The Land Of Look Behind Part 1

The Land of Look Behind.

by Paul Cameron Brown.

FOREWORD

The Land of Look Behind hopes to be something of a rear-view mirror, at once c.o.c.ked to reveal our innermost dimensions while transporting that, which by necessity, must lie beyond. Involving ourselves in any interplay with flickering images, of course, must be more than fireside watching and it is my hope the book will be seen not solely as a collection of short stories, although these do figure prominently in the narrative. Satire, "beast fables," and texts (single-page entries) mingle casually with the longer tales. Regardless of the genre, they hope to speak as a unit--to view the conflicting colours of a prism's radiation. Allow me to detail what you can expect.

On the subject of Indian myths, these are entirely of my own making.

They are an attempt to visualize the mysteries of creation through alien perspectives. Oral myths were Canada's indigenous literature. In this vein, the writer resorts to utilizing the spoken ballad form in some of his exercises. Some of the prose pieces reflect a mirror world where the gazer chances upon reality with a new breath of perception--much as the native people's world was to the arrival of the whites. Bewilderment with the natural world is the keynote here. For how many of us have wished, like the Indian, to clarify a particularly taxing bit of life--to elucidate its function into a more recognizable form?

On a larger plane, this is the issue before the book--the "terrible algebra of our existences,"--explored with the urgency and sometime seriousness it deserves.

TO CROSS THE BAY

"I wouldn't try a crossing in weather like this," warned the old man.

"It's a bad time of year, what with the wind and all. Worse still, the lake water is lethal by November. That means if you capsize it will be the chill that does you in."

The old man stopped short, conscious of the look of defiance in the youth's eyes. Young fool biting the nose to spite his face, he thought.

The marina was closed for the season, but the island's residents made contact with the mainland one way or the other. Until mid-winter there was a ferry service, but that a.s.sumed a fair bit of discipline from a resident. He had to go and come when the province obliged. Young bloods off to escape the monotony of Wolfe Island were only marginally willing to conform their Sat.u.r.day festivities with an arbitrary ruling. No, it was too easy to keep a boat in tow at a friend's landing. Keep a bottle to ward off the night's chill. A bottle for tonic against the elements and a b.u.t.tress against authority. The old man knew if he did not avail this one a boat--a safe one at that--he would put his hands on a craft of some sort. Accountability, he thought. They mustn't care about their own lives. Still, there was a living to be made and it was a marina, albeit a closed one. He would still get a boat one way or the other, he mused again as he watched the light fade in the evening sky. He pulled his collar sharply. Yellow leaves were beginning to form a mat on the wooden stairs leading to the shed. He could just make out land's end against a funnel gray sky. Better to advise the young man of the dangers, suggest a daytime crossing. Perhaps even try a little reverse psychology.

The boy, if he could be called that, was growing impatient.

"I'll be all right with a life-jacket. The boat won't be overloaded.

Just the three of us. My cousin and her kid are going with me."

The old man's eyes stirred from the damp reverie of the previous moment.

"I can't let you take a child out into that. The water's choppy at best. You know next to nothing about handling a craft if she takes on water or if it becomes turbulent. Why are you in such an all-fired hurry to get across anyhow?"

"Let's just say it's my business. My uncle supplies you with business during the summer months. He has a boat in tow here now. I'm responsible. It's still normal weather for this time of year. Now step aside and stop your glib patronizing and palming yourself off as an expert on the sea."

"I can't stop you, son. I can only suggest, well that you await next morning and only take two across at one time. Many a person has received a cruel surprise out there. Why this area's full of tales dating back to the earliest times concerning drownings. Why from the time of the Loyalists up through my earliest childhood--all the time in between that--my family has run the marina and it seems someone is claimed yearly by this lake. The French didn't call it an inland ocean for nothing. Some even claim there's tides--real swells that will take a boat and . . . ."

"The French, the Loyalists. I'm not here to listen to a travelog. What do I care if a long list of idiots blundered to their doom. I'm now and intend to keep on living. What should I care about the past!"

