The Rest is Silence (3 page)

“Avocados.”

“What do you do with them?”

I asked her if she'd ever had guacamole. She shook her head. She had probably never left the Annapolis Valley.

On the way home I biked past a dairy farm with three fields. The precision and uniformity of those fields was appealing. Their square edges, the green of the triple-mix hay, the lighter rye grass, and the parallel rows of sprouting corn. Those fields were the only beautiful thing about that farm. Holstein calves taken from their mothers and awaiting vealization were housed in tiny pens the size of outhouses. Dozens of old tires held down gigantic sheets of shredded plastic covering a manure pile, the ammoniac stench of which crossed the road as I pedalled slowly up the hill. My heart thumped against my ribs and I was panting with the effort. Farther along, past the herds of Holsteins and Herefords, pasture gave way to woodlots. I got off the bike and walked it up the hill at the foot of Lily Lake Road.

By the time I got home, my shirt was damp and blackflies were stuck in the sweat on my neck. I had elevated a small barrel seven feet off the ground atop a platform made of short logs laid logcabin style. The water in the barrel had been heated by a black rubber hose coiled on the side facing the sun. I stood beside the barrel on an oak pallet and opened the spigot. The warm water felt refreshing as it hit my skin and cooled in the air. It takes surprisingly little water to clean the sweat and dirt off my skin. As there was nobody to see me, I walked naked in the luscious warmth of the late-afternoon sun and air-dried my body and hair.

3

Lily Lake Road

On Saturday I coast downhill on my bike to work at Art's house. Toward the Bay of Fundy, weaving across the median from one side of the road to the other, relishing the sun on my back. In the twenty minutes it takes, only three cars pass. The drivers wave as if we know each other. I come into fog at Margaretsville as it streams off the bay and up the slope at my back. The temperature drops ten degrees. The sharp curve takes me to the right, past the takeout place that sells haddock fish 'n' chips. All along the high bluffs worn by Fundy's tides are old houses and summer cottages owned by people from away: Americans, Germans, and what the locals call Upper Canadians. Jenifer described Art's place to me, a big, white house almost hidden from the road by trees. When I turn in to his gravel driveway a border collie runs at me with a foaming mouthful of teeth. I jump from my bike and stand as still as a heron fishing in the shallows as the dog circles around me, figures I am harmless, and trots back to the house.

“I see you met Lucy.” Art is smiling by the side of his house.

It is the first time I've seen him without a hat. His hair is silver, wavy and thick like the wolf pelt I recall raking my fingers through when I was a kid and my class was on a field trip at a museum. If I have hair like his when I'm eighty, I'm never going to wear a hat. He is good-looking, though I'll be damned to say so out loud after the embarrassment at the fire hall when we first met. I catch up and walk beside him. He leads me around the side of the house. Rose bushes are growing wild against the house between the cultivated flower beds. I stick my nose into a pink flower and inhale its scent.

“Salt air makes them big and pungent. The septic tank should be here.”

He scuffs the ground with his boot. “Or over here a bit. My brother, Joshua, kept track of that sort of thing. All the drains are backed up and the house smells bad. One of the pipes is blocked and we need to find it. According to the map Joshua drew forty years ago, the pipe runs along here.” I follow his hand with my eye to a half-dozen trees on the edge of the cliff that drops into the bay. “The outlet is between those two trees.”

The outlet? The crazy bugger is flushing his raw shit onto the beach.

“Just like in Halifax, huh?”

My voice sounds harsh, but it makes me sad to see how the city treats its harbour like a giant toilet bowl. Piss, shit, and toilet paper, bleach, paint, used motor oil, battery acid: one big cesspool. The tides come twice each day, out-in, out-in, but don't flush it out. There are snails in the harbour that can't decide whether they are male or female, their indeterminate sex the result of who-knows-what synthetic hormones flowing out of sewage pipes.

“No, no, no.” He laughs. “The outlet pipe is a hundred feet from the edge of the cliff.”

I'm relieved.

“If you dig here, you should find the connection. I'm going to the woods for a bit,” he says. “I've got a log that's hung up in another tree.”

A mattock and shovel lie on the ground near us. Digging holes by the shore is no easier than in my so-called garden. The shovel hits rock after rock, the shocks reverberating along my forearms. I straighten my back for a rest and lean on the shovel. Trees rim the clearing in front of me. The spruce and firs are blasted by the cold winds off the sea in winter and stunted by the cool fogs of summer. They might be a hundred years old, but none is so tall that I couldn't throw a stone over it. From my right, beyond where the trickle of the pipe overflows onto the grass, comes the sound of waves licking the cliffs along the shore. Art walks through the clearing wearing an orange helmet and face guard and carrying a chainsaw and a couple of orange plastic wedges. His gait is stiff but purposeful. Soon, the crashing of the waves is interrupted by the whine of his saw.

I go back to digging, bending down with each shovelful to remove the stones that impede my progress. It is almost an hour before I make it down three feet and feel the
click-click
of the shovel on the clay pipe we are looking for. Shit, it stinks out here. I dig a wider hole to locate the suspect connection, see that the outlet of the pipe is shattered, and begin to clear the soil from around and under it so it can be replaced. The lines on my fingers are traced with soil, like mini tattoos, and there is a dark rim under each of my chipped nails. My hands are never clean since I moved here.

I think back over this first summer, all the hard work I've done alone, and I remember meeting Art a month ago. I had spent the afternoon in the sun weeding Martin's carrot beds. He gave me a dozen lush tomato transplants when I was done. Jen invited me to go with her to a dance at the fire hall in Margaretsville that night. I was eager to get out and have some company. Martin doesn't like to dance and didn't want to go with his wife. I was glad he wasn't coming. He's always crapping on me for not being practical enough, and I suspect he's jealous of the friendship I have with Jen. At that point it had been so long since I'd been in a city or heard live music that I would have listened to a marching band of accordions and kazoos.

