Solomon Gursky Was Here (10 page)

“McNair and his party arrived before dinner from Pelly Bay by way of Chesterfield Inlet with the most astonishing tale, if true.”

McNair's tale:

“A young white man who is unknown to the Compy. or opposition is living with a wandering band of Esquimaux in Pelly Bay and appears to be worshipped by them as a manner of faith-healer or
shaman. He goes by the name of Ephrim Gor-ski, but possibly because of his dark complexion and piercing eyes the Esquimaux call him Tulugaq, which means raven in their lingo. McNair, hardly averse to claiming the reward, dared to conjecture that the young man might prove to be a survivor of the Franklin expedition but this vain hope was soon dashed. Gor-ski had no intelligence of either the
Terror
or
Erebus
. He claimed to be a runaway off an American whaler out of Sag Harbour, but was not in want of rescue. Gor-ski was obviously at ease with the Esquimaux in a snow house and when one of them brought in freshly killed seal he partook with them of the soup of hot blood and invited McNair and his party to share in that disgusting broth.

“McNair lingered for two days in camp, his curiosity aroused by this man who claimed to be an American yet spoke with a Cockney accent, and who lived as a native, but was proficient in Latin and had a Bible with him. On the eve of the second day McNair witnessed an odd ceremony. Gor-ski emerged out of the entry tunnel of his snow house wearing a silk top hat and a fringed white shawl with vertical black stripes: and then the native women did disport themselves before him.

“McNair: ‘Eight of them exhibited some most curious dances and contortions, till at length their gestures became indecent and wanton in the highest degree, and we turned away from the display.'

“Of course McNair is a low, superficial creature, who lies more frequently than he speaks the truth and can take more than a glass of Grog. He fell into the habit of intemperance after he got into Disgrace in consequence of employing one of the Compy.'s Servants in cutting off the Ears of an Indian who had had an intrigue with his Woman, but which would not have been thought so much of had it been done by himself in the heat of passion or as a punishment for Horse Stealing. Quite possibly there is more bibulous fancy than truth to McNair's tale.

“Had Jos. Arnold bled again tonight, but he continues to complain of dizziness and a general weakness of the limbs. He is a born malingerer.”

McNair's tale and its possible connection with Sir John Franklin's fate—not to mention the reward and glory waiting on the man who
solved the riddle—must have worried McGibbon, for six weeks later he sent a party out to Pelly Bay to investigate. They found that the Esquimaux had long gone, and the white man with them, if he had ever existed. All that remained of their camp was seal bones, other animal scraps, a discarded ulu, a tent ring, and that celebrated soapstone carving that is still on display at Hudson's Bay House in Winnipeg. Another northern enigma. For while small soapstone carvings of seals, walruses, whales, and other mammals indigenous to the Arctic are far from uncommon, “The McGibbon Artifact”, as it has become known, remains the only Eskimo carving of what was clearly meant to represent a kangaroo.

Eight

Beatrice had never cared for his cabin in the woods. His Gurskyiana mausoleum. The first time he had driven her out there, she said, “But I come from the backwoods, Moses, and couldn't wait to get out. Why would you bring me here?”

1971 that was, shortly after he had been fired by NYU for “moral turpitude”. They were living together in Montreal, Moses idle, Beatrice working for an ad agency, hating it. After work she joined him in one downtown bar or another, usually finding him already sodden, his grin silly.

“Weekends,” he said, pouring himself a drink. “It's not that long a drive.”

“I suppose.”

They separated for the first time the following summer and ten days later Moses was back in the clinic in New Hampshire. Discharged in the autumn, he first had to endure the traditional farewell meeting in the doctor's office. “So tell me,” the doctor said, glancing at the fat file on his desk, “it's 3:30
A.M
., August 5, 1962. They break in and find Marilyn Monroe lying face down on the bed, bare shoulders exposed, the phone clutched in her right hand. Who was trying to reach her just before she died?”

“How would I know?”

“Clever clever. Now turn over your hands and let the nice doctor have a look.”

His fingernails had driven deep cuts into the palms.

“Be well, old friend. Please stay well this time.”

