I was about to get an important lesson in a series of lessons on the subject of what you might call ‘body knowledge’ or instinct. It’s the kind of intelligence cats have – their brains, of course, are miniscule. Most people are on familiar terms with it apparently but I suppose I had been very much over-protected and over-educated as a girl. As a result I was quite unrealistically cerebral in my approach to life. It was an attitude that derived from having lived inside a metaphorical fortress called ‘civilization’.
It was, in retrospect, quite a comical episode the time I got my first clue about the power of instinct, when I began to grudgingly respect the body’s ability to know…
We had gone on a camping trip to Algonquin Park, shortly after Jason and I fell in love. We were both absolutely desperate to get away from the city and our gossipy crowd of fashionable friends. No big deal. Perfectly normal and natural, right? We simply wanted to be alone together, somewhere sheltered and hidden by the great Canadian forest.
So then what happened was that, on a lazy summer-holiday morning, while wonderful warm, woodsy breezes were riffling the water on the lake, I crawled out of the little yellow pup-tent under the trees, where Jason was sound asleep in our big double sleeping-bag. Lying there in the leaf-patterned tent-shade, he looked so beautiful that I knew all of a sudden that he possessed the terrifying power to break my heart.
Once outside the tent, I stood up among the early-morning sunbeams and felt that there was a sweet new wistfulness in my happiness that day. Then I got an exuberant impulse and took the little red canoe out onto the lake because its deep emerald waters were covered in so many sun-sparkles and I needed to be out there in the open among all the dancing sparkles.
The leafy green of the forest was hanging out over the rocky shore, with the pale blue mists of morning dissolving beneath the drooping branches. Birds and insects were twittering and buzzing as they moved between the brightness of the air and the black shadows under the big trees. As I paddled along, everything I saw seemed to express my gentle, delighted mood to perfection. I was floating slowly past the shoreline, gazing raptly into the clear water at all the pretty little minnows and water-bugs darting among the water-weeds down there. I hadn’t had that wonderful underwater feeling since I was a child. I could just barely even remember it.
But then I heard a sort of whuffling grunt and looked up and a huge black bear was standing up in the bushes at the edge of the lake, about six feet ahead of me. Bears, of course, are notoriously short-sighted and I had been gliding along so quietly in the canoe that the big bear was probably as surprised as I was myself, which was not a good thing.
I have absolutely no memory at all of turning the canoe around, which still makes me laugh. The next thing I knew, I was paddling back to camp as fast as I could, which was pretty darn fast, believe me. My body had known exactly what was happening and had instantly overruled my silly, hesitating brain. And for more reasons than the narrow escape I have described, this was a highly shocking revelation to my vain, domineering intellect. I can still recall that incident with almost startling clarity.
So I think that was why, when Jason came home with Junior that night, I recognized that my body had made another decision for me, in great sadness. A door in my soul had clicked shut and the old, loving openness that I had always taken for granted with my husband was gone.
From then on it just became so painfully obvious to me that Jason was being a bad actor, always playing a part and faking every action and reaction, you know. And he actually thought that I wouldn’t notice the change! But he was doing such a laughably bad imitation of himself, and he could only see me and the boys as distorted reflections of his own ambitions. His underlying loyalties had shifted.
I had learned a few things since we left the city and the look in his eyes reminded me of when somebody’s dog starts sneaking off and running with other dogs in a pack. Their eyes can’t look directly into human eyes any more. Jason had become a hunter like that. Do you remember that old Elvis song called “You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hound-dog”? Since then I understand it.
When I opened my eyes the next morning, I was hugging the far side of the bed – my body again, getting as far away as possible from Jason. His big body was lying on its back, occupying the entire bed other than my small corner. I couldn’t stay lying there awake and I couldn’t look at him either. Dread throbbed once inside me and I quietly stretched my toes down to the cold floor and left the blankets.
Downstairs I found a few remnants of normal life and patched them together to make a morning. I cleaned and I cooked and didn’t talk any more than I had to. Then the kids were safely on the school-bus and I came back inside the house and sat at the kitchen table, listening to the snoring from upstairs as well as Junior’s louder and rougher version cascading from the general area of the living-room couch.
I knew I had become too locked in to the dull but happy routines of house and barnyard. I had gotten used to Jason and his friends coming and going in the background. He was away from home so much and most of the time I didn’t even know where he went.
There was a growing but unspoken tension between us because the further he went into wildness the more he was forcing me to go into reliability, into predictability, into a dull gray country where freedom was only a laughable myth. The children noticed and I felt their contempt. For a long time that great hovering Thing had been getting away with another little piece of me, some time during the night when I wasn’t able to defend myself.
Why are mirrors so much like people? Some are never friendly, always prone to subtle and malicious distortions, while other ones such as the big mirror we had in the hallway are always sympathetic. Then there is that quick glance that no one can resist, that pure beam of absolute self-awareness that passes between the real eyes and the reflected ones. Every day my eyes pleaded with my eyes in the mirror and, behind me, Jason would walk quickly to the door and open it and go outside without ever saying goodbye to me, without ever stopping and saying my name. The day he never came back was exactly the same, except that is the day I will always remember.
For the first month or so he was away I was convinced that there had to be some other woman he was seeing down in the city. All those mysterious things he had been juggling could have finally started to all fall down onto his mixed-up head, so he just ran away to her, to his Plan B. I always felt like he was keeping us in the dark but really it was Jason who had gone away into the darkness. For a long time I couldn’t help answering the boys’ questions with a bitter mouth, though, which didn’t help any of us.
