Late Nights on Air (31 page)

Then Harry started to whistle, and suddenly she shivered and rubbed her arms through the sleeves of her heavy woollen shirt. “What’s the coldest you’ve ever been?” she asked him.

He knew the answer without even thinking. Saturday afternoons, bicycling home from playing hockey on the duck pond, his hands on the icy handlebars. His mother would tell him to run cold water from the kitchen tap over his cold hands. Frozen feet too, jumping from foot to foot. The air around the electric light all blue and rainbowy, his eyes so cold. His mother would give him a cup of scalding cocoa and nine times out of ten it took the roof off the top of his mouth. “Nothing holds the heat like cocoa does,” he said, “but it doesn’t
store
heat the way ice stores cold.”

Eleanor said she had a theory that there’s something about heat that actually reinforces memory. She broke off, and Harry waited for her to go on. “When I was about sixteen,” she went on, “my friend Jill and I went to a Saturday matinée and when we came out it was dark and freezing cold and the
bus didn’t come. Ottawa in January. So I decided to walk home and Jill was positive I was going the wrong way. She refused to come with me, she held on to a parking meter with both hands,
no no no
. That was the coldest I’ve ever been. And all I remember is plodding home and Jill dragging her feet behind me and me trying not to think or feel
anything
. The movie, on the other hand, I remember every detail of, because I was inside and warm.”

“
Were
you going the wrong way?”

“No, it was the right way.”

“You’d better do the navigating from now on.”

She was about to tell him which movie it was when a sound—a cough—made them turn around. Impossible to say how long he’d been squatting there, twenty yards away. Unkempt, dark-haired, unsmiling. Cradling a gun in his arms.

Harry stood up, but Eleanor stayed where she was, her arms around her knees. Where on earth had he come from?

The stranger stood up too and came down the barren slope, and Eleanor thought of Eddy, because the man didn’t smile and he looked dangerous. The movie on the coldest night of her life was
Teahouse of the August Moon.
, for which Brando starved himself in order to play the Japanese interpreter Sakini. Now, in one of those uncanny coincidences that guide us through life, if we let them, their wild-looking saviour turned out to be Japanese.

His name sounded like Ee-zay and he was travelling “solo,” he said.

By means of a map and some English and a good deal of gesturing, he told them he was coming from Snowdrift on Great Slave Lake and heading to Chantrey Inlet on the arctic
coast by way of the Back River. Through his binoculars he’d seen their tent, which stood out, being in such an unlikely place. Wanting to stretch his legs, wanting to be sure they were all right, he had hiked the low ridge behind them. His own canoe was out of sight around a bend.

A Saint Christopher medallion hung around his neck. Eleanor pointed to it in some surprise and his face lit up. “Is your?” he asked, and undid the fastener and handed it to her.

After that, Eleanor couldn’t stop smiling. You never know how help will come, she thought, or in what form. She felt protected, rather like the Thelon River wildlife sanctuary to which they were headed.
Nothing bad is going to happen to us
. The idea was like a crystal-clear hallucination, the product of a wild coincidence in a wild place.

Tonight Ee-zay would paddle and portage until he reached—he pointed at the map—Ptarmigan Lake, which was their destination too, not that they would get there as soon as this solitary adventurer. He liked to travel all night, he told them, when it wasn’t so windy, then sleep during the day, then take off again. They could follow him, he indicated, and they would probably find their companions. By now it was after midnight and the silver lichen had a sheen rising off it like the wavery heat rising from a toaster.

They struck Harry’s tent and packed their canoe and the three of them paddled until they reached Ee-zay’s canoe. Then he led the way out of the back channel in which they’d been lost, and canoeing towards them came the search party of Gwen and Ralph. With that, the lonely Barrens turned into a place of domestic ease and multiple embraces. They beached their canoes and suddenly there was chocolate, dried fruit,
conversation, laughter, repeated avowals of never letting you out of my sight. Ralph offered Eleanor morsels of chocolate on his fingertips, and in leaning towards him she caught an old childhood smell of Christmas: nicotine and chocolate and raisins—it was her father at the foot of her bed filling her stocking after he thought she was fast asleep.

