Object of Your Love Read online

  “Yes,” I say without conviction. I head off. On the edge of the community, I snap on my skis and glide over dry, powdery snow into the hills. I try to picture Morgan arriving in the community as a young woman, ten years ago, bringing with her a diploma in fashion design and a ruthless determination. I reflect that the North seems to attract these hard-edge types like a lodestone, metal to metal, people fleeing the ghosts and failures of their past, running from themselves as they cross the treeline and head toward the Arctic Circle, brash, fearing nothing but their own emptiness. I wonder if Morgan thought when she arrived here that, at thirty, she’d be bearing her seventh child. She once told me she’d married Manasie because he was harder, stronger than she. “He was a leader,” she said, “and I’d got tired of leading.”

  In the middle of the afternoon, I am skiing on a ridge a few kilometres from the settlement. I pause, wanting to appreciate the panorama, the impressive sweep of the land, the pearly moisture frozen like crystals in the air. I have not seen a soul all afternoon but now, into my vision, slide two figures, also on skis, cutting across a slope a hundred feet below me. It is Egan and Ruth. Without noticing me, they too stop, draw something from their backpacks, perhaps thermoses of tea, exchange a few words, store away their thermoses, pick up their poles. I watch them move away. Soon Egan is skiing well ahead of Ruth, it is a struggle for her to keep up. She moves slowly, without energy or zeal. I have heard that Egan has been away a lot lately. He must fly to Toronto, New York, San Francisco to promote the community’s art, leaving Ruth here.

  I have passed Egan’s house at night, seen a single light burning in a single room and wondered what Ruth does with her time. I have heard she is an accomplished knitter. She makes me think of the legend of the Eagle’s Bride: a young Inuit woman picked up by an eagle and flown to a high sea cliff, where she is imprisoned in a nest and must bear the eagle’s human-bird children. The girl asks the eagle to bring her a whole young caribou so that, when he is out hunting, she can braid the caribou sinew into a long line for her escape. I think of Ruth alone at night knitting a strong wool rope that stretches through all the rooms and doorways of Egan’s house, seeking deliverance. Hasn’t she merely, I think, exchanged one kind of suffocation for another: urban skyscrapers for these encroaching hills? Now the figures of Egan and Ruth disappear behind a ridge. I look around at the landscape and marvel at the power of such vastness to crush one.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, I come home for lunch and find a pair of hiking boots on my landing. Cautiously, I enter the apartment and see Morgan lying on my sofa. She turns, her face flushed, and looks at me.

  “I wasn’t feeling well,” she says. “I came here. I’m sorry. I couldn’t think of any other place. I remembered there was an extra key to your apartment in Egan’s desk drawer. I had nowhere else to go.” Her legs are pressed up against her belly. I touch her forehead.

  “You’re burning up,” I say.

  She tells me that several days ago she aborted her baby using a knitting needle. She told no one. The abortion itself went well but now some kind of infection seems to have set in. She is weak and inert with pain.

  “I can’t go home,” she tells me. “Manasie will suspect something. What should I do?”

  I sit down at the kitchen table. “You need to see the nurse,” I say.

  “I can’t go to the clinic,” she says firmly. “They’ll find out what I’ve done. Everyone will know. Manasie will be disgraced. He’ll want to get rid of me. He’ll take another wife.”

  “Why haven’t you gone to Ruth for help, instead of me?” I ask, thinking she has a nerve, coming here.

  She pauses, her face full of disappointment. “Ruth has changed,” she says, “since she went south. She’s become distant. I’m not sure where her loyalties lie now. I don’t want to take a chance of things leaking out. Whereas you…” she paused. She was going to say, whereas you have no friends here. “There must be some way you can get medication for me, some roundabout way,” she goes on. “You could go to the clinic and pretend to be sick. Say you have an ear infection. Anything to get ahold of some antibiotics.”

  I say I don’t see how I could do that, I have no fever, no symptoms of anything that could pass for infection. I feel angry that, with all her connections in the community, she’s come to me, an outcast, someone she would not invite to her own home. I’m not willing to lie for her. Nobody here has ever lied to benefit me. I give her some aspirin, cover her with a blanket, put a cold cloth on her forehead.