I went home and put the tomato plants in the ground late enough in the day that they wouldn't be shocked by the sun and watered them. Then I watered myself.

Jen drove us down the winding road to the Margaretsville fire hall in her Lada. She had cleaned the dash with lavender so it smelled nice, but there was no hope for the seats. They were covered with cat fur. I never tire of that stretch of road running downhill from Victoria Vale to Margaretsville, especially when it opens up out of the trees and beyond the fields of hay the water and sky are separated from each other by the wide ribbon of land on the other shore. I was in a good mood and sat sideways so I could watch Jenifer drive while I teased her about the cat hair on the seats. She has a lovely face and is thoughtful and fun, and I was attracted to her that night.

The dance took place in a large room beside the garage that housed the fire trucks. Most of the picnic tables set up at the back of the room were filled with people drinking beer or coffee. In front of the heavy woman at the canteen counter lay brownies, date squares, and cookies covered with Smarties. I gave the woman two loonies for a date square and a cup of strong black tea.

The fiddler was a leathery man who played jigs and reels that made it impossible to sit still. He sat stiff-backed in a wooden chair, one foot tapping the rhythm on the stage. I danced with Jen. Between sets, canned music played through the speakers. Jen didn't want to stop dancing, so I twirled her around as best I could. I felt dozens of pairs of eyes watching us, wondering who the new guy with Jenifer was, dancing like a flustered chicken. A slow song came on and we kept dancing. Jen is almost my height and I was relishing how good it was to have a woman in my arms again when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“I'm cutting in,” a deep voice said.

I pulled my cheek away from the softness of Jen's hair and turned to see the creased face of the fiddler, the bill of his John Deere cap aimed at my nose. I looked at her as we separated, then reached for his hands. He shoved me away.

“Not you, you fairy,” he said. “I wanna dance with her.”

I snorted, pretending I'd been joking, and found a picnic table at the back of the hall. If it hadn't been such a long walk uphill in the dark, I would have started right then for home. When the song ended Jen came and joined me. I didn't look at her.

“So now you've met Art.”

“Lucky me.”

“He's blunt but really quite sweet.”

I grunted like a caveman. The rest of the dance was ruined for me. All I could think of was that everyone had seen me reach for his hands.

—

The screen door at the back of the house slams shut and I am woken from my daydream. Lucy comes running around the corner wagging her tail and sneezing the way border collies do when they like you. She is followed by a young woman whose motion is the opposite of Art's: fluid, graceful, lithe. There is no wagging, no sneezing, but her eyes make up for that. Their irises are black, and huge, as she stares at me and says nothing. Unnerved, I put my head back down and poke around the pipe.

“I've got a strange request.”

Her voice is soft like water running through my cupped hands. I look up.

“Will you sit for me while I sketch you?”

“Your grandfather seems to think it's important that I get to the bottom of this hole.”

She laughs. She smells of geraniums. “Art won't mind if I borrow you for half an hour. I'll pay you for your time.”

I lay the shovel beside the hole. “They don't call them odd jobs for nothing.”

I reach out to introduce myself. She eyes the dirt on my fingers suspiciously.

“It's only soil. I haven't had to deal with the pipe yet.”

“I'm Lina.”

Her hand is cool and has the rough skin and strong grip of someone who could be digging the hole instead of me. It's as if I'm clasping the handle of a whip that runs up her arm, coils through her core, and whose tips end in the black centres of her eyes.

She turns toward the house and I follow the thick, dark braid that flows like a tail down her back. The scarlet ribbon tied at the end, near her sacrum, sways from side to side as if flicking flies off her hips. Her studio is in the northwest corner of the house, facing the water. It smells of oil paints, turpentine, and books mouldering from the damp sea air. The spines on the shelves are discoloured from sunlight. It is a strange collection. Poetry by Hopkins and Hardy, a thirty-volume set by Trollope, and three works by Krishnamurti. Portraits are hung on the high white wall opposite the windows. The features in each one look like they are made of melted wax. Out of the top of each head emerges the clear and precise image of a bird, its wings outstretched in liftoff.

Lina motions for me to sit in a chair facing the row of windows and moves to her easel. I rest my hands on my thighs. My shoulders and forearms relax after their exertion. I reach up to remove my hat, with its floppy, dirty-white brim.

“Oh, leave it on. It's what made me want to sketch your head. That and your nose.”

“It's the hat that becomes the bird?”

“Sometimes.”

“What bird will this become?”

“Can't say yet.”

She is quiet while she draws. She wears loose, paint-splattered jeans and a white T-shirt that hugs her breasts and accentuates the darkness of her skin. I focus on her eyes while she is intent on my portrait. Even when she looks up from the easel she ignores me, as if she is a surgeon and I am her patient etherized upon the table. When she looks back at the paper, her irises are iridescent, like the glossy purple head of a grackle. She looks up again, this time into my eyes, and smiles. Her smile is subtle, lips pressed together, corners curving up slightly. I wait for another. Her pencil scratches are punctuated by the scream of Art's chainsaw coming through the open windows.

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“Quebec.”

“And where's your family from?”

She guesses what I'm wondering and, in a minute, says, “My mother's Wendat.”

“Wendat?”

“Huron. I grew up on the Wendake reserve in Quebec City.”

I don't interrupt her concentration again. Instead I imagine what she is drawing coming out of my head. Based on my hat it could be a gull or tern. A few minutes pass, and she puts down her pencil and sighs.

“Can I see it?”

“It didn't work.”

“I don't get to have a pileated woodpecker pounding on my head?”