Jane Urquhart Page 3

The cat kept his distance but followed Jerome everywhere. When he was working, the animal either sat on a tall bank of snow watching his efforts with what appeared to be mild disdain, or it coasted back and forth inside the areas Jerome was excavating with its head high in the air and an ominous growl in its throat any time Jerome came too near. These dugouts, as Jerome thought of them, were assuming the shape of a ship’s deck. Sometimes, after he had drawn the outline of such a dugout on the surface of the snow, the cat lay down in the middle of the area he was hoping to excavate and refused to budge, spitting and lashing its tail when Jerome attempted gently to remove it with the shovel. Once, when Jerome became angry, he dug under the cat and tossed it along with a load of snow onto a nearby bank, where the animal scrambled to a seated position and remained in place, scowling. Two or three times a day, without warning, the cat would dash off toward the copse at the east end of the island. It always returned, however, and Jerome was once interrupted in the midst of photographing an excavation by the sound of crunching coming from one of the dugouts behind him where the cat was crouched over the rapidly disappearing body of a bird. Later, while photographing the remains, Jerome determined by the tattered remnants of red and black plumage that the bird had likely been a robin, the harbinger of spring.

  By now the ice, both in the river and in the lake, was beginning to completely break up: the water was rising and the floes that were passing the shore of the island looked like parade floats featuring non-representational sculpture. Late one afternoon when the light was particularly intense, Jerome photographed several of these ice forms with a color film. Then, with the cat in tow, he walked back to the loft on the path he and the animal had tramped into the snow. On the stairs the cat was so constantly underfoot Jerome began to feel as if his ankles were being bound in a blur of orange wool. Because of the soundless fluidity of the animal’s movements, Jerome had decided to call it Swimmer.

  “Swimmer,” he said now, “are you hungry?” and as he spoke he realized that he had begun to talk to the animal some time ago, that he had explained his work to it, scolded it, and occasionally used terms of endearment. “So this is what solitude does to you,” he said to the animal when it reappeared, “you begin talking to unfriendly cats.”

  Swimmer growled in reply, and ran away from him.

  That night, it started to snow and Swimmer sat looking almost picturesque near the large window, watching the flakes descend through the beams of the one outdoor light in the yard. Jerome had given him – he had decided that a cat this large must be a neutered male – a portion of the tinned tuna fish he had had for supper and this seemed to have put the cat in a more placid mood. Jerome himself was far from placid and angrily paced the loft floor, glancing now and then with irritation at the snow, worrying about the accumulation in what he now called his Nine Revelations of Navigation. He feared that, unless he scraped the interiors out with a shovel, it would take him hours by hand to bring the bottom of each shape back to what it had been earlier in the day. But, having never before broken the surface of the earth in his work, he would do his best to avoid the disturbance a shovel might cause to what he believed was the purity of scattered twigs and blackened leaves.

  Eventually he stopped pacing and turned his attentions to the cat. What a mangy, rough-looking beast! Weren’t cats supposed to clean themselves up? An idea struck him. He searched for and found his own comb, put on his leather gloves, and warily approached the cat, who, though suspicious and growling, did not turn around. Gently but firmly seizing him around the middle, he wrapped a towel around the cat’s legs. Then positioning his knee against Swimmer’s side so that he could free one hand, he began to drag the comb through the matted fur. The cat yowled, swung his head back and forth, and made every effort to bite the offending, gloved hands, but finally he gave up and submitted to the grooming.

  It wasn’t long before Jerome discovered the wound near the tail. Swimmer hissed and yowled more loudly when the comb neared the lesion and Jerome turned some greyish-yellow fur aside to explore the problem. The torn flesh was clearly infected and not in any way helped by the abundance of dirty fur that covered it. He let go of the animal and went to search for the antiseptic and a pair of scissors he had noticed in a kitchen drawer. After retrieving them, it took some time to locate the cat again, but at last Jerome discovered him crouching behind the shower curtain in the bathroom. He closed the door and ran some warm water onto a clean washcloth. Then he cornered the beast once again, cut away the fur near the infected spot with the scissors, and began tentatively to bathe the exposed skin. When, despite Swimmer’s continuous growling, it was clear he would tolerate these ministrations, Jerome applied the antiseptic. When he was finished, Swimmer walked slowly across the room, lay down, and went to sleep.