  “I have to get back to work,” I say. Putting on my coat, I pause in the doorway and try once more. “Let me take you over to the clinic on my way,” I say.

  “I’m in too much pain to walk.”

  “Then let me get them to bring a stretcher over.”

  She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “I’ll just sleep for a few hours and then see how I feel.”

  I am too busy at the store that afternoon to even think about Morgan, but I do book off early and hurry home. The apartment has grown dim and Morgan appears to be asleep. I turn on a light.

  “Morgan?” I say, stepping forward, but she doesn’t stir. The flush is gone from her cheeks. She is in fact grey. I reach out to touch her forehead, find it cold as a soapstone carving, and I know that she is dead. Sitting down on the edge of the couch, I stay there for some time, holding on to her lifeless hand, full of amazement at my own anger that afternoon, at the bitterness that had kept me from helping her. Feeling her fingers, light as twigs in my hand, I begin to shake because I know that I have become someone very different from the young woman who only a year ago first looked out these apartment windows.

  An hour later one of the RCMP officers is sitting with me at my kitchen table taking notes. There will have to be an investigation into Morgan’s death, he tells me. The coroner has been called and will fly in the next day. Now, some men come up from the co-op, wrap Morgan in a blanket and carry her out, struggling with her body down the narrow stairway. Moses is among them. He will not look at me. He acts like he’s never been in the apartment before. Downstairs in the sewing room, Morgan’s employees sit in a circle until well after six o’clock, there being no one there to tell them they can go home.

  After the men are gone, the officer observes my pallor, my trembling hands. Even though the community is officially dry, even though the RCMP meet the weekly flight in the hope of apprehending liquor runners, he says to me, “You might want to have a good stiff drink,” and I think of Morgan and her bottle of whisky. I tell the officer only that Morgan had been feverish and not strong enough to walk home and get into bed. I don’t mention the abortion. Let them do their own digging, I think.

  While the officer questions me, I listen for Egan’s footsteps on the stair, wait to see his broad shoulders darkening the door. Given that he is justice of the peace, given Morgan’s old friendship with Ruth, one might naturally expect him to take an interest. Also, I think, it would be a nice gesture for him to show me a little support, after what I’ve been through, but he does not come. Then the officer leaves and I am alone. Only now do I pour myself a drink. I have my pride, after all. I sit at the table, steadying my hands on the glass of scotch, disturbed, shocked not by Morgan’s death but by my inability to be moved by it. I find I cannot feel sorrow or any kind of emotion for her and I realize that something within me too is dead, that it perished months ago.

  As it turns out, Morgan died not of a botched abortion but of a burst appendix. The coroner reports that it had been ruptured for several hours, that the poisoning was well advanced by the time Morgan reached my apartment at noon. She would not have recovered in the clinic.

  I attend her funeral, sitting in the back pew of the little white church. People do not want to look in my direction. They have no secret smiles left to give me. They wonder, I am sure, why Morgan had to die in my apartment, rather than in the clinic or at home, why I left her to die alone. They understand, it would seem, about the appendiciti
s, but they see me as some kind of accomplice in her death, an agent of bad luck. After the service is over, people stand around outside in the icy wind, watching as her coffin is carried to a shed behind the church, where it will be locked up until summer and the earth can be dug.

  Seeing Moses on the edge of the crowd, I move to his side. In the three days since Morgan’s death, I have not heard from him. “Come up tonight after work,” I say to him quietly. “Please. I need you.”

  He shakes his head and looks away. “I cannot,” he says. “It is not good. It is bad luck to lie there now.” He looks small and cold in his parka, out here in the wind. I smile sadly at him, for I do not believe that he is superstitious. He is rejecting me because I have become too great a liability.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, the Hudson’s Bay store manager stops me on my way out to lunch and asks me to drop off a package for him at the airstrip. There is to be an unscheduled flight that afternoon at three o’clock and he wants the parcel to go with it. I carry it through town. It is mid-May and still there are no signs of spring here. The skies are dark and snow falls heavily, large wet flakes that coat your clothes. I wonder how long it will be before there is a thaw and Morgan can be properly buried. I wonder if she sensed, while she lay on my sofa, that she was dying, if she embraced the opportunity as the best way out, her only escape from Manasie, from the community.

