Authors: Margaret Atwood
They never knew, about that or why I left. Their own innocence, the reason I couldn’t tell them; perilous innocence, closing them in glass, their artificial garden, greenhouse. They didn’t teach us about evil, they didn’t understand about it, how could I describe it to them? They were from another age, prehistoric, when everyone got married and had a family, children growing in the yard like sunflowers; remote as Eskimoes or mastodons.
I opened my eyes and sat up. Joe was still there beside me; he was holding on to the edge of my canoe.
“You all right?” he said. His voice came to me faintly, as though muffled.
He said I should do it, he made me do it; he talked about it as though it was legal, simple, like getting a wart removed. He said it wasn’t a person, only an animal; I should have seen that was no different, it was hiding in me as if in a burrow and instead of granting it sanctuary I let them catch it. I could have said no but I didn’t; that made me one of them too, a killer. After the slaughter, the murder, he couldn’t believe I didn’t want to see him any more; it bewildered him, he resented me for it, he expected gratitude because he arranged it for me, fixed me so I was as good as new; others, he said, wouldn’t have bothered. Since then I’d carried that death around inside me, layering it over, a cyst, a tumour, black pearl; the gratitude I felt now was not for him.
I had to go onto the shore and leave something: that was what you were supposed to do, leave a piece of your clothing as an offering. I regretted the nickels I’d taken dutifully for the collection plate, I got so little in return: no power remained in their bland oleotinted Jesus prints or in the statues of the other ones, rigid and stylized, holy triple name shrunken to swearwords. These gods, here on the shore or in the water, unacknowledged or forgotten, were the only ones who had ever given me anything I needed; and freely.
The map crosses and the drawings made sense now: at the beginning he must have been only locating the rock paintings, deducing them, tracing and photographing them, a retirement hobby; but then he found out about them. The Indians did not own salvation but they had once known where it lived and their signs marked the sacred places, the places where you could learn the truth. There was no painting at White Birch Lake and none here, because his later drawings weren’t copied from things on the
rocks. He had discovered new places, new oracles, they were things he was seeing the way I had seen, true vision; at the end, after the failure of logic. When it happened the first time he must have been terrified, it would be like stepping through a usual door and finding yourself in a different galaxy, purple trees and red moons and a green sun.
I swung the paddle and Joe’s hand came unstuck and the canoe went towards the shore. I slipped on my canvas shoes and bundled up the sweatshirt and stepped out, looping the rope to a tree, then I climbed the slope towards the cliff, trees on one side, rockface on the other, balsam smell, underbrush scratching my bare legs. There was a ledge, I’d noticed it from the lake, I could throw my sweatshirt onto it. I didn’t know the names of the ones I was making the offering to; but they were there, they had power. Candles in front of statues, crutches on the steps, flowers in jam jars by the roadside crosses, gratitude for cures, however wished-for and partial. Clothing was better, it was closer and more essential; and the gift had been greater, more than a hand or an eye, feeling was beginning to seep back into me, I tingled like a foot that’s been asleep.
I was opposite the ledge; reindeer moss feathered it, clumps intricate with branches, the tips red, glowing in the sun. It was only an arm’s length away on the sheer cliff; I folded my sweatshirt neatly and reached it across.
Behind me something lumbered, crashing. It was Joe, I’d forgotten about him. When he caught up with me he took me by the shoulders.
“You all right?” he said again.
I didn’t love him, I was far away from him, it was as though I was seeing him through a smeared window or glossy paper; he didn’t belong here. But he existed, he deserved to be alive. I was wishing I could tell him how to change so he could get there, the place where I was.
“Yes,” I said. I touched him on the arm with my hand. My hand touched his arm. Hand touched arm. Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole.
He kissed me; I stood on my side of the window. When his head drew away I said “I don’t love you,” I was going to explain but he didn’t seem to hear me, mouth on my shoulder, fingers at the clasp behind my back, then sliding down my flanks, he was pushing on me as though trying to fold up a lawn chair, he wanted me to lie down on the ground.