One day I stumbled outside and stood on the narrow lawn inside our fenced yard. Then I fell to my knees on the grass, sobbing, and found relief and strength radiating into me from the earth itself – that’s the only way I can describe it. After that, Jason was merely, as they say, history.
That winter Danny went and found old Henry sitting at his kitchen table like usual, except that he was stone cold dead, frozen solid with a fork in his clenched fingers. It had been a long month of deep freeze and Danny hadn’t seen Henry for a few days so he decided to stop in there on his way back from town.
Then he came and got me and we had an awful time rescuing the old man’s barn full of animals, cold and hungry and thirsty as they all were by then. Danny ended up taking the dog. But first he moved in there for a while, after the undertaker had come and gone, to take care of the animals until some of Henry’s many relations could come and take them away Most of the horses and cattle went to the auction-barn. Danny said it didn’t bother him too much to be there but I don’t know – I couldn’t have slept very well in that house just then myself.
We survived though, mostly because Danny started a greenhouse and garden center over next to the highway, which turned out to be a real money-maker. He started small and the boys and I always helped out. I still manage it for him now. The boys are grown up and married and happily settled down. The oldest one lives just up the road and has three kids and another on the way. He runs a small saw-mill and wood-working shop, making all kinds of furniture and stylish planters that we sell out of the greenhouse, mostly for the urban markets in Toronto and Ottawa. His younger brother has made a point of doing the exact opposite, by which I mean that he has gone into computers, and he lives with his career-minded wife in a high-rise condo just outside Toronto. I still live here on the farm, of course, and it’s a nice place for them all to come and visit.
One day, many years after my husband’s disappearance, when I was already middle-aged and had a thick crop of white hair, I led a bunch of my goats to the back field, to a lush grazing area below the cliff where they were usually too timid to venture by themselves.
There had always been a loose embankment at the bottom of the cliff back there, composed mainly of fallen rock that had built up over the years, along with smaller debris and thick layered beds of autumn leaves. There was a lot of fresh greenery for browsing and the goats were nimble enough, although the side-hill there was difficult to traverse. I was in an exploring mood myself, curious to know what had changed since the last time I had been there.
I soon realized, with some dismay, that the waterfall over the cliff had now entirely dried up. From long experience, I knew that the reason for this had to be that beavers had built a dam across the creek up on top.
The goats thought it was great fun jumping from rock to rock and running along the fallen logs to snatch at all the yummy food. And it was such a pretty scene, all twenty-four of the goats bouncing and bounding among the bright rays of sunshine, in and out of the leafy shade, that I stopped and stood still on a big flat boulder to enjoy the happy effect and have a look around.
Although I certainly missed the waterfall noises that had always been so overwhelmingly there, the new silence meant that I could hear the little breezes and the chirping and rustling of the smaller creatures of the forest. My eyes wandered serenely upward over the cliff-face and I saw that there was a large black opening in the side of the cliff that was leaning over me. The waterfall had always covered it up before. A few moments later, I found the cave.
I climbed all the way up to it, hardly caring that I was hurting my hands and feet on the jagged rocks. Then I walked a short distance inside the opening while , behind me, the goats were gathering at the entrance, bleating with anxiety. I waited there for my vision to become adjusted to the darkness of the interior. The floor of the cave was remarkably smooth and level. I could hear water dripping and, further back, the echoes of water dripping, and then suddenly I heard the disturbing but famiiar sound of porcupine quills rattling their warning, quite close by.
It was a very large porcupine and its erect quills had a golden sheen even in that dim light. Then I was able to see, just beyond it, the white bones of a human skeleton stretched out on the stone floor of the cave.
From the size and proportions of the skeleton and then, as I ducked around the porcupine and moved closer, from the well-remembered clothing – I had mended that shirt so many times – I knew that it had to be what was left of Jason, of my husband. One of his long arms was extended forward, reaching toward the black recesses of the cavern. The other arm was held out to the side and bent. That hand was holding a rusted pistol.
A couple of days later, I returned by myself with a flashlight and found the corroded strong-boxes that must have once held the money and various treasure he had found in the old stone fences and stashed there. Obviously he had been killed for it, by his ‘friends’, the thieves. He always had to brag, I guess.
The whole time I was in there I could sense a rhythmic breathing motion in the dank air inside the cave, in the dead, cold air. I do know that the dragon is only a metaphor. Its task is to convert the surplus production of toiling humanity into a compact and useless form – such as cash and gemstones – and return it to the earth, hoarding it within the deepest caves far beyond the reach of even the roots of the greatest and oldest trees. This is done, I think, so that each new generation will have to cultivate the fields. We must be excluded, you see, from the Garden of Eden…
I never did tell anybody what I found that day. I went up on top of the cliff and laboured alone for a couple of days to destroy the beaver-dam and restore the waterfall. Then I waited until dusk and shot all the beavers when they came swimming out of their lodge and went to work trying to rebuild the dam.
Both my sons and their families have a running joke about Granny’s funny obsession with the waterfall in the back field. I laugh right along with them. But I wrote it into my will that they have to keep that water coming down over the cliff. That cave is a bad, bad place.
THE END
The Dragon Of Rural Route Four (conclusion)
This is the conclusion of this story, describing the downfall of the narrator’s husband and her own ability to survive in spite of that.