  I walk up the hill toward the airstrip. On my way past the cooperative, I pause, because I see Ruth sitting in the brightly lit archives building. Every morning she comes down from the house to catalogue drawings. This has been her job for at least a decade. During her brief absence in Toronto, Egan locked the door of the archives. No one was allowed to go in there. Now Ruth sits alone, day after day, at a large table, making her little pencil notations on the drawings, photographing them, storing them in expensive, airless, dust-free solander boxes, between sheets of acid-free tissue. There are tens of thousands of these drawings, stacks and stacks of them, dry and brittle and sometimes disintegrating, and more of them acquired every day. There is enough work there to last several lifetimes. Ruth can sit in this bright room until she is an old and addled woman and she will never be finished her work. The Eagle’s Bride toiling away at her lonely task.

  Observing her there, so fragile and solitary, the crude overhead light falling harshly on her lustreless hair, I remember her words to me that day on the road. You are not important to me. You are not a threat. This is something you should know. For the first time, I wonder: Was there a hidden message there? A veiled kindness? Was she, I speculate, trying to help, rather than intimidate me? Was she saying that, if my intent in staying in the community was to punish her, it was only myself I would end up destroying? This is something you should know. While I had thought Egan was the strong one, I see now that it was always Ruth who was the pillar, the force, the magnet toward which Egan would soon be winging his way home, and without which he could never have survived this arctic hinterland. She is his marker, as indigenous to him as the stone inukshuks constructed out on the land by the Inuit to guide them through a featureless landscape.

  Up on the airstrip, I enter the small, overheated office and push the package across the counter to the clerk. As I walk away, an idea occurs to me. “Is there room for passengers on the unscheduled flight?” I ask, turning back to the clerk. He consults a list on the counter, tells me they can probably fit me on.

  At three o’clock I am seated in a Twin Otter, its sole passenger, with my back pressed against a wall of cargo. The flight will drop off freight in three other Baffin Island communities before it turns south again toward Timmins. From there I will catch a plane to Toronto. At my knee rests a single suitcase, in which I have packed a few clothes, leaving behind everything I acquired here in the past year. The throb of the engines fills my ears as the plane taxis down the short runway and takes off. I feel my spirits lifting unexpectedly with it, climbing. We bank, circle, pass above the community. I look out the window, down at the collection of tiny houses scattered across the terrain. From this height, they seem less a community than a random collection of vessels dangerously adrift in a white sea. Once again the plane tilts and, just before the settlement disappears from view, Ruth’s greenhouse catches the sun’s rays, flashing up at me, a brilliant and transitory fire in the cold snow, blinking its isolated message.

  A RIVER LANDSCAPE

  FOR A LONG TIME, the only days the twins could remember were the good ones, when they came home after school to the crooked wooden house with its red front door and found all the lights on and fresh air blowing in through the back windows, which opened onto the river. They lived in a tiny, self-contained neighbourhood, a dozen or so streets cut off from the rest of the city by the river on one side and a large official estate on the other. On their own street, the houses, some in stone, some clapboard, all built around 1900, had been professionally renovated, with authentic trim and spindle rails and weathervanes and paint in gentle tones of ash or sulphur or leaf-green. And if their own narrow white house, with its overgrown garden, sagging porch, damaged gable and musty decay seemed shabby next to these, it was because their mother, Hedda, knew that all the beauty in the house was what time had wrought, that age had given it its depth and wisdom and character.