"That may very well be, son, but n.o.body sets out to drown. Even on the calmest days a sudden storm whips up and . . . I remember my daddy telling of a group of early settlers up from the Bay of Quinte area crossing to attend a church service--full seven of them drowned after a heavy wind whipped . . . ."

"Church," snorted the other. "Well, I'm not going to any church that's for sure." He broke into a snicker, his dark eyes flas.h.i.+ng above a set of stained teeth.

"Yes, I guess you're not. Your type will . . . ."

"My type, is it? My type is not so gutless as you, that's a fact. A little natural obstacle doesn't send me s.h.i.+vering to the nearest root cellar. This is near winter. You have to b.l.o.o.d.y well expect a little discomfort at this time."

He had unnotched the first of several ropes securing the craft. The boat, a little three seater, st.u.r.dy, but otherwise quite frail was bobbing up then down as each successive dark wave hobnolled it against the current. It looked for all the world like a large, red currant fleshy against the wind. The young man checked the fuel, began to rev the motor before glancing toward the distant sh.o.r.e. A package of cigarettes emerged from his coat pocket. Blue gray puffs, sentinel like, climbed the air about his person. He spat into the water and proceeded to throw the match after it. Both whirled in the spray, then disappeared from sight. The old man sensed his growing uneasiness but that resilient pride checked any apparition of modesty.

"Put the fare on my uncle's account. I'll return the boat tomorrow morning."

Little lights some ten miles distant were fingering the early darkness.

Something near the water's edge bobbed cork-like in the growing dusk.

Always the worst time of day, the old man pondered, a process of diminis.h.i.+ng returns. Not quite dark, sure as h.e.l.l not light--an in between shudder world, a limbo of gray.

"When will the girl and her baby be along?", the old man queried.

"I'll see to that. You never mind. Go back inside, pop, where it's warm. You'll feel better. Entering the number and registration just about does it. I'll keep you posted," he laughed a growing laugh that tore soft wind from his mouth. He spat again, returned to his car and was soon out of sight.

The old man looked wearily at the ground. He was recalling more and more of that early story his dad pa.s.sed down from his dad concerning the overcrowded boat up Adolphustown way so many years ago. If G.o.d allowed decent churchgoers to be snuffed from sight in the act of attending His wors.h.i.+p, think of what must await young fools who defy His natural laws. To be drowned outright was bad enough. To meet death on a fool's errand with a woman and child in tow for some vaguely evil purpose was scant courtesy to their lives. He recalled seeing the plaque near the church outside Adolphustown and wondering as a child why, how, they could have met death that Sunday morning when crossing the bay in so devout a fas.h.i.+on. He had never tried to antic.i.p.ate G.o.d's will or ponder events anymore than pa.s.sing suggestion might receive.

The little white pioneer church near a knoll on a rising hill framed the growing memory in his mind. A dirt road snaked up to its door with the bay clearly visible from every pew completed the stucco walls that dotted the heavy distance. A pretty enough place, especially in mid summer with the smell of sweet hay in the nostrils or a full breakfast under the belt with a pleasant drive out to smell the country air. Yes, that little church made a lasting impression on any who might see it.

Certainly more for its serene presence than any link with that dark episode in its past. At least this was the way he was thinking. Yet he always wondered where the graves of those seven drowned might be. They were pioneer graves, a mite shy of 200 years but they must exist. A cold wind with the not too distant splash of some object brought his thoughts back to the present. Wonder what happens to those drowning today, he felt himself saying almost aloud. Do they really resemble the element they've been cast from? I mean, are their lips really blue or did fear choke all colour from their countenances? He thought of the baby and its mother he had not met. Wondered if the next light he saw midway out into the channel would be the same skiff he had registered and had at least ostensibly given the O.K. to make the perilous crossing. Many thoughts like these pa.s.sed through his mind as he swathed a scarf more fully around his neck.

