if he is awake early enough the boy sees the men walk past the farmhouse down first lake road. then he stands at the bedroom window and watches: he can see two or three lanterns between the soft maple and the walnut tree. he hears their boots on gravel. thirty loggers, wrapped up dark, carrying axes and small packages of food which hang from their belts. the boy walks downstairs and moves to a window in the kitchen where he can look down the driveway. they move from right to left. already they seem exhausted, before the energy of the sun. sometimes, he knows, this collection of strangers will meet the cows being brought in from a pasture barn for milking and there will be a hushed politeness as they stand to the side of the road holding up the lanterns (one step back and they will be in a knee-high snowdrift), to let the cows lazily pass them on the narrow road. sometimes the men put their hands on the warm flanks of these animals and receive their heat as they pass. they put their thin-gloved hands on these black and white creatures, who are barely discernible in the last of the night's darkness. they must do this gently, without any sense of attack or right. they do not own this land as the owner of the cows does. the holsteins pass the silent gauntlet of men. the farmer who follows the cows, nods. he passes this strange community most mornings during the winter months, the companionship a silent comfort to him in the dark of five a.m. – for he has been rounding up cattle for over an hour to take them to the milking barns.

the boy who witnesses this procession, and who even dreams about it, has also watched the men working a mile away in the grey trees. he has heard their barks, heard their axes banging into the cold wood as if into metal, has seen a fire beside the creek where water is molecular and grey under the thin ice. the sweat moves between their hard bodies and the cold clothes. some die of pneumonia or from the sulphur in their lungs from the mills they work in during other seasons. they sleep in the shacks behind the bellrock hotel and have little connection with the town. neither the boy nor his father has ever been into those dark rooms, into a warmth which is the odour of men. a raw table, four bunks, a window the size of a torso. these are built each december and dismantled the following spring. no one in the town of bellrock really knows where the men have come from. it takes someone else, much later, to tell the boy that. the only connection the loggers have with the town is when they emerge to skate along the line of river, on homemade skates, the blades made of old knives. for the boy the end of winter means a blue river, means the disappearance of these men. *** he longs for the summer nights, for the moment when he turns out the lights, turns out even the small cream funnel in the hall near the room where his father sleeps. then the house is in darkness except for the bright light in the kitchen. he sits down at the long table and looks into his school geography book with the maps of the world, the white sweep of currents, testing the names to himself, mouthing out the exotic. caspian. nepal. durango. he closes the book and brushes it with his palms, feeling the texture of the pebbled cover and its coloured dyes which create a map of canada. later, he walks through the dark living room, his hand stretched out in front of him, and returns the book to a shelf. he stands in darkness, rubbing his arms to bring energy back into his body. he is forcing himself to stay awake, take his time. it is still hot and he is naked to the waist. he walks back into the bright kitchen and moves from window to window to search out the moths pinioned against the screens, clinging to brightness. from across the fields they will have seen this one lighted room and travelled towards it. a summer night's inquiry. bugs, plant hoppers, grasshoppers, rust-dark moths. patrick gazes on these things which have navigated the warm air above the surface of the earth and attached themselves to the mesh with a muted thunk. he'd heard them as he read, his senses tuned to such noises. years later at the riverdale library he will learn how the shining leaf-chafers destroy shrubbery, how the flower beetles feed on the juice of decaying wood or young corn. there will suddenly be order and shape to these nights. having given them fictional names, he will learn their formal titles as if perusing the guest list for a ball – the spur-throated grasshopper! the archbishop of canterbury! even the real names are beautiful. amber-winged skimmer. bush cricket. throughout the summer he records their visits and sketches the repeaters. is it the same creature? he crayons the orange wings of the geometer into his notebook, the lunar moth, the soft brown – as if rabbit fur – of the tussock moth. he will not open the screen and capture their pollened bodies. he did this once and the terrified thrash of the moth –a brown-pink creature who released coloured dust on his fingers – scared them both. up close they are prehistoric. the insect jaws munch. are they eating something minute or