Given Read online

  I guessed she must be Agnes. She knew without asking who I was looking for, and said her nephew was up at his cabin, but insisted I come in and meet her brother. The way he was carrying on since their sister had passed, she said, I might not get another chance.

  The Uncle lay in bed, attached to a respirator, drinking from a Tweety Bird cup, holding a paper bag in his other hand, a Sears Christmas catalogue open on his lap. A poorly recorded tape of drumming and chanting issued from a tape deck surrounded by an array of pills and empty Drambuie bottles on top of the TV. The Uncle bore a resemblance to both Agnes and Hooker, though his black hair was specked with silver, braided and tied together by a shoelace. He reached for my hand and pulled me down on the bed. He was, I could tell, a handsome man under all the wreckage.

  “The old goat,” Agnes sniffed. “If he steals a kiss, count your teeth afterwards.”

  She made as if to tuck in the sheets at the bottom of her brother’s bed. He wouldn’t let go of my hand and fixed me with watery eyes, as if trying to fathom who I was. I looked around the room at the wallpaper with dimple-cheeked cherubs pressing their chubby bottoms up against one another — and down at the Christmas Wish Book, opened at a page of women in white underwear.

  The Uncle made a dismissive gesture, as if he could guess my thoughts. His voice was faltering, weak; he said he was too old to be reading the kinds of girly magazines that showed you everything girls had to offer but nothing of what they felt.

  I shifted my body as he continued to grip my hand, tried pulling me close again, and leaned into my ear to speak. Then he began coughing, as if the effort of speech was too much for him.

  He let go of me, closed his eyes, and let the paper bag slip from his hands. “When’s that Agnes going to bring my lunch?” he said, as if she wasn’t there. I rescued the bag and set it on top of the television, upsetting the bottles of pills.

  “They’re all empty anyway,” said Agnes. “He doesn’t remember, but he already ate two hours ago.”

  I backed out of the Uncle’s room and he opened his eyes again. “Bend over and touch your toes and I’ll show you where the wild goose goes,” he said, starting a coughing fit at the same time.

  “The old wolf,” Agnes said, shaking her head and closing the door behind us. She laughed as I pretended to count my teeth, and showed me into the cluttered kitchen where she was pickling sea lion flippers, next to three loaves of bread on the counter, rising in pans. Agnes had covered the softly swollen loaves with a dishtowel to keep them warm as they rose.

  She gave me directions to Hooker’s cabin: north through the village all the way to the end of Dead End Road. She said I could park where the sign said not to, and take the well-marked trail around the graveyard, or I could cut through the graveyard and save myself some wear and tear. She told me to watch out for lumaloos, and that once I made it through the graveyard it would be easy enough to find the path that led to her nephew’s place.

  I set off through the village, saw a wisp of cloud spiralling into the sky over the dome of the Catholic church, as if a spirit were taking leave of a body. I passed Matt’s Yaka-Way, and swung left onto Dead End Road. When the road ran out I parked and took the shortcut through the graveyard that was nothing but sucking mud and wound under the twisted apple trees — ghostly presences in a place that lacked all colour other than gradations of gloom.

  The trees, though leafless, still had small, golden apples hanging on to the branches that were weighed down by grey hanks of moss. I stopped before a mound of black earth — a new grave piled high with fresh, wet flowers — in a part of the graveyard inhabited by Moons: William Moon, 1937–1985 (there was an empty Bombay gin bottle on his grave labelled “Wholey Water Do Not Consume” next to his wife, Violet) and a string of relations. Lawlor Moon lay side by side with his drowned daughter. Her grave looked like the floor of a hastily abandoned playroom — a headless doll, a scattering of faded Magic Markers. The markers appeared to have been, once upon a time, stuck into the earth, describing a circle around her plot, as if she were being admonished — the way children are told not to colour outside the lines — not to stray from the confines of her final resting place.