Moses immediately struck out for the 91. He drove through New Hampshire and Vermont to Quebec's Eastern Townships, crossing
the border at Highwater. Wet slippery leaves lay scattered everywhere on the Quebec side, the bare trees already black and brittle. BIENVENUE. Even if the border had been unmarked Moses would have known that he was back in the Townships. Penury advertised. Suddenly the road was rippled and cracked and he had to swerve to avoid potholes. Rusting pickup trucks, bashed and abandoned, cannibalized years ago, lay in the tall grass and goldenrod here and there. Sinking barns rotted in the fields. Small mills, which had once manufactured bobbins—employing eight of the locals—chewing their fingers—were shuttered. In lieu of elegant little signs directing you toward the ivy-covered Inn on Crotched Mountain or the Horse and Hound, originally built as a farmhouse in 1880, there were roadside CANTINES with tarpaper roofs, proclaimed by a stake banged into the dirt, OPEN/OUVERT, and offering Hygrade hotdogs and limp greasy
pommes frites
made of frozen potatoes. There were no impeccably appointed watering holes, where the aging bartender, once Clean for Gene, would offer you a copy of
Mother Jones
with your drink. However, you could pull in at “Mad Dog” Vachon's and knock back a Molson, maybe stumbling on a three-week-old copy of '
Allo Police
. Or the Venus di Milo, where scantily clad pulpy waitresses out of Chicoutimi or Sept-Iles stripped and then sank to a bare stage to simulate masturbation, protected against splinters by a filthy flannel sheet.

Before turning off on the old logger's track to his cabin in the woods on the other side of Mansonville, Moses stopped at The Caboose, where he found Strawberry exactly as he had left him a month ago, brooding over a quart of Molson.

“It's good to see you, Straw.”

“That's not what my wife said the last time I seen her. She said would I be wanting some of the same when I'm eighty. Not from you I ain't is what I told her. Besides I'm thinking of divorcing her for being so unsanitary. Every time I want to pee in the sink it's fill of dirty dishes.” He guffawed and slapped his knee. “You look like I feel.”

“Have you been taking care of my cabin?”

“You only just got here, Mister Man, and you're starting to put the pressure on. Nobody's gonna break into your place because they
know you got nothing there but all those damn books and maps and empty bottles and salmon flies that ain't no good here. Whatever you're drinking will be good enough for me.”

“I'm not.”

“Again?” Strawberry asked, amused.

If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasn't to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and thousands of bars like it that knit the country together from Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, to the far side of Vancouver Island. Signs over the ancient cash register reading NO CREDIT or TIP-PING ISN'T A CITY IN CHINA. A jar of rubbery pickled eggs floating in a murky brine, bags of Humpty Dumpty potato chips hanging on a spike. A moose head or a buck's antlers mounted on the wall, the tractor caps hanging from it advertising GULF or JOHN DEERE or O'KEEFE ALE. The rip in the felt of the pool table mended with black tape. Toilet doors labelled BRAVES and SQUAWS or POINTERS and SETTERS. A Hi-Lo Double-Up JOKER POKER machine in one corner, a juke box in another, and the greasy sign over the kitchen door behind the bar reading EMPLOYES ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.

The Caboose had a notice board.

SURPRISE DART COMPITITION

FRIDAY NIGHT

TROPHY'S

The board listed a cottage for sale on Trouser Lake, last month's Slo-Ball League schedule and a HONDA MOTORCYCLE LIKE BRAN NEW FOR SALE.

The Caboose was a clapboard box mounted on cinder blocks, more flies inside than out. Tractors and dump trucks and pickups began to bounce into the parking lot around five
P.M.
, uniformly rust-eaten, dented badly here, taped together there, often an old coat hanger twisted to hold a rattling or leaky muffler in place. Once the men settled in they began to mull over the day's events. Who had been found out by the welfare office and who was the latest to be
caught putting it to Sneaker's wife, Suzy, and was it Hi-Test again who was stealing those big outboards on the lake. Whether the new barmaid at Chez Bobby was worth the cost of a dinner first or if she was only trying it on because she had graduated from high school in Ontario, she said. Where you could get the best deal across the border on used tires for a grader and at the bottom of which hill were the fucken provincial police lying in wait right now.