is it subliminal – the way his father chews his tongue when in the fields. the kitchen light radiates through their porous wings; even those that are squat, like the peach-green aphid, appear to, be constructed of powder. patrick pulls a double-ocarina from his pocket. outside he will not waken his father, the noise will simply drift up into the arms of soft maple. perhaps he can haunt these creatures. perhaps they are not mute at all, it is just a lack of range in his hearing. (when he was nine his father discovered him lying on the ground, his ear against the hard shell of cow shit inside which he could hear several bugs flapping and knocking.) he knows the robust calls from the small bodies of cicadas, but he wants conversation – the language of damsel flies who need something to translate their breath the way he uses the ocarina to give himself a voice, something to leap with over the wall of this place. do they return nightly to show him something? or does he haunt them? in the way he steps from the dark house and at the doorway of the glowing kitchen says to the empty fields, i am here. come and visit me. he was born into a region which did not appear on a map until 1910, though his family had worked there for twenty years and the land had been homesteaded since 1816. in the school atlas the place is pale green and nameless. the river slips out of an unnamed lake and is a simple blue line until it becomes the napanee twenty-five miles to the south, and, only because of logging, will eventually be called depot creek. "deep eau." his father works for two or three farms, cutting wood, haying, herding cattle. the cows cross the river twice a day – in the morning they wander to the land south of the creek and in the afternoon they are rounded. up for milking. in winter the animals are taken down the road to a pasture barn, though once a cow headed towards the river longing for back pasture. they do not miss it for two hours and then his father guesses where it has gone. he runs towards the river yelling to the boy patrick to follow with the field horses. patrick is bareback on a horse leading the other by the rope, urging them on through the deep snow. he sees his father through the bare trees as he rides down the slope towards the swimming hole. in mid-river, half-submerged in the ice, is the neighbouring farmer's holstein. there is no colour. the dry stalks of dead mulleins, grey trees, and the swamp now clean and white. his father with a rope around his shoulders creeps on his hands and knees across the ice towards the black and white shape. the cow heaves, splitting more ice, and cold water seeps up. hazen lewis pauses, calming the animal, then creeps on. he must get the rope under the body twice. patrick moves forward slowly till he kneels on the other side of the cow. his father puts his left hand on the neck of the animal and plunges his right arm into the freezing water as low as he can go beneath the body. on the other side patrick puts an arm in and waves it back and forth trying to come in contact with the rope. they cannot reach each other. patrick lies on the ice so his arm and shoulder can go deeper, his wrist already starting to numb, and he thinks that soon he will not be able to feel the rope even if it brushes against him.

the cow shifts and water soaks into the boy's coat, through to his chest. his father pulls back and the two of them kneel on either side of the cow and swing their wet arms, beating them against their chests. they don't speak. they must work as quickly as possible. his father puts his ungloved hand against the cow's ear to collect the animal's heat. he lies down sideways on the ice and plunges his arm down again, the water inches from his face. patrick, in a mirror image, swirls his hand underwater but again there is nothing to touch. "i'm going under now. you've got to get it fast," his father says, and patrick sees his father's trunk twitch and his head go into the icy water. patrick's hand clutches his father's other arm on top of the cow, holding it tightly. then patrick puts his head into the water and reaches out. he touches his father's wrist under the cow. he dares not let go and moves his hand carefully until he grips the thick braided rope. he pulls at it but it won't move. he realizes his father in going down deeper has somehow got his body over the rope, that he's lying on it. patrick will not let go, though he is running out of air. his father gasps out of the water, lies on his back on the ice, and breathes hard past the ache in his eyes, then is suddenly aware of what he is lying on and rolls away, freeing the rope. patrick pulls, using his foot now to jerk himself up out of the water, and he slithers over the ice away from the cow. he sits up and sees his father and puts his arms up in a victory gesture. his father is frantically trying to get water out of his ears and off his eyes before it freezes in the air and patrick uses his dry sleeve and does the same, shrinking his hand back into the jacket, prodding the cloth into his ears. he can feel the ice on his chin and neck already forming but he