  At the base of one gnarled apple tree, as close as you could get without disturbing its roots, I spied a small, untended grave. I felt as if my heart had rounded a corner and bumped into a lost part of myself. I kneeled, brushed aside the rotting-apple scented grass, and read the words I’d spent the last twelve years of my life praying I would never have to see:

  Baby: Born and Died.

  An angel lost his wing

  Crooked he did fly.

  I fled, stumbling between rows of older graves, with their almost rubbed-out names, until I reached the far side of the orchard. I wept as I ran, seeing Angel with only one wing flying up from me, flying crooked out of my heart. In the dim light under a thick canopy of hemlocks, I found the path.

  The trees — pushy, spiky, ill-tempered spruce with needles that felt as friendly as barbed wire — made the forest seem more forbidding. A single small fern caught my eye, undulating playfully even though there was no breeze. Having risen from the walking-dead I had believed I could walk away from my past. Instead I had come full circle, as if the loneliness from which I’d fled was the only place I had left to go.

  In the House of the Dead at the Clínica Desaguadero I remembered the many candles burning, a strong chemical smell, and a cloying scent of flowers. An Italian oil painting — a saint having his intestines slowly unwound from his body on a reel — hung, crookedly, as if no one had looked at it long enough to take the time to right it, below an old Spanish proverb meticulously penned in italic script: “God Does Not Send Anything We Can’t Bear”.

  The curandero had taken my arm, trying to keep me on my feet, as he led me down the hall into a spacious high-ceilinged room with rows of marble tables in the centre of it. A nauseating wave of cold air hit my face; I recognized now the chemical smell of the embalming fluid.

  Angel lay on his back in an open coffin made of some endangered wood the curandero’s assistant said they reserved for los angelitos. I looked down at him, in that final room, with orchid blades cutting shadows across the grim slabs, his quiet face, and the cotton wool in his nostrils like puffs of breath. I remember closing my eyes for a long time, and opening them, and turning my head to one side to see a wreath of crucifix orchids in the middle of which a pair of baby boots sprouted miniature wings. Clipped to one of the wings in metal lettering, the one word: Angel.

  My teeth started to rattle, my body shook, my legs crumpled from under me and I collapsed onto the floor. I fought to control the spinning sensation in my body; I fought to breathe. With each small breath I took I felt as if my own intestines were being unwound on a reel, the tears icing over in my eyes before they had time to drop, like pebbles of frozen rain, into my hair and face.

  The last thing I remember was asking the curandero for a blanket — a thin sheet wasn’t good enough — to keep my angelito warm. As if he were still alive. Because if ever I allowed myself to believe Angel was dead, I knew there’d be nothing more that could happen to me.

  Gradually the trees thinned out and the dominant conifers were replaced by the rebel alder, whose hold on life was more tenuous. The trail wound down through salmonberry, huckleberry bushes and salal, and ended abruptly, just as I tasted the smoke in the air that rose from Hooker’s chimney, and streeled towards the sea. His cabin sat in a clearing halfway to the end of the point. A raven the size of a flight bag crouched on the edge of the roof as if preparing to ambush me.

  I made a noise to try to shoo him away, and a dog began barking inside the house. The raven hopped further up the roof, almost to the peak, where he sat tall and erect with his bill angled up, his throat hackles puffed out, and his wings spread broadly to the side, making himself even bigger than he had first appeared. I knocked on the door, and the barking became more frenzied.

  “It’s open,” Hooker called out.
“Come on in. Don’t worry about Toop. He barks at nothing.”

  I was more worried about the raven than Hooker’s mutt. I approached the door, and opened it a crack. “Sit!” I heard Hooker order, but it was the opportunity his dog had been waiting for. He got his nose in the crack and forced the door all the way open; if I hadn’t jumped to one side he would have run right over me, three legs and all. When he looked back at me over his shoulder I saw he carried a shoe in his teeth.

  Hooker lay on a mattress in the middle of the floor propped up on one elbow. His hair was pulled back into a ponytail and he was naked except for a pair of jeans, faded around the crotch. His belt was undone.

  “He has to bury everything,” Hooker said, as if that explained why his dog had been in such a hurry to knock me over, “just so he can dig it up again. He likes to chew on things after they’re nice and ripe. He’s got caches all over.”