I stretched out inside my body, twigs and pine needles under me. At that moment I thought, Perhaps for him I am the entrance, as the lake was the entrance for me. The forest condensed in him, it was noon, the sun was behind his head; his face was invisible, the sun’s rays coming out from a centre of darkness, my shadow.
His hands descended, zipper sound, metal teeth on metal teeth, he was rising out of the fur husk, solid and heavy; but the cloth separated from him and I saw he was human, I didn’t want him in me, sacrilege, he was one of the killers, the clay victims damaged and strewn behind him, and he hadn’t seen, he didn’t know about himself, his own capacity for death.
“Don’t,” I said, he was lowering himself down on me, “I don’t want you to.”
“What’s wrong with you?” he said, angry; then he was pinning me, hands manacles, teeth against my lips, censoring me, he was shoving against me, his body insistent as one side of an argument.
I slid my arm between us, against his throat, windpipe, and pried his head away. “I’ll get pregnant,” I said, “it’s the right time.” It was the truth, it stopped him: flesh making more flesh, miracle, that frightens all of them.
He reached the dock first, outdistancing me, his fury propelling the canoe like a motor. By the time I got there he had vanished.
T
here was no one in the cabin. It was different, larger, as though I hadn’t been there for a long time: the half of me that had begun to return was not yet used to it. I went back outside and unhooked the gate of the fenced oblong and sat down on the swing, carefully, the ropes still held my weight; I swayed myself gently back and forth, keeping my feet on the ground. Rocks, trees, sandbox where I made houses with stones for windows. The birds were there, chickadees and jays; but they were wary of me, they weren’t trained.
I turned the ring on my left-hand finger, souvenir: he gave it to me, plain gold, he said he didn’t like ostentation, it got us into the motels easier, opener of doors; in the intervening time I wore it on a chain around my neck. The cold bathrooms, interchangeable, feel of tile on footsoles, walking into them wrapped in someone else’s towel in the days of rubber sex, precautions. He would prop his watch on the night-tables to be sure he wasn’t late.
For him I could have been anyone but for me he was unique, the first, that’s where I learned. I worshipped him, non-child-bride,
idolater, I kept the scraps of his handwriting like saints’ relics, he never wrote letters, all I had was the criticisms in red pencil he paper-clipped to my drawings.
CS
and
DS
, he was an idealist, he said he didn’t want our relationship as he called it to influence his aesthetic judgment. He didn’t want our relationship to influence anything; it was to be kept separate from life. A certificate framed on the wall, his proof that he was still young.
He did say he loved me though, that part was true; I didn’t make it up. It was the night I locked myself in and turned on the water in the bathtub and he cried on the other side of the door. When I gave up and came out he showed me snapshots of his wife and children, his reasons, his stuffed and mounted family, they had names, he said I should be mature.
I heard the thin dentist’s-drill sound of a powerboat approaching, more Americans; I got off the swing and went halfway down the steps where I would be shielded by the trees. They slowed their motor and curved into the bay. I crouched and watched, at first I thought they were going to land: but they were only gazing, surveying, planning the attack and the takeover. They pointed up at the cabin and talked, flash of binoculars. Then they accelerated and headed off towards the cliff where the gods lived. But they wouldn’t catch anything, they wouldn’t be allowed. It was dangerous for them to go there without knowing about the power; they might hurt themselves, a false move, metal hooks lowered into the sacred water, that could touch it off like electricity or a grenade. I had endured it only because I had a talisman, my father had left me the guides, the man-animals and the maze of numbers.
It would be right for my mother to have left something for me also, a legacy. His was complicated, tangled, but hers would be simple as a hand, it would be final. I was not completed yet; there had to be a gift from each of them.
I wanted to search for it but David was jogging down the path from the outhouse. “Hi,” he called, “you seen Anna?”
“No,” I said. If I went back to the house or into the garden he would follow me and talk. I stood up and walked down the rest of the steps and ducked into the trail entrance through the long grass.
