Vandal Love (16 page)

She wanted to ask about Bart’s past, but it seemed unfair. Besides, what was there to know. The alcoholism couldn’t be new. She could guess other things from Bart’s stories, or from Evelyn’s hesitation and surprise.

Thank you, she said.

It’s no problem. We’ll be in touch, okay?

All right.

Good night.

She sat in the car. She felt what she was, a huge woman, pregnant, maybe even pathetic in their eyes.

On the drive through town she passed a shop with TVs in the windows, large images that she immediately recognized as New York’s streets at Christmastime. She felt that the world on the screens in no way belonged to hers.

Bart’s truck was there when she got back. Just inside she smelled him. The floors creaked in the bedroom. He came into the doorway, positioned so that the light from the kitchen showed the stubble on his jaw. Briefly she paused, lost in the moment, the gassy odour a familiar ghost.

He shifted closer. Where’ve you been?

She turned on the light. She tried to hold herself
steady and look at him. Bloodshot veins banded his eyes. Did you kill Levon? she asked.

He rocked slightly and turned away. It was an accident, he said. He put his forehead against the wall. He appeared odd, large and unshaven and holding his face to the wall like a punished boy.

I went to see your grandmother, she told him, wishing he’d lied, that she’d never asked.

Slowly he straightened. The reek of alcohol was overwhelming, and she noticed that he held a bottle. She couldn’t make out the label, and if she hadn’t been trying, she wouldn’t have realized he was going to throw it. She screamed involuntarily.

You can’t do that, he said. You can’t.

From the way he stepped forward and back she understood he was forcing himself not to approach. She moved to the door. He swung and broke a chair effortlessly against the wall. She thought of words that might have power or meaning. But seeing how easily everything came apart, she knew that all they could try was hopeless, and she fled.

By New Year’s she was in a hotel in Québec. She stayed in one after another, the humming resonance of travel inside her even as she slept. The northern sky seemed wider. Sunset came too soon, some evenings yellow and vast, others a faint red mist. Often she couldn’t recall if she’d showered or eaten. The highway was streaked with mud and salt, and she followed it.

It was strange she’d never been here before. She’d read so many books, had collected old photographic studies of the regions, quiet terrains that she searched for hints. She cast Jude’s stories against the landscape, but there was nothing of the cartoon past, its blurbs and silences. He hadn’t belonged to the recognizable currents of history the way Bart’s family had, even if Bart had lied about what remained. Jude had come too late. His death hadn’t left a single clue.

Was the desire to return natural, like that of a creature spawning? How long before it ceased to matter? She’d tried to make sense of what Jude had sought. Was it odd that a place she’d never known lived on within her?

She stopped at lighthouses and cathedrals. Repeatedly she was mistaken for
une parisienne
, for the accent she’d relearned in university. She was a foreigner here. Like all the others, she parked on the sides of roads and walked to outlooks where vistas offered what they could: a landscape with a few souvenir shops, or evening’s postcard on the sea.

For two weeks she stayed on the coast of Gaspésie. She rarely ate. She woke early, preferring this light. She thought of Virginia, the way the house had given her the space to dream and become something new.

At the nearby town she bought boots. The mountains, without leaves, showed the deep lines of their creation. Walking a frozen road she came to a place where trees had been felled and split, the tang of wood still in the air. Once Jude had sat and held his puckered hand, thinking himself unseen, in the barn loft for hours. Hidden, she’d
matched his stillness until after dark, calming what she felt in her breath for him.

Her body ached. Her guts cramped. Her feet were swollen, and veins bulged in her legs. Though the cold made her return to the hotel, she felt she could walk off in such a way that the world would forgive her.

Mid-January a strange warm front arrived, announced on the radio. The sky seemed to unfurl, blue upon blue. Sunlight was on everything, itching in her sinuses. People stood outside, not talking, jackets shaken by gulf wind. Even in Virginia this weather would be odd for January: half a day of crystalline rain, hot winds, snow melting from grey outcroppings. Ice floes crowded into the gulf. What was Bart feeling now? It seemed a lifetime ago that they’d lain together, talking about their mothers. What had happened to that part of them?