doesn't worry about that. his father scuttles back to shore and returns with a second rope. this one he attaches to the first rope, and patrick hauls it towards himself under the cow, so both ropes are now circled around the animal. patrick looks up – at the grey rock of the swimming hole, the oak towering over the dirty brush that spikes out of the snow. there is a clear blue sky. the boy feels as if he has not seen these things in years. till this moment there was just his father, the black-and-white shape of the cow, and that terrible black water which cut into his eyes when he opened them down there. his father attaches the ropes to the horses. the face of the half-submerged cow, a giant eye lolling, seems unconcerned. patrick expects it to start chewing in complete boredom. he lifts its lip and puts his cold fingers against the gums to steal heat. then he crawls to the bank. holding each of the horses by the halter he and his father yell encouragement to them. the horses do not even hesitate at the weight they are pulling. from the bank he sees the cow's tongue slide out, its complacent look for the first time replaced by concern as it is dragged towards the shoreline, breaking ice as it cuts a path. about ten feet from the bank where the ice is thicker the body tightens against the ropes. the horses stop. he and his father switch them, and they break into a trot. then the whole cow magically emerges out of the ice and is dragged on its side, its four legs straight and hard in the air, dragged uncompromisingly onto the shore over the brown mulleins. they let the horses go. he and his father try to untie the ropes on the cow but it is too difficult and his father brings out a knife and cuts the ropes away. the animal lies there snorting its steam into the cold air, then stumbles up and stands watching them. more than anything patrick is surprised at his father who is obsessed with not wasting things. he has lectured the boy several times on saving rope. always unknot. never cut!

bringing out his knife and slicing the rope to pieces is an outrageous, luxurious act. they begin to run back home, looking behind them to see if the cow is following. the boy gasps, "if she goes into the ice again i'm not doing a thing. " "neither am i, " yells his father, laughing. by the time they reach their back kitchen, it is almost dark and they have pains in their stomachs. in the house hazen lewis lights the naphtha lamp and builds a fire. the boy shivers during dinner and the father tells the boy he can sleep with him. in bed later on, they do not acknowledge each other apart from sharing the warmth under the blanket. his father lies so still patrick doesnt know if he is asleep or awake. the boy looks towards the kitchen and its dying fire. he imagines himself through the winter until he is a white midsummer shadow beside his father. in summer his father drips gasoline onto the caterpillar tents and sets them on fire. flof. the grey cobweb skins collapse into flame. caterpillars drop onto grass, the acrid burn smell is in the roof of the boy's mouth. two of them meticulously search a field in the evening light. patrick points to a nest his father has missed and they walk deeper into the pasture. he is almost asleep. in the darkness another flame ignites then withers into nothing. *** in the drive-shed hazen lewis outlined the boy's body onto the plank walls with green chalk. then he tacked wires back and forth across the outline as if realigning the veins in his son's frame. muscles of cordite and the spine a tributary of the black powder fuse. this is how the boy remembers his father, studying the outline which the boy has just stepped away from as the lit fuse smoulders up and blows out a section of plank where the head had been. hazen lewis was an abashed man. withdrawn from the world around him, uninterested in the habits of civilization outside his own focus. he would step up to his horse and assume it, as if it were a train, as if flesh and blood did not exist. in winter months patrick carried meals into the acreage north of the creek where his father, solitary, cut timber all day, minute in those white halls. and then when patrick was fifteen, his father made the one leap of his life. at some moment, chopping into hemlock, hearing only the axe and its pivoting echo, he must have imagined the trees and permafrost and maple syrup ovens erupting up in one heave, the snow shaken off every branch in the woods around him. he stopped in midafternoon, walked home, unlaced his bear paws, and put away the axe forever. he wrote away for books, travelled into kingston for materials. the explosion he saw in the woods had been an idea as he tugged his axe out of the hemlock. he bought dynamite and blasting caps and fuses, drew diagrams on the walls of the drive-shed, then carried the explosives into the woods. he laid the charges against rock and ice and trees. the detonator cap spat a flame into the cartridge and his eyes watched the snow collapse out of branches from the shudder in the air. whatever was dislodged became a graph showing him the radius of the tremor.

