The Underpainter

For Tony Urquhart,
whose spirit is visible in art, in life

For Amy Quinn,
who discovered the letters, and knew

For Ellen Seligman,
with affection and gratitude

“Although an even north light is preferable in the greater number of cases, direct bright sunlight is sometimes useful in examining blacks and other very dark colours.”

— RALPH MAYER,
The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques

T
he woman is standing near the window in the downstairs front room of a log house on the north shore of Lake Superior.

It is the winter of 1937.

She is wearing a grey tweed skirt and a checked woollen bush jacket. Her dark-blonde hair is pulled back from her face and hangs in a thick braid almost to her waist. Despite the fact that she has kept her fires — both in the Quebec heater in this room and in the stove in the kitchen — burning all night, it is cold enough that she can see her breath. In her hand she holds an unopened envelope with the words “Canadian National Telegram” printed on it. Her head is bent and her shoulders are slightly stooped as she stares at this folded and glued piece of paper.

To the left and to the right of the house in which she stands lies a series of similar homes built for the miners who arrived in this place in the 1860s. Since the penultimate closure of the silver mine in 1884, all but a few of these dwellings are abandoned in winter. In recent decades they have been used as summer residences only by certain adventurous families from the small twin
cities of Port Arthur and Fort William, which are situated sixteen miles to the west but cannot be seen from here because a limb of the huge, human-shaped peninsula of rock, known as The Sleeping Giant, hides them from view.

This unconscious granite figure is famous. In the summer, tourists driving the gorgeous north shore of Lake Superior stop their cars and stare across Thunder Bay at his reclining body. Passengers who have travelled on the Trans-Canada train can bring his physique to mind long after mountains and prairies have faded from memory. He is twenty miles long, this person made from northern landscape, and, in 1937, no roads as yet have scarred his skin. According to the Ojibway, who have inhabited this region for hundreds of years, he was turned to stone as punishment for revealing the secret location of silver to white men greedy enough to demand the information. He will lie forever obdurate, unyielding, stretched across the bay.

The little settlement of Silver Islet Landing, where the woman lives, occupies a site on his anatomy sometimes referred to as “the toe of the giant.”

During the brief summer season, bonfires bloom nightly on the small offshore islands she can see from her front windows. Swimmers dive from the dock near the large clapboard building that acts as a hotel and a store. Steamers, which provide the only transportation to the spot, ply back and forth from Port Arthur; the narrow track near the shore is filled with running children. Occasionally games and entertainments take place on the sand beach at the end of the lane. There is often laughter, and sometimes singing.

By mid-September, stillness and quiet are reinstated, the summer population having returned to the schools and industries of daily life. One old government official, who is responsible for the maintenance of two lighthouses and for the sporadic winter postal deliveries, remains in his house near the dock. And the woman remains in her cabin a little farther down the shore. By the time the world begins to frost, and then to freeze, even the memory of the summer activity seems unreal, as if it had been a mere performance and she a witness — not even a member of the audience but a stranger in the wings.

When these houses were built, almost eighty years before, the need for shelter was so pressing that the mining company was forced to use unseasoned timber, which had warped in odd directions over the course of the first year. On frigid January mornings, the miners, their wives and children, had awakened to the sight of miniature snowdrifts on the floor and ragged open spaces between the logs. The gaps were swiftly filled with anything that came to hand — socks, knitted hats, treasured table linen from the Old Country. Eventually the houses gave up the struggle, settled, and became stable. Only then were the upstairs walls plastered and whitewashed. On the ground storey the logs remained — and still remain — exposed in the parlour and the kitchen.

Once when the woman was driving a nail between the timbers to hang a picture that I had given her — a picture of herself in her summer garden — a chunk of caulking gave way and an embroidered handkerchief, edged in lace, fell like a message out of the wall.

She is standing near the window beside a rough log wall. The unopened telegram in her hand appears to have already darkened with time, darkened in comparison to the white snow around her house, the brightness of sun that enters the room.

She pushes a tendril of hair behind her ear, a strand that has escaped the braid. This strand contains some threads of grey. She stares at the envelope, then lifts her head to watch the departure of the mail sled, its driver and team of noisy dogs, to watch it glide over the snow-covered ice and disappear behind Burnt Island. For several minutes she wants to refuse the message she has not yet read. The world around her is quiet and fixed, frozen and beautiful. She does not want the scene disturbed. Even the tracks of the sled irritate her; they have scarred the white surface, they have soiled the day.

The woman’s winters are long and bright and silent. Just before nightfall the landscape blossoms into various shades of blue. Few events interrupt the tranquillity; a storm, maybe, or the delivery of supplies, or her own infrequent journeys over ice, around Thunder Cape, into Port Arthur. She has come to rely on the predictability of the season, its lengthiness, its cold. She doubts she would be able to understand a life without it.

She crosses the room and lifts the lid of the Quebec heater, which she holds at the end of the lever for some time as if not quite certain why she has taken this action. For a moment it looks as if she will toss the telegram, unread, into the fire. But this is not what she wants. When she replaces the lid, there is the sound of cast iron striking cast iron, a sound so familiar to her she barely hears it.

Sitting on the chair nearest the stove’s heat, she carefully opens the envelope. It falls to her lap. She reads the contents.

Almost immediately she decides to leave. In her father’s long-ago abandoned room upstairs, she takes his ancient mining clothes from the closet, shakes the dust from the overalls, and removes her jacket and skirt. She covers her feet in several layers of socks and steps into his boots, his overalls, then puts on his large down-filled parka. This is the costume she occasionally wears when she is outdoors in winter, though she knows it to be somewhat ridiculous on the body of a woman entering middle age. Outside her door she reaches for the skis leaning against the outer log wall, places them side by side on the paper-dry snow, tightens the leather straps over her father’s boots, and sets out.

Just before she passes, like the mail sled an hour ago, between the mainland and Burnt Island, she turns to look back at the shore, back at the house she is leaving behind her. There is no differentiation, in this season, between water and land. A delicate wisp of smoke is escaping from her chimney, though she has added no wood at all to her fire this morning.

It is six and a half miles to Thunder Cape, a large spearhead of land rising thirteen hundred feet and clearly visible across the frozen bay. She will spend the night with the couple that keeps the lighthouse there. Tomorrow she will ski sixteen miles across Thunder Bay to the modest lakehead city of Port Arthur.