She decided to leave. She packed. Indian teenagers were out hitchhiking in jeans and heavy-metal T-shirts.

That afternoon she found a stretch of empty beach strewn with boulders. She took Jude’s ashes from the back of the car. The tide was coming in, washing against raw coastal mud. Slanted isles jutted from the sea, grown with grass and forest and looking, in the heaving water, like pieces sheared from hillsides, like parts of the world cut off and set afloat. There was no ritual she knew, no means of returning him to a place he’d left and which had kept no trace. Finally she undressed, naked, one hand on her stretched, aching belly. She wanted to be
there completely. Her breath came shallowly. She threw ashes against the wind. Shattered, dry bits of bone fell away, and fine powder blew back onto her face. She touched her lips, the scar on her nose. She recalled the book on cannibals she’d read as a girl, and she moved her dusty fingers onto her tongue. They tasted of ash, faintly acrid. That was all, and she sat and held her belly. Regretting a last gesture, she thought of her mother, of what other ceremony there might be. She’d assumed her dead, had never considered, even when she’d hired the investigator, that it might be otherwise. She lacked the strength to dream her life over again.

In brisk sunlight she dressed, startled movement within her, pain. Touching grey hands to the boulders, she stumbled back. That night she parked on a stretch of shore, wind rocking the car, heat in the vents. She turned off the lights. She woke to moonlight on disturbed waters, a sense that this could be anywhere, any country but her own.

In Montréal she took a room. She left the Honda in a car park. She walked the blustery city: riotous karaoke, Irish pubs, Japanese kids in arcades, old Jews playing chess in a dingy café. Her love of the past had no place here, sleek cars and club music, boutiques of exotic knickknacks,
Depart en Mer
and
Dix Milles Villages
. Even the day before, Québec, the Plains of Abraham, the old town and picturesque inns—it had all been meaningless. She couldn’t go more than a few minutes without having to
sit. She wanted sleep. People wavered like old ghosted TV tubes. They stared. She could see herself towering over them.

Where a street angled up against a city vista, a black woman stood in sunlight, holding a baby. Isa was confused, tired. She had a sense of loss. It took a moment, standing there, to realize how many things it might be.

Each morning she touched the closed venetians. The sun shone against them, and they shimmered like water.

Hunger woke her. She tried to hear her story told carefully by people she didn’t know. She stood at the mirror without her shirt and touched her breasts, her abdomen. She’d once read that the Spartans had treated childbearing as sacred as soldiery. All in the days before overpopulation.

She would gladly accept Miguel’s vision of the future now. The past, her suffering even, were obsolete. She could easily follow philosophy to that point. A place of letting go.

The snow had begun again, sweeping against skyscrapers, silencing the city, wet streets turned to ice. The radio was calling for a cold front, clear arctic skies. As low as minus forty. The weatherman warned people not to go out longer than necessary.

She slept constantly, it seemed, and never more than an hour at a time, pain frequent. She woke not knowing where she was. She wanted familiarity. She got up well before dawn. She dressed and went out and warmed the
car. She cleaned the snow off. In the city’s glow, the air felt sucked up away from the earth as if the atmosphere had expanded. Even as she drove the cold radiated through the windows, the heat sapped from inside, the car’s suspension stiff and jerky. During the hour to the border she was drowsy, her thoughts distracted, and in the bathroom there she washed her face and throat. On the empty interstates south, the stars shone a path between the trees. Briefly, she had a sense of grief, for all that had been lost or stolen, for the family she could no longer let herself imagine. Was she dreaming or remembering Virginia now, white fields, the way moonlight dissolved against the humid dark? Or those first evenings on Jude’s shoulders, endless galleries of sky and the lit city, the dark faces gazing up, sharing her wonder? The cold felt as if inside her. She wanted to sleep. She dreamed it was dawn. The grey sun dropped from a horizon of clouds. She closed her eyes and waited to be lifted from stillness.

Could he stop again? What reason was there to make this effort now?

He drank constantly. He hadn’t showered or shaved in weeks. People jerked their heads when he passed, and the men on his crew commented among themselves. He knew how easy rage would be. When he tried to make sense of things, it seemed that only his fear of his own anger held him in place.