  I asked how his dog had lost his leg, as I closed the door behind me.

  “Guy I got him from amputated it off to slow him down. You might as well try and stop the sun coming up in the morning.”

  I said I had rarely seen the sun come up on this island. I figured it was afraid to come out because it might drown.

  “You’ve got a point there. Anyways, Toop keeps me out of trouble a lot of the time.” He yawned, and stretched. I tried hard to keep my eyes off his body. “Keeps me in line.”

  Hooker told me to come on in and take a seat. I looked around but could see nothing to sit on. A driftwood slab piled with shells, bullet cartridges, dishes, and a bowl of fruit served as a table, and a large steel barrel that had been converted into a woodstove squatted on a platform of flat rocks.

  “My old man built this place,” Hooker said. “Gracie and I were born here . . . though I tried to put it off as long as possible. I could see my old man’s fists at the end of the tunnel, waiting to pound on me.”

  He paused as if waiting for me to comment. “After two days he got tired of waiting and he reached up inside my naha and grabbed hold of one of my arms. He thought he could force me out.”

  I didn’t know what to say and moved towards the heat of the stove, in front of which lay a heap of running shoes, all different sizes, the same kind Hooker’s dog had carried in his mouth. They looked as if they had been sentenced to a dozen life cycles in a washing machine with a grudge.

  “Cat got your tongue?” Hooker said.

  I was saved from having to try and answer by the sound of a thunk on the roof, as if Toop might have been plucked up by an eagle and dropped from a height. I’d watched birds let go of their victims — clams and mussels, mostly — from the sky, to dash their brains out on the sharp rocks below, but Hooker didn’t look concerned.

  He raised his eyes to the ceiling. “That would be Charlie.

  You probably met him on the way in. He’s letting me know it’s chow time.” I listened to the sound of wings beating, and the discussion that followed, one that Hooker appeared to understand.

  “He and Ralph are at my feeder, up on the roof. I keep it supplied with roadkills. I like to have ravens around, they’re better than any watchdog you’ll find . . . even Toop. If I’m not home they won’t let anyone near the house. And I like to watch them eat.”

  He reached out, picked a big red apple from the bowl and polished it on his thigh. “I like to watch people eat, too,” he said, taking a bite of the apple, then tossing it to me. He had juice on his chin, and didn’t bother wiping it away. I caught the apple, and set it on the driftwood table.

  “Come over here,” Hooker said, quietly, “and help me do up my belt. It’s one thing I have a bad time doing myself.” His trousers were unzipped and I could see he wasn’t wearing any underwear. My throat felt like I had a roll of quarters stuck in it.

  I walked over to where Hooker sat on the edge of the mattress with his legs stretched out, and squatted between his knees; he didn’t even need to hold in his breath while I zipped up his fly. His skin felt hot where my hands touched it. The draft coming from under the door made the fine hairs on his arms horripilate.

  “You cold?” he asked. His hair tickled the back of my neck, my mouth was inches away from one of his nipples. I sat back on my heels, shivering.

  “I could put more wood on the fire. I don’t get much company so I usually stay in bed. It’s always warm under the covers.”

  He got up, bent over a pile of laundry on the floor and searched for something to wear. “My old man used to talk down at my naha for not picking up after him. These are mostly his clothes. The only thing I got left of him. Besides this . . . ” He held out his hook.

  He pulled a black T-shirt over his head, opened the stove door, and fanned away the smoke that belched out. He looked at me and laughed as the smoke rose to the ceiling, spread flat against the boards and hung there, grey and featureless, like a version of the actual sky.

  Hooker said his mother lay on this mattress, in this same room, in labour for three days. On the fourth day his father hiked into town to fetch Agnes. “He told her I was stubborn. He says to Auntie, ‘The kid’s not even born yet and already he’s a pain in the butt’.