In the cool green among the trees, new trees and stumps, the stumps with charcoal crusts on them, scabby and crippled, survivors of an old disaster. Sight flowing ahead of me over the ground, eyes filtering the shapes, the names of things fading but their forms and uses remaining, the animals learned what to eat without nouns. Six leaves, three leaves, the root of this is crisp. White stems curved like question marks, fish-coloured in the dim light, corpse plants, inedible. Finger-shaped yellow fungi, unclassified, I never memorized all of them; and further along a mushroom with cup and ring and chalk gills and a name: Death Angel, deadly poison. Beneath it the invisible part, threadlike underground network of which this was the solid flower, temporary as an icicle, growth frozen; tomorrow it would be melted but the roots would stay. If our bodies lived in the earth with only the hair sprouting up through the leafmould it would seem as if that was all we were, filament plants.
The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn’t want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and the date was on them to weight them down. She would have hated it, that box, she would have tried to get out; I ought to have stolen her out of that room and brought her here and let her go away by herself into the forest, she would have died anyway but quicker, lucidly, not in that glass case.
It sprang up from the earth, pure joy, pure death, burning white like snow.
The dry leaves shuffled behind me: he had shadowed me along the trail. “Hi, whatcha doin’?” he said.
I didn’t turn or speak but he didn’t wait for an answer, he sat down beside me and said “What’s that?”
I had to concentrate in order to talk to him, the English words seemed imported, foreign; it was like trying to listen to two separate conversations, each interrupting the other. “A mushroom,” I said. That wouldn’t be enough, he would want a specific term. My mouth jumped like a stutterer’s and the Latin appeared. “Amanita.”
“Neat,” he said, but he wasn’t interested. I willed him to go away but he didn’t; after a while he put his hand on my knee.
“Well?” he said.
I looked at him. His smile was like a benevolent uncle’s; under his forehead there was a plan, it corrugated the skin. I pushed his hand off and he put it back again.
“How about it?” he said. “You wanted me to follow you.”
His fingers were squeezing, he was drawing away some of the power, I would lose it and come apart again, the lies would recapture. “Please don’t,” I said.
“Come on now, don’t give me hassle,” he said. “You’re a groovy chick, you know the score, you aren’t married.” He reached his arm around me, invading, and pulled me over towards him; his neck was creased and freckled, soon he would have jowls, he smelled like scalp. His moustache whisked my face.
I twisted away and stood up. “Why are you doing this?” I said. “You’re interfering.” I wiped at my arm where he had touched it.
He didn’t understand what I meant, he smiled even harder. “Don’t get uptight,” he said, “I won’t tell Joe. It’ll be great, it’s good for you, keeps you healthy.” Then he went “Yuk, yuk” like Goofy.
He was speaking about it as though it was an exercising programme, athletic demonstration, ornamental swimming in a chlorine
swimming pool noplace in California. “It wouldn’t keep me healthy,” I said, “I’d get pregnant.”
He lifted his eyebrows, incredulous. “You’re putting me on,” he said, “this is the twentieth century.”
“No it isn’t,” I said. “Not here.”
He stood up also and took a step towards me. I backed away. He was turning mottled pink, turkey neck, but his voice was still rational. “Listen,” he said, “I realize you walk around in never-never land but don’t tell me you don’t know where Joe is; he’s not so noble, he’s off in the bushes somewhere with that cunt on four legs, right about now he’s shoving it into her.” He glanced quickly at his wristwatch as though timing them; he seemed elated by what he’d said, his eyes gleamed like test-tubes.
“Oh,” I said; I thought about it for a minute. “Maybe they love each other.” It would be logical, they were the ones who could. “Do you love me,” I asked in case I hadn’t understood him, “is that why you want me to?”
He thought I was being either smart or stupid and said “Christ.” Then he paused, aiming. “You aren’t going to let him get away with it, are you?” he said. “Tit for tat as they say.” He folded his arms, resting his case, retaliation was his ultimate argument: he must have felt it was a duty, an obligation on my part, it would be justice. Geometrical sex, he needed me for an abstract principle; it would be enough for him if our genitals could be detached like two kitchen appliances and copulate in mid-air, that would complete his equation.
His wristwatch glittered, glass and silver: perhaps it was his dial, the key that wound him, the switch. There must be a phrase, a vocabulary that would work. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but you don’t turn me on.”