before the spring breakup hazen lewis rode down to the rathbun timber company headquarters. he demonstrated his talent, moving a log into precisely the location he said it would go, exploding a half-ton of shale, and was hired along with the river drivers. he had secured a role for himself in the industry that took place along the depot lakes and the napanee river. when the company closed down some years later he moved over and worked as a dynamiter in the feldspar mine excavations around verona and godfrey, hired by the richardson mines. in all his life the longest speech was the one made to the rathbun staff when he told them what he could do and that as far as he was concerned there were only two sensible jobs in logging – being a dynamiter and being a cook. *** along the chain of depot lakes – from first depot to fifth depot – the loggers arrived in winter and disappeared into shanty camps, walking twenty miles into land they did not know. all february and march at the centre of the lakes the pyramids of logs grew, hauled there by sleds. before daybreak the men were working – through the worst storms, in weather far below zero – and they finished at six. the double-handed crosscut saw brought down the pines. the pulp cutters, bent double, had to saw the stumps just above the ground. this was the worst job. some used the swede saw. it cut spruce at twice the speed of the crosscut, and when they moved to, the next camp they rolled up the narrow blade, making new handles in whatever forest they arrived at. in april, with the melting of the lake ice, the river drives began. this was the easiest and most dangerous work. from bellrock to napanee men were stationed wherever the river narrowed. bridges or split rocks had two or three men always there in case of a jam. if a jammed log did not get fished out in time the weight of others would pile up behind it and the whole length of the river would be padlocked. at this point the river drivers could do nothing and a dispatcher was sent on horseback for the dynamiter. a twenty-foot log suddenly leaping out of the water and side-swiping a man, breaking his chest. hazen lewis and his son rode up to the split rock. the large man walked around the logjam. he drilled in a plug of dynamite and lit the fuse. he got the boy to shout the warning and the logs went up into the air, onto the bank, and the river was free. in difficult cases patrick would remove his clothes and grease himself down with oil from the crankcase of the steam donkey. he dove into the ribbed water and swam among the logs. every half-minute wherever he was he had to raise his hand to assure his father. eventually the boy located the log his father had pointed to. he caught the charge thrown out to him, crimped the blasting cap onto, the fuse with his teeth, and lit the powder. he re-emerged from the water, walked back to the horses and dried himself with the towels from the packsack, like his father not even turning around to watch. a river exploded behind him, the crows leafing up. the drives lasted a month and he watched the men float by, riding the sawlogs with their large poles towards yarker down to napanee where the corralled logs were towed to the mills. he was always beside his father. patrick lazed in a patch of sun by the bridge and they waited.

at noon the cook walked up first lake road with two dairy pails. one pail carried tea, the other contained thick pork sandwiches. the sound of the crows above the food was a signal, and men emerged from various bends in the river. when the meal was over the cook picked up two empty pails and stepped onto a log on the water's edge and floated back downstream to the camp. he stood up straight in mid-river, travelling at only the speed that the river wished. he would float under the bridge without altering his posture, though there was only an inch to spare, nodding to loggers on the bank, disheartened by the ever-present crows. he would step off at the camp at goose island with his shoes perfectly dry. hazen read his pamphlets. he dried the powdered, cordite on a rock. he was sullen even in the company of his son. all his energy was with the fuse travelling at two minutes to the yard