Come Back (28 page)

Memory like a crab clawing itself out; everything we did to each other. Over years.

Loving Lord Jesus Christ, have pity on us poor sinners.

You were eighteen, leaning over me, the yellow

chainsaw in my hands, the snarling cutter-bar

Your left arm was pushing the notched aspen to drop

it exactly right. Slowly the whiteskin leaned, leaned

down the July air into a green crash no one heard as

I pulled back and sensed a touch, just barely a steel touch

on flesh, the tanned skin below your left elbow

opened and you made no sound as I screamed

Every contact, for the lover, raises

the question of an answer:

the skin is asked to reply.

In the back seat of the car roaring over gravel we held

each other, your head against my shoulder hard, then

in my lap. I would not let the knotted handkerchief

go, not too tight, not too loose, the right side

of your head on my thigh, the coiled skin of your ear

your tangled hair. The town doctor already waited

in the entrance and you disappeared

I cannot continue to be in love

with an image. Is it that I want to be

someplace that doesn’t exist?

On the smooth highway back to Edmonton you

talked, you laughed so amazingly complete with

happiness, your sewn and bandaged arm a commitment

between us, a summer of healing to come

On that road I told you about the worn hills

along the Oldman, brittle grass and sky white

as spring skin

October 14, 1984:
what I want to do is get myself

together for my Oldman River quest, April 28
,

1985. There is no physical space in this world

that I seek; is it in the itch of the mind?

Always places named, dates detailed, every

word bearing its inevitable past exact

as an artichoke unlayered of each edible

leaf down to that ultimate taste at the core

You considered every word large, you held each

quotation in your hands, unleafing, dipping each

in the acerbic relish of your imagination until it burst

on your palate but it was never enough, this wringing

of words, never exact enough for your taste

always at their core they were elusive, yet you

could not trust yourself to abandon them, and your teeth

sank deeper, deeper into your hunger, you would find that

understanding sweetness, gnaw that ultimate hunger, god

damn it you would

I said, I get obsessive about

things. She said, I know

What did she mean

In the unrelenting spin of a pickup motor among

the whiteskin trees above Aspen Creek

which flows into the North Saskatchewan River

which is later joined by the Sturgeon and Dogrump

and Turtle and Battle Rivers and eventually by the

South Saskatchewan, which has already merged with the Red

Deer and the Bow and your Oldman, and grown together they

wash down the Grand Rapids into Lake Winnipeg fed by

the Red and Assiniboine Rivers which joined each other

where you were born, a blur of crocuses waiting for your

opened eyes, and the last great swamps of the Nelson River

and finally vanish forever in muskeg and

the passage of geography and stone and time ebbing

into Hudson Bay, into the frozen Arctic Ocean, the

colour of your ashes an incarnation of the ice

and the darting fish and seals and belugas

and polar bears and gravelly tundra where caribou

hunch to calve every spring and dawn lightens

the limitless ice, its pressure ridges

rammed into immense castellated islands

by every new-moon surge of the sea

as controllable as your relentless

hunger. Breathing in that steady

motor did you see the coming

thunder of angel wings

who when I scream

would hear

Yo is cleaning, so much dust in a very large area,

as always things have to be clean

always such a desperation of dust, and then

two arms are around her, clasping her so tight

the mop clunks to the floor, such a hard body

pressed against her back, such a powerful hug she

feels instantly who it is. I miss you

so much, she says. And again, Why did you

do it? And again, So much. After breathing for

a time she asks, Are you happy now? She lifts

her hands back to his head, his ears, his hair is short

with a touch of curl and remembering she says, Show

me your hands. The elegant fingers slightly double

jointed and longer than the palms, the lines a map

of prairie rivers she has known since the moment

of his birth.

T
he second long day of their hunt for the Orange Downfill in the ravines and deeper river valley randomly bent, gouged by glacial water through flat, sprawling Edmonton. April had faded into the first day of May. Warmer afternoon light brightened over them as they trudged up an inclined scar scratched into the south valley cliffs. A century ago it might have been the narrow bed for a cable railway to haul people and goods up and down from John Walter’s ferry strung on a cable across the river, but now they had to force their way through its brush, the traffic on Walterdale Hill Road roaring down just beyond deadfall and leafless bush on their right. Cars and buses and vans and pickups … remorseless pickups.