  The next morning, a warm front moved in, melting both the previous evening’s precipitation and some of the old snow on which it had fallen, and Jerome was pleased to find that his markers were even more prominent than they had been the day before. The blackened maple leaves, twigs, and flattened weeds appeared to have been pasted to the floor of the excavations by the melt, and a rising mist once again softened the atmosphere. Jerome had brought his sketchbook with him, as well as several graphite pencils and a folding stool, for today he intended to draw the details of what he had exposed. He smiled when he thought of some of his contemporaries who felt that the making of drawings was a stale, traditional way of exploring landscape, for this type of rendering of the details of the physical world gave him great pleasure. He had almost finished the third drawing when he heard an unfamiliar sound, that of the cat’s loud, sorrowful, and repetitive meowing coming from somewhere close to the edge of the lake. Realizing that this was the first time Swimmer had used this noise so common to cats, and sensing some urgency, some insistence in the tone, Jerome stood, placed the sketchbook and pencils on the stool, and walked toward the tall brittle grasses near the shore.

  It took Jerome’s mind some time to interpret the visual information being transmitted. Some of the smaller icebergs had moved closer to the island during the night and were now lined up like docked rowboats near the shore. He once again marvelled at their mysterious, irregular shapes, but this time there was something more. During their journey down streams and rivers, the icebergs had picked up and incorporated into their structures twigs and branches, as if consciously creating their own skeletons. Jerome was intrigued by this, and was about to pull the camera from his pocket when he noticed a large mass of ice that contained within it a blurred bundle of cloth that seemed both enclosed in the ice and emerging from it. Wondering if the ice had somehow managed to trap a patchwork quilt or a collection of rags, he moved closer, camera in hand, hoping for an interesting shot. The slab of ice bumped against the shore and shifted slightly. It was then that Jerome saw the outstretched hands, the bent head, the frozen wisps of grey hair, and he heard his own voice announcing the discovery. “A man!” he shouted to the air, to the nearby cat, to himself. “A man!” he shouted again. Then he spoke the word dead, just before he turned away and vomited into the snow.

  One year later, in a small town thirty miles down the lakeshore, a woman woke early. There was no sound coming from the street below. Darkness was still pressed against her bedroom windows.

  Her husband was sleeping and did not stir as she slid from the bed, crossed the room, and walked down the hall to the bathroom where she had laid out her clothes the night before: the dark wool suit and grey silk shirt, the string of small pearls, the black tights, white underwear, and conventional cream-colored slip, the somber costume that she believed would ensure that no one would look at her, or look at her for very long. She took no special precautions as she washed and dressed, running the taps and opening the drawers as she would have on any other morning. Malcolm had been out on a night call and had not returned until 3 a.m. He would be sleeping deeply and would not waken for at least two more hours. By then she would be on the train, part of the journey completed.
/>
  She stood for some time in front of the open medicine cabinet in the bathroom, gazing at the plastic containers that held her various pills. Then she closed the door and stared at her own face in the mirror. Her fair hair, some of it grey now, was pulled back, and her face, she was relieved to see, was composed, her grey eyes were clear. She could not say whether it was an attractive face that looked back at her. Someone had once told her she was lovely and not, in some ways, that long ago, but she knew that her features, her expression had altered since.