The last time he’d stopped had been at a halfway house in Louisiana, his possessions a beat-up electric
guitar and amplifier, and a grocery bag of books. Later, the director found him work and lodging on an old farm that was being converted to a nursery. There, dogwood and pawpaw and magnolia bloomed in the fields, each shift of wind fragrant, and he hadn’t minded his daily chores. Though his rages still came, sudden and inexplicable and making him want to drink, instead he dug, sweated, heaved at the earth. His pores released an animal smell that was neither bad nor good but which he hated.

One evening, as mist gathered in the trees, he walked an overgrown farm road into the woods. He’d finished work but was restless, and in the fading light he followed weedy ruts to where he’d been told there was a cypress swamp. Bleached trunks rose from land as irregular as a crumpled egg carton, exposed clay red, the water covered with leaves and pollen and seed fluff. Grass had turned beaver dams into bridges of spongy earth. The sky above the blasted trees seemed faint and far. The silence was voracious unless the wind set up, though oddly the silence remained. He stood in the presence of the marsh, the thick rank settling air, and breathed.

Sundays were no-work days, and late the next afternoon he loaded his guitar and amplifier and a gas-run generator into the farm truck and drove back. On the bank of the swamp he set up to play, then worked into the songs he’d loved best as a teenager,
Iron Man
, Metallica’s
Fade to Black
. Though he’d seen himself many ways, often as characters in books, poets or writers or explorers, music had been the only thing he’d given
any effort. There had been a time when he’d memorized the fretwork of songs and practised them for hours. He tried to find satisfaction in the crunching rhythms, the dull chop of palm-muted power chords. He sang, his voice grating. He wanted the noise to be raw, the way he’d first heard it. Sweating against the urgency of spring, he stared at the crowded waters. He lifted his hand to strike the guitar but stopped. A man was standing across the swollen murk, on a hummock, dressed in black and holding a wide-brimmed hat.

Just a minute, son, the man said and began to make his way over the marshy earth. Don’t leave, he called, all the while lifting his knees like a heron, stepping for solid ground.

Close, he looked Bart over, up and down a few times as if just now perceiving the sheer size and perhaps the potential danger.

My boy, he said, what a gift! The Lord has blessed you with the voice of a shepherd. The voice, he added, as if shepherds were not known for hollering, of a leader.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I thought I heard cries of pain. I myself came here to work on my preaching, but I can tell you have other reasons and I have heard those records played backwards. But the Lord wouldn’t have brought you if He didn’t intend you saved. I can see you have it in you.

He paused, his face tense, hawkish, gaunt, the skin like frost beneath the thinning hair. I can see you’ve been seeking. I can see you have the power of the Lord God in you and you don’t know how to express it.

Reverend Diamondstone, he introduced himself—said it was a self-invented name and that he’d been told, street preaching in New York, that it was a Jewish name, but hadn’t believed it. He will tell you anything to turn you away. He said,
he
will, with special significance, lowering his voice as if this
he
was not only lowercase but squiggly and smudged. It was not the He of his Reverend Lord Jesus.

That Sunday, Diamondstone talked until mosquitoes swarmed over the stagnant water and darted at their faces. Bart listened, wasn’t asked but rhetorically. Diamondstone told of days street preaching, businessmen on Wall Street who fell to their knees and wept and gave him donations of a thousand dollars to continue his mission. The Ecclesiastical Manger of the Holy Tribunal, he said. I suppose that’s a good name, but any will do, just so people don’t think I’m another Baptist. I am a Baptist, though. He told Bart he’d been homeless, living in a ditch in West Texas, then had a visitation of the Lord, the terrifying angel Michael who’d cast down the fearful legions with the strength of the Lord’s right hand, and he, Diamondstone, had started preaching right there in the ditch—converted, he said, a lady walking home with her groceries.

Diamondstone took a long breath that he balanced in his chest. Yes, he said, Jesus found me. Jesus found me in a ditch in Texas and decided I’d done my suffering. He gave me a dream and turned all of my evil to good. But, son, listen now. Do you know why I suffered so much?