They made tea, having a Barren Lands tea ceremony at one in the morning, boiling the water in a billy can, then dropping a bag of black tea into the water and serving it with sugar to their impressive Japanese traveller. Gwen got her tape recorder out of its brown canvas bag and their wild angel talked into it; he had a delightful way of saying pee-nuts ba-ta-, which seemed to be his mainstay along with any fish he caught. They gave him some of their supply of chocolate and dried apricots, then they all returned to their canoes and paddled to the entrance of the Lockhart River, where Gwen and Ralph had set up camp on an island. Ee-zay kept going and they watched his progress into what he called “the big of Ca-na-da.”

Watching him disappear, Harry had a sudden intuition and felt somebody walk over his grave. Doug Palliser, Lorna Dargabble’s first husband, who had drowned making a trek to the Arctic Ocean, had light brown hair. Lorna, he said to the others, must have gone out into the arctic night, holding in her hand a lock of her dead husband’s hair.

THE NEXT MORNING
they woke up on their island in the Lockhart River to fierce winds. The stillness of the night before now seemed like a mirage. This pattern of a golden evening followed by its opposite, of silence as the precursor to violent gusts of wind, wouldn’t register in all its significance until it was too late.

What registered instead was the need to ignore bad weather. From Ralph, Eleanor was learning how it ought to be handled, not as reason for melancholy but as material for rough humour; he was always girding his loins and sallying forth “to be bloody, bold and resolute,” treating as a romp the weather that made Harry so morose. Before breakfast Ralph had been out filling their canoes with rocks to prevent the wind from lifting them and tumbling them hundreds of feet down the shore.

Now it was late morning. Eleanor was in her tent, writing up the events of the day before and describing the terrible noise of unimpeded winds tearing at the nylon, the ropes, the poles on either side.
We pass our days in beauty and in drudgery
, she wrote,
like Cinderella
.

Gwen was beside her, stretched out in her sleeping bag, reading Eleanor’s Bible.

“I’m too resistant,” she said, putting it down after a few minutes.

“What are you afraid of?” Eleanor asked gently, looking up from her notebook.

Gwen was staring at the orange ceiling three feet above her head. “I’m afraid of being taken over,” she said at last. “Of having to give up too much.”

“Do you have so much?”

“I don’t have much at all. But what I have is me.”

“You wouldn’t be less you, that’s what I’ve discovered. You’d be more you.”

“Oh, I’m as much of me as I can stand.”

This conversation, once begun, threaded its way through the next little while with Eleanor saying to Gwen that her fear of being effaced was natural, but didn’t she realize that her fears already effaced her? “I’m not trying to convert you when I say that Christ saved me from that sort of narrowness.”

But there were certain words Gwen detested, among them: Christ, goodness, salvation, sin, saviour.

Gwen tried to figure herself out as the tent billowed sideways in the wind and the sound of flapping worked on her nerves. Earlier Ralph had said the wind sometimes blew steady for weeks, it blew for thirty days straight one year in Baker Lake. He’d pointed to willows so tiny they sat an inch or so above the ground, the wood tough and fibrous and lateral. He said it could take a hundred years for one of those roots to reach the size of a thumb. Now Gwen heard a bird call, only one, in the wind. Later, she would hear the sound of a door banging shut, and recognize it as the sound of her own
deep longing for permanent shelter. It must have been a rock falling, she thought.

“Eleanor?”

“Yes?”

“What did you mean when you were talking about blind spots? I mean, being in love and not knowing it?”

“Have you noticed the way Harry looks at you?”

Gwen frowned. “That doesn’t mean anything. He’s in love with Dido.”

“That’s what he thinks too. Poor wretch.”

On the second wind-bound morning on their island, Gwen picked up Eleanor’s
Varieties of Religious Experience
and in the soft orange light of the tent became engrossed in William James. He certainly was a very good writer, she thought to herself, and there was something in his spiritual case histories that thrilled her. What she loved were all the outer details that clothed inner change. You knew a change was coming, you even knew what form it would take, but the details varied, the struggle varied, the language varied. One woman said, “I did lie down in the stream of life and let it flow over me.”

Gwen closed the book and let herself feel the same marvellous thing.