  The previous morning, after Malcolm had left for the clinic, she had filled an old suitcase with stockings, one blue skirt and cardigan, underwear, a few cosmetics, two well-used green leather notebooks, a plastic bag containing squares of felt, scraps of fabric and wool, one antique album, and a worn hardcover book. Then she had lifted the bag from the bed where she had packed it and had placed it in the unused cupboard of the spare room. The interior of the case was pink and had elasticized compartments under the satin-lined lid where, at one time or another, some long-dead woman must have kept hairbrushes and clothes brushes, and perhaps a bottle filled with liquid detergent for washing silk stockings. That woman may very well have been her own mother, but she couldn’t be certain because as far as she knew her mother had never been a traveler. The people who lived in this rural County stayed home. Year after year, generation after generation. The geography of the County discouraged travel; trains no longer visited any of the pleasant towns of the peninsula where she had lived her entire life. She would have to drive for almost an hour to reach Belleville, the larger mainland town where she would catch the train that would take her to the city. The word city had hissed in her mind all week long, first as an idea, then as a possibility, and, finally, now as a certain destination.

  After washing and dressing she went into the spare room, removed the suitcase from the cupboard, and carried it with her down the unlit back stairs and into the kitchen where she placed it on the table. On a desk facing the large kitchen window was the tactile map she had been making for her friend Julia, its rhinestones, tinsel, and bits of folded aluminum foil glistening under the single lamp she lit. Placed carefully beside it were the several diagrams and drawings she had made of the location Julia next wanted to visit: an abandoned lighthouse on a seldom-used road at the very tip of the County. She glanced at the map, then looked through the window into the yard, which was partially illuminated by the kitchen lamp. It was the middle of a cold April and only recently had the thaw begun in earnest. At this moment everything beyond the kitchen windows appeared to be weeping; droplets were clinging to her clothesline and shining on branches, and icicles that had disengaged themselves from the eaves were embedded like spears in the remaining heavy snow near the foundations of this house in which she had lived all her life. This is the anniversary of sorrow, she thought – everything moist, transitory, draining away, everything disappearing.

  Her friend Julia, who had also lived all her life in one house, said that she could smell the beginnings of the spring melt on her farm long before those who were sighted were aware of its arrival. She could also smell the approach of storms on cloudless summer days and the presence of deer hidden deep in the cedar bush behind the barn. How she admired this in Julia, this sensory prescience; that and the calm that always filled her corner of the room like a soft light.

  It was Julia who had sensed her grief, Julia who had suggested that she make the journey to the city. In the year since the newspaper article had appeared, she had mentioned it to her friend only twice, her voice as neutral as milk, the need to state the terrible fact of it perfectly disguised. The first time, Julia simply shook her head as she often did when presented with sad news items concerning strangers. The next time, however, in the midst of the retelling, Julia had suddenly straightened in her chair and had moved her hand across the space between them. “There’s something here, Sylvia,” she had said. “Something deep and private and important. I think you should meet this young man.”

  Sylvia had said nothing more, but in the silence that followed Julia’s statement the idea of taking her story to the city had been planted.

  She opened her suitcase again and placed the map, the sketches, two rectangular plastic containers – one filled with an assortment of threads, textured papers, and several ordinance survey maps, the other with string, twine, sequins, and rhinestones – into the interior. Then, once again, she quietly closed the lid, using her thumbs to ease the fasteners into place. She would take the materials with her and continue to work on the map. In this way she would keep the connection to Julia.

  As she put on her outer clothing she wondered if she should leave a note and decided, finally, that she would. She took a pen from her purse and wrote the sentence I have engagement on the back of a grocery bill. The question that came into her mind at this point was one of placement. Where did people leave such messages: near the phone, under a magnet on the refrigerator, on the hall table? The kitchen, she concluded, would be no place to leave such a scrap of paper, to leave such a formal declaration, and so, after lifting the salt shaker from the table and dropping it into one of her pockets, she moved down the hall and went into her husband’s study, his library. Selecting two volumes that dealt with medical syndromes, she placed one on top of the other in the center of the desk, then glanced at the note on the top. “I have engagement,” she smiled, testing the phrase. She reached for her husband’s pen and added the article an to the sentence. Then underneath this she wrote, Don’t bother calling Julia, she has no idea where I am.