The lot outside The Caboose, punctured with potholes, overlooked a lush meadow lined with cedars. There were picnic tables out there as well as an enormous barbecue, the engine a salvage job done on an abandoned four-stroke lawn mower. Sundays in summer the truculent and hungover Rabbit would turn up at seven
A.M.
to begin roasting a pig or a couple of shoulders of beef for the community dinner, all you could eat for five bucks, proceeds to The Old Folks Home in Rock Island. The Rabbit was once dismissed for pissing in the fire. “People was looking and it puts them off their feed.” He was fired again for falling asleep in the grass after guzzling his umpteenth Molson and failing to notice that the spit hadn't been revolving properly for more than an hour. Then he beat up an inspector from the
Commission de la Langue Française
outside The Thirsty Boot on the 243. According to reports the inspector had ordered The Thirsty Boot to take down their sign and replace it with a French one. “Sure thing,” the Rabbit had said, kneeing the inspector in the groin, just to cut him down to his own height before laying into him. “We're gonna put up a pepper sign all right. Only it's gonna read ‘De Tirsty Boot'.” After that he could do no wrong.

Behind The Caboose there was a gravel pit and a fished-out pond and beyond that the mountains that had been lumbered twice too often, the cherry and ash and butternut long gone. Bunk, who also trapped during the winter, had a shack somewhere up there. He took the odd fisher, some fox and racoons and beaver. The deer were everywhere.

Moses had stopped at The Caboose in the first place by accident. Late one afternoon six years earlier, having spent two days sifting through historical society files in Sherbrooke, searching for references to Brother Ephraim, he went out for a drive and got lost in the
back roads. Desperate for a drink, he pulled in at The Caboose and considered not getting out of his Toyota because two men, Strawberry and Bunk, were fighting in the parking lot. Then he grasped that they were both so blind drunk that none of their punches were landing. Finally Strawberry reached back and put all he had into a roundhouse, sliding, collapsing in a mud puddle, and just lying there. A gleeful Bunk reeled over to his pickup, climbed in, the piglets in the back squealing as he gunned his motor, aiming himself at the prone Strawberry.

“Hey,” Moses yelled, leaping out of his car, “what in the hell are you trying to do?”

“Run the fucker over.”

“He'll bite a hole in your tires.”

Bunk pondered. He scratched his jaw. “Good thinking,” he said, reversing into a cedar, jolting the protesting piglets, then charging forward, swerving into the 243.

Moses helped Strawberry to his feet and led him back into The Caboose.

“Whatever you're drinking will be good enough for me, Mister Man.”

Strawberry, blue-eyed, tall and stringy, all jutting angles, was missing two fingers, a souvenir of his days in the bobbin mill, and had no upper teeth. Moses drank with him and the others until two
A.M.
Then Strawberry, insisting that Moses was now too drunk to drive, settled him into his Ford pickup and took him to his house on the hill to spend the night on the sofa. No sooner had they staggered inside than Strawberry dug out his shotgun, rolled back out on to his rotting porch and fired a couple of rounds into the air.

“What are you shooting at?” Moses asked, startled.

“If I lived in some big-shot apartment building in the city like you probably do, Mister Man, all I'd have to do is drop my boots on the floor and the neighbours would know I was home safe. Here I fire my shotgun so's they know I'm back and they don't need to worry no more. I may be stupid, but I ain't crazy.”

The next morning Strawberry's wife made them bacon and eggs and then they moved on to Chez Bobby, having agreed to have just
one for the ditch before Moses proceeded to Montreal. Three hours passed before Strawberry suddenly leaped to his feet. “Shit,” he said, “we got to get to Cowansville.”

Strawberry, charged with drunken driving a month earlier, was due to appear in court that afternoon. First, however, he took Moses to The Snakepit, a bar around the corner from the courthouse, where Bunk, Sneaker, Rabbit, Legion Hall, and some of the others were already waiting. By the time Strawberry's supporters, Moses still among them, drifted into the courtroom, they were quarrelsome drunk. They waved and whistled and hollered imprecations at the first sight of Strawberry standing there, grinning.

“Order, order in the court,” the judge called out.

“I'll have a hamburger,” Strawberry said.

“I could give you ninety days for that.”

“That's nothing.”