"Must be cold, so cold down into that channel," he thought turning to the stove door on his shanty. "I'll put a few extra logs on the fire,"

as he poked some tattered newspapers by the edge of the stove. He lit his pipe and watched the smoke fade toward horizon's line where a skiff disappeared from view. Half absentmindedly, he thought he measured a headline describing a craft missing since, since ... No, he mused, just my preoccupation, he thought settling down for a quiet smoke.

UPTURN THE ROCK

Upon the rocks where the baubles of broken blue gla.s.s wink at the sun and gather strands of rusted wire with the occasional bloodroot wildflower, a man is unbending in his efforts to construct a stone rail fence. Specks of mica in the rock are like lizards basking in the heat of a mid-day or a man's thumb placed squarely about these noisome stones clattering as one more of their number comes to rest and home.

The line of cherokee rocks bends first up, then downward in movement across the meadow much like a labouring oar listing but finally brought into play. The glitter of turquoise water with jewels of light on her pa.s.sing wave--like wings entrances much as does this fence moving smartly into the s.p.a.ce of green and earth.

The man, a stooped farmer, has toiled for days to clear this land for tillage. His impact seems negligible to efforts given yet gradually he surmises a scant return is being paid. He picks a wildflower nudging its face through calloused stone and watches the juice break onto forward skin. An old saying reminds him insect bites will lessen should he smear the liquid onto exposed limbs. He is perspiring now and the rocks shove face-like projections into the consciousness of forest and that periphery area, his clearing.

The fence begins to melt as if in a haze and the logic of clearing this vast expanse of earth and rock escapes him. He thinks of each rock as the b.u.t.tress of a treasure box he has just hidden and is loath to dislodge further stones. He ponders Christ's parable of the Kingdom of Heaven likened unto treasure buried in a field. For reasons unclear but not necessarily related to the blood juice, he imagines the fence to be the one at Chancellorsville where a Union regiment died to a man and was found by a burial brigade with apple blossoms stuck to each bloodied face.

Evasive now, he perceives the fence to be the one stopping Pickett's charge at Gettysburg or that fence at Mons in northern France which turned a war. He begins to rummage through the piled stones for spent bullets and other mementoes of a great battle. He relives the story of the Angel of Mons[1].

As he dislodges more and more stones, he showers chunks of limestone and granite backward onto the barren field. The shower of rock is somewhat reminiscent of Ungava's meteor spray or splintered debris forced down a soldier's foxhole. Perhaps a runic stone will fall from tangled roots when he burns the dead stumps of trees deciphering once and for all why men labour or think at all. The fence swirls on and on in growing amnesia becoming the very touchstone of all purpose, stones from Jericho's Wall or the pa.s.skeys taken from our material existence.

Gabriel, the archangel, will sound his trumpet here, he is a.s.sured. The dead and unburied of nameless acts of toil and dread will stand a stone's breadth across this fence. The Face of G.o.d will be seen in the pact nature has made with earth and stone.

He turns and puts his hat by a tree, lifts a canteen and imagines what all might be should vegetation ever be coded and stones prophets to their accordion earth.

[1] Allied soldiers at the first battle of Mons believed certain of their numbers had escaped destruction by the intervention of a Heavenly spectre.

SEAEGGS

The reef was inviting, her languid coral nudging the breakers as they returned from sea. From the instep of the dingy, the fisherman in his broken English was advising the seated men of dangers indigenous to these waters.

"None of that hostile marine life business, Steve--keep it simple--use words he's familiar with," the man with a razor lip, Cliff, muttered to his companion. The other was busy going through the motions in heavily accented Spanish broadly emphasizing common words that lead to nods and ballyhoo, those expected currencies of behavior.

"I'm getting through," came the reply. "Seems beyond the reef, dolphins and the occasional shark gather. Good fis.h.i.+ng, though--red snappers and groupers with anemones along the bottom--the Mexicans eat those you know--call'em seaeggs."