. Something unspeakable.

In this hurricane-hurled forest, Pieter and I trimmed branches, some huge and twisted, while we waited for the crane. There was no sense trying to cut the roots away without some mechanical help — far too dangerous. We checked the length of the tree before we sliced through the leader to make sure the trunk was free and straight. And still the cutting bands got caught regularly in the torque-prone stems. We carried wedges and a sledgehammer around with us in order to pry the tree open if it pinched the saw's blade. The stinging nettle hid an assortment of unpre-dictable miseries, too, including old fencing that nicked the saw's razor edge. We had to stop every couple of trees, take out the files, and sharpen our tools. Meanwhile, Pieter's skin had swollen from the nettle rash. Also, my saw kept cutting out. First it surged, then it coughed and stalled. I opened it up, cleaned the spark plug with an Opinel knife, cut out the exhaust debris. It was a day from hell, as Pieter had predicted.

As I worked, I stood on the trunk of the tree I was cleaning, shifting my weight as the tree rolled or shifted its. A wild ride and chancy. The height and unpredictability of each tree intensified my concentration. I had learned early on to jump at the slightest worrisome movement. I assessed each tree by its particularities — the way the bark turned up its spine, the direction of its fall, what lay on it and in what manner. I could climb along a tree hanging upwards of two metres in the air and work with precision and without fear. There was a thrill to it. Finally, the crane arrived on the back of a flatbed truck. The operator, a hulking giant named Paul, emerged from the cab.

'Dag, said Paul.

'Lo.

As soon as he perceived my gender, Paul began to leer at me. He smiled at me from the glassed-in booth of the crane. Whenever he spotted me and he thought I might be looking, a horny glaze came over his eyes, and he put his hands down between his legs to the gearshift. He sat up high in the red crane, watching me as much as possible while he was working. Later, I would come to thank him.

Paul positioned his crane so that the jaws held the tree stem. Pieter stood as far back as he could without losing his balance and sliced through the tree as close to the roots as possible without catching dirt in the chainsaw blade. As often as not, the root ball crashed back to earth right in the spot where it had emerged. The craters were filled. I noticed suddenly that Pieter had lost weight; his pants were loose on him. Thinness gave him the appearance of having grown taller. He had changed even as he regretted the possibility of moving on, changed physically. Soft down had sprouted on his chest, his manner had more room for humour, his lovemaking had become more exploratory. He was approximating Erwin's presence; we both were.