  “When they got back Auntie seen my arm sticking out from between my naha’s legs, rubbed raw and that from where the old man had spent so much time tugging on it.” Hooker said Agnes massaged his arm — he still remembered the feeling — how she stroked the inert limb with her index finger. She told him, years later, she thought he was gone and that all she could try and do was to save his mother. But when she began to stroke his tiny hand, she said, it suddenly closed, clutching her finger, refusing to let go. Agnes got to work. “Long story short, she saved my hide,” Hooker said. “That’s pretty well it. What time’s it getting to be, anyways?”

  He looked at me and smiled, a slow half-dance of a smile. I stood with the emptiness of the room between us, feeling as if I had lost my nerve even for speech. “I don’t even know why I am telling you this,” he said. “It only makes you old, when you hear bad things like that.”

  “You care about him. He’s your father,” I said.

  “He was a mean bastard who hurt the people who were stupid enough to love him. Why should I bother to care? By now he’s probably dead.”

  I wanted to say, if the dead live on in us for any reason, it is to force us into remembering. But Rainy said, in group one day, “The truth is a bully we all pretend to like just so we don’t get singled out and picked on,” and nobody could come up with anything better than that.

  “I’m just having fun with you, anyways,” he said. “Jus’ kiddin’ around.”

  Hooker wadded up a newspaper and laid a tipi of kindling on top of it. “You ever had a kid of your own?” he asked, striking a match. He looked up at my face as he spoke, fanning away the smoke.

  He sat down again, his eyes moving from my face to the fire, and back again, generating their own heat. I wanted to tell Hooker about my son, but Angel was a secret I wasn’t ready to share, as much as it hurt keeping it to myself.

  “You’re beautiful when you’re sad,” Hooker said. “Anyone ever tell you that?”

  I turned away, frowning. Hooker cocked his head, looked at me sideways. “I’m jus’ kiddin’ you. If you’re good at something, that’s beauty,” he added, quickly. “That’s all I meant. You’re good at looking sad. It’s a compliment?”

  He always seemed to get the better of me. He was quick, an expert at feeling me out. He had a way of looking at me, too, that made me feel I was standing before him, dressed in a white cotton bra and French-cut briefs, like a model in the Christmas Wish Book. I folded my arms across my breasts.

  He walked over to the door, then turned to look at me over his shoulders. “You’re easy to like,” he said. “I think I like you more than might be good for either of us.”

  This time he didn’t add, “Jus’ kiddin’.”

  Hooker led the way through the darkening woods, away from the sound of the pebbles on the beach being drawn back into
the sea. Toop, who had reappeared with a worried ‘W’ on his forehead the moment Hooker whistled for him, limped beside his master, his large wing-like ears sticking straight out on either side of his head. Every so often he stopped to mark his territory on a tree root that snaked across the trail.

  Hooker said he had taken this path so many times he could walk it blindfolded, and that he knew the surrounding woods just as well. When he was a boy his mother had sent him into the forest to learn the secret of seeing into shadows, and find his animal guide.

  “No animal I ever found was crazy enough to take on the job of looking out for me. Except for Toop, who looks after me all the time, don’t you, little guy?”

  Toop cocked his head to one side, the same way Hooker did when he was about to say, “jus’ kiddin’.” There was something else unusual about Hooker’s three-legged friend: I looked closer at his face — he had one blue eye, one brown. “A dog with one blue eye, they say he can see the wind,” Hooker said, when he saw me staring. Toop lifted his head, sniffed the air, and blinked. “He knows what we’re talking about, too. Don’t you, buddy?”

  We had reached the end of the trail when a slaughter of crows lifted up from the trees and swept across the sky, as one entity, like iron filings, magnetized, over the inlet. I covered my head, as if they might sweep me up with them; Hooker laughed and said that was nothing, there were so many birds here in the old days that when they took off from the inlet the sky went black over the graveyard.

  Up ahead I could see the spectral white dabs of the gravestones floating beyond the trees and had started towards them when I heard a branch snap in the bushes. “What’s that?” I whispered.

  Hooker grinned at me over his shoulder. “Could be a lumaloo. A person like you, who asks too many questions.”