Hal’s body was dragging slower and lower and Owl kept exact pace with him, both saying nothing. But Yo’s piano had begun singing in the valley search, and now words settled gently on the notes:

And abruptly they were out of wet, snowy brush and facing the five-road intersection at the height of 109th Street. Inevitable Edmonton skyline: brilliant sunlight in the bluest air to the thin eastern glaze of oil refineries; around them waiting and surging traffic, pavement and massive machines and stink. They crossed right with the light and walked down, so gently easy now, down, the bent sidewalk to the south-east steel massif anchoring the High Level Bridge: fresh black paint, a commuter cyclist smashed there a year ago.

And grey and black straight ahead, one kilometre of concrete and riveted steel stretched over trees towards the running water against the opposite bank: eighty-five metres high. A staggering depth. The tops of the trees far below here, and that distant, it seemed motionless, snake of grey water blank as mindless fear and thick enough to conceal any thing, slip it beyond imagining under the ice of the Arctic Ocean, truly a Yo song for singing “…  O my soul it is well, it is well …” so step up on the bottom rail, lean out, fold your body forward over the top rail. It is well.

Close your eyes. Bend a little farther, longing pulls you soft, steady, your hands clenched together on the rail, feel it grow, lift the left leg, over, and quick as you can the right and both hands open and gone and well with my soul with my soul

Sometime, somehow, the river would give some of you back, somewhere. Nevertheless.

Gabriel’s long body was not broken. It had only one scar.

Hal said without thinking, “Owl. Listen. He walked across here, over this, hundreds of times. He lived and worked over there almost a year, every time he walked to university or home to us he could have … but he never.”

The stone Legislature Building loomed on the opposite cliff, the skyline city buildings stretched away east like the blunt spikes and stumps of teeth in the river’s dinosaur jaw. But Owl stood looking steadily down the valley, across trees and snow-blotched park and river to the spidery construction cranes tearing at three Edmonton power-station chimneys on the river’s edge. Century markers being smashed. Perhaps Owl was trying to discern, at their base, the circle of steel memorial beams leaning over the unnamable, the lost graves of vanished Fort Edmonton. Almost two centuries, probably more. In the world over a million people—the population of Edmonton—killed themselves every year, over four hundred in Alberta, many by falling; the Lions’ Gate, the Golden Gate Bridges were two favoured high places, any high bridge, there is a kind of ecstasy in high air—who could walk this narrow grey track and not feel—looking down, down into always more unresisting air. The water that will accept, will vanish, every thing.

“Yes,” Owl said, so quickly Hal could barely hear him for traffic swishing just beyond the girders.

“Not this. He refused this.”

“Yes,” Owl said again. Then: “No smashing his body.”

“He’s not here in the valley.”

“The orange jacket isn’t here.”

“No.”

“You have an idea.”

“Not the Orange Downfill I saw on the street, no.” From the trees below the Legislature dome a black flame flared up. A great bird riding up, westward on the steady air. Gradually it lifted higher over the river until it reached the rim of the bridge, then it dipped, and was gone.

Hal said, “We don’t need to look here any more.”

“Yes,” Owl said. He too had watched the raven fly.

They stood together tilted against the southeast pillar clotted with round black rivets. New paint. Endless vehicles streamed past them just beyond the steel, a city bus blasting diesel, a convertible already open to the cold light, a blue Chev pickup. It seemed every particular thing on earth was continuously moving: it seemed any one thing must eventually, inevitably, pass by every one given place and inevitably crash. Or stand tilted and inert.

For once no people from the high-rises along Saskatchewan Drive were walking down the 104th Street sidewalks toward Whyte Avenue. Hal could calmly limp the short blocks—cars roaring around the corner from both directions in bursts of acceleration—move as quickly as he could still push his right leg. He waited inside his neighbour’s hedge for a brief break in the traffic, then ducked out and under his apple tree and climbed to the porch—vacant—no bills in the mailbox, of course Saturday—and unlocked his front door fast. The furnace sighed warmth in the floor registers. He locked the door and crossed the living room, not looking at the stacked
Journals
he had not
read since Wednesday but he drew the wooden folding cover down over the blank TV as he passed it, and turned towards the kitchen.

CLANG! the door chime banged beside his right ear and his calm exploded—but he choked his shriek.

One: the back door—police!

He collapsed onto the bottom of the staircase to give his heart a chance. Thanks be to God he hadn’t set the security alarm when he left: now he wouldn’t have been able to get to the back door to code it out, the door-window blinds were always tilted slightly open and it was certainly the police, there was no one else it could be. They would be peering inside for movement. He edged his head around the staircase wall: light through the slats of the back living room window, yes, heavy blue shoulders. Two, they were on the back porch. The glint in the alley beyond the garage must be the black nose of their car.