  On those good days, the boys went down the narrow hallway to the back of the house and found Hedda wearing an old work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, sitting in the kitchen at the maple table with her great potter’s hands—dried clay under her fingernails—laced around a mug of coffee, the old arthritic sheepdog, Charles, sleeping at her feet. The light, reflecting off the river, was tangible, miraculous, spiritual, and sometimes the twins thought that Hedda was its source, that everything flowed from her, the sunshine flooding across the scarred floorboards, the warmth of the kitchen, the vast expanse of maple table, the herbs growing on the windowsill, even the air they breathed: all of this originated with her, their lives would have had no texture, they would not have had a world to live in at all if Hedda had not created it for them. It seemed to Angus and Garreth that Hedda had even arranged for the slow grey river to flow behind the house and for a row of ancient willows, their twisted trunks big around as silos, to hang into the water like old women letting down their tangled hair.

  No one else they knew could come home to this smell of fresh clay and oil paints, and their mother waiting always with something new to show them, one of her brilliant, wickedly clever clay scenes of seaside towns or villagescapes. Or, if she’d been out scavenging, found objects: an old wedding dress, a Niagara Falls cushion, a diary written in 1876, yellowed postcards, letters written by strangers, secondhand clothes, in the pockets of which they might discover handwritten notes, lucky rabbits’ feet, coins, photographs, handkerchiefs. It seemed that Hedda brought the whole world into the house and together they would sit down and wonder what kind of persons might have once owned these things. Then their father would come in, and sometimes Hedda’s dealer, Joseph, and though she was a small woman with a long lean face and something vulnerable in her pale grey eyes, they all drew strength from her and knew that none of them would be there at all if it weren’t for Hedda.

  But there comes a time in children’s lives when they must begin to remember, and one April afternoon the boys came through the front door, two twelve-year-olds slender and light of limb and fresh-faced and susceptible. They saw Hedda hurtling down the hall toward them, her eyes crazy. She pushed past and out into the sunny day, where any sane person would be rejoicing at the sight of the crocuses thrusting through the grass and the tender leaves unfolding like tongues on the trees. Out on the driveway, Hedda pounded her head against the roof of the Datsun. Frozen on the porch, the boys watched but could not move toward her because she had become a stranger. Her long curly hair twisted, a wild bush in the wind. Finally, a neighbour ran out of a nearby house, pulled Hedda away from the car, pinned her arms back, gently pressed her down onto the damp earth. Surely there had
been scenes before this, perhaps ones that Dempster had skilfully hidden from their knowledge or somehow smoothed over, but the boys could not remember them. That evening before dinner they watched Dempster pull the covers up over Hedda’s shoulders, they glimpsed through the open bedroom door the welt rising like an eggplant on her forehead.

  “Why did she do it, Dad?” they asked, their faces so knitted with injury and fear that he almost could not answer.

  “Sometimes … sometimes your mother is overcome by … by powerful emotions she can’t control. Don’t worry about her. She’s going to be all right. We’re all going to be all right.”

  And so began the twins’ acquaintance with Hedda’s illness.

  The days they dreaded—and this was often during the driving rains of fall—were when they came home and found the house dark after school and the mail still uncollected in the wicker basket hanging on the porch post. They listened anxiously in the front hall, holding their breath, their wet sneakers leaking onto the wide floorboards. Behind them the door stood open and a cold rain bounced off the street pavement. They saw shards of clay littering the hall, the cellar stairs. In the glass room off the kitchen they found Charles hiding in the fluff behind the old threadbare sofa Hedda had bought at the Salvation Army depot.

  “Aw, shit, not again!” Garreth, now a tall, dark, lean-jawed teenager, spat out. He threw his backpack down on the floor. Angus, who in contrast was short, with his father’s sandy colouring and soft teddy-bear shape, said, “We better check on her.”

  “Be my guest,” said Garreth with disgust, heading for the kitchen. “I’m getting something to eat.” He was the older of the twins (older by about ten minutes) and the most impatient. As a baby, he’d screamed with colic until Hedda had wanted to drown him in the river. Angus, on the other hand, had been a docile infant, easy to please. Hedda’s instinct, as a young mother of twins, had always been to pick up Angus first. Garreth sensed, even now, that she preferred Angus’s company.