  In order to reach the front door she had to pass through the dining room, and as she did so she recalled that in the late afternoon, while the rest of the house darkened, the low light entering the room from the west window always caused the large oval of the table to shine like a lake, a lake with two silver candlesticks floating on its surface. She had watched this happen almost every day of her life, as long as she could remember, and it would continue to happen when she was not there: an abandoned table gathering light and her far away, not witnessing the ceremony.

  Outside, she unlocked her car, hoisted the old suitcase into the front seat, climbed behind the wheel, and backed slowly, carefully away with this one piece of furniture still glowing, senselessly, in her mind.

  The road that was taking her out of the County was lined by the homes of some of the earliest settlers in the province. Though it was still too dark to see clearly, she was aware that much of this old architecture was sad, neglected; some of the properties were completely abandoned. A few houses in the County had been restored by city people seeking charm, however, and always seemed to her to be unnaturally fresh and clean, as if the past had been scrubbed out of their interiors, then thrown carelessly out the door like a bucketful of soiled water. She knew the histories of the old settlers as well as she knew her own body. Better, in some ways. She knew the three-pronged ladders leaning against trees in autumn orchards, the arrival at barn doors of wagons filled with hay, the winter sleighs, the suppers held on draped tables outdoors in summer, the feuds over boundary lines, politics, family property, the arrival of the first motor car, the first telephone, the departure of young men for wars, the funeral processions departing from front parlors. She knew these things as well, as if they bore some weighty significance in her own life lived behind the brick walls of a house situated in the town.

  A graveyard swept by the window near her right shoulder, scarred, decaying stones inscribed with names still common in her County. These tombs stood stark and pale in the early-morning light that lay in pools on the sooty snow surrounding the bases of the tombstones and in small snow-filled hollows scattered here and there in the fields. Trees were dark against the lightening sky, darker than they had been in midwinter when they often became frosted by a coating of snow. She loved the trees, their reliability, the fact that they had always been there on the boundaries of fields or along the edges of roads. She loved certain boulders for the same reason. An
d there were cairns left behind as a visual reminder of the past. These were some of the markers Andrew had spoken of. The old settlers, he had once told her, had left nothing behind but a statement of labor, nothing but a biography of stones.

  Andrew’s voice, telling her such things over and over, was inside her head almost all the time now. In the past she leaned toward his whisper, had once or twice heard him sing, and then, near the end, had heard the terrible noise of his weeping. A recording of the sounds he had made was always playing in her mind, but she was losing the shape of his face, the look of his legs and arms and hands, the way his body occupied a chair, or moved across a room toward the place where she stood, as she had always stood each time, waiting for him to touch her. She had never told Andrew how touch, until him, had been a catastrophe for her, how having leapt over the hurdle of touch, he would then become a part of her – without him ever being aware of this – how the idea of him would be like something she was carrying with her, like an animal, or a baby, or a schoolbag, or maybe something as simple and essential as this purse that rested on the passenger seat of the moving car.

  Afterwards she would rise and dress, cross the orchard, walk to her car, and drive the concessions with the smell of him still on her, wanting to keep this with her, not bathing until minutes before Malcolm returned from the clinic.

  And then would come the distant days, days when she would not, or could not, inhabit her own body, as if she had taken the decision to go with Andrew wherever he had gone, as if she were out of doors mapping the scant foundations of houses abandoned by vanished settlers, or following the vague line of an old, disused road, though she did not see such things in her imagination. Then, gradually, she would feel her self begin to return, tentatively, like a guest anxious not to take up too much of her time, and a certain taste or smell would connect her to the present for a moment or two: that, or something like the sight of poplar leaves flickering in an otherwise invisible breeze just beyond the glass of the kitchen window. If it were winter, she might become focused on the movement of flame, the snap of cedar kindling, and then the satisfaction one feels when a piece of hardwood surrenders itself, finally, to the inevitability of combustion.