Harry was beside the fire. He was thinking of Dido’s
I love you
as the elevator closed, of the lingering look on her face. He was thinking of her voice, the way she pronounced
Harry
as if it were a problem she couldn’t fix.

After she’d gone, there had been a lot of mail from listeners who missed her, who wanted to know what had become of
her. One listener wrote that Dido was the first intelligent woman he’d heard on the radio. “Her voice was a balm.” And Harry wrote back to say that Dido Paris had gone on to greener fields. The word
balm
had stayed with him as a perfect description of her sound. Only a few voices, he thought, were so expressive. And he remembered an old poet he’d heard on the radio once.

“Something’s bothering you.” Those blue eyes, bluer than ever, searched his face. “What are you thinking about?”

He poked the fire with a stick and Gwen noticed his broken fingernails, his banged-up knuckles. Then he looked up, and discovered an exit from his mood in her sunburnt, teaseable face.

“I was thinking about an old poet I heard reminiscing on the radio years ago. He said he was looking out the window when lightning struck the tree in his garden, and it threw off its bark, he said, ‘like a girl flinging off her clothes.’“

Gwen laughed. “
That
I’d like to see. But not as much as you would, I think.”

After lunch the wind dropped, and they scrambled to take advantage. They left their island and paddled up the Lockhart River. By evening they’d reached the rapids below Ptarmigan Lake and camped. July 3. Harry made a supper of “beef stew isolé” and Ralph headed up a hill with his binoculars, only to come back with “the foul, dank and dreadful news” that Ptarmigan Lake was also covered in ice.

The next day they moved one mile—over the portage to Ptarmigan Lake and back into a frozen world.

“‘O me, my heart, my rising heart,’” groaned Ralph.

But then he put on his sneakers, stepped into the ribbon of icy water at the rocky edge, and began to muscle his canoe forward. The others followed, sliding, slipping, falling, cursing, until they came to a sheltered bay, where they set up camp in a thicket of small willows.

In the morning they woke to what they thought was rain falling on their tents. But it sounded odd until they realized it was snow. Snow falls more lightly than rain, and, if anything, it’s wetter, the way it clings and melts. July 5.

In their willow thicket, their little rabbit warren, everything they did soaked them through—brushing against wet bushes to gather wet wood, breaking wet branches, cooking with wet dishes. The snow fell like wet feathers into the pot heating on the fire, it cruised down, thought Harry, knowing from Dido that
cruise
comes from
kruizen
for the zigzag motion of boats evading pirate attacks at sea. He looked up and for one brief moment saw a bush full of roses, orangey-red roses. But it was Gwen’s tent in the snow.

Ralph was saying, “A day like today makes me appreciate a day like yesterday.” He meant coming to a standstill made him appreciate a day of hard slogging.

“Twenty-two more days,” grumbled Harry, “and the fifth day this week we’ve been weather-bound. Two hours to make bannock.”

“An hour and a half,” said Ralph.

Harry leaned back. Ralph seemed to be getting younger and fitter with each passing day. He was having the time of his life. He was even sleeping well, as Harry knew from having to endure his freight train of snores every night. “You’ve
always got something to say. I say two hours. You say an hour and a half.”

“That’s making conversation, Harry. Most people want a response when they say something.”

Gwen turned, grabbed Harry’s foot. Tugged it. “You really want to know the difference between you two?”

“No.”

“I’ll tell you anyway.”

“I’m sure you will,” he said acidly.

But she held her tongue. She turned her face away.

Curious, Eleanor asked her, “What’s really the difference?”

“No. Harry doesn’t want to know.”

A few hours later, when they found themselves alone, Gwen said to Harry, “You don’t want to be here.”

“You’re right. I’d give anything for a plane to come and get me right now. Would you come with me? Would you run away with me, Gwen?”

She gave him a look meant to squelch his nonsense, but not entirely. Not entirely.

Eleanor examined her hands and said they’d aged thirty years in three weeks, they were the hands of an old fisherman. She held them out and they were large and cracked, red and rough in patches, swollen and scraped from sun and weather, from cold and wet. She said her father came to Canada and never wore gloves in the winter, they don’t in England, and his hands were the mottled blue and red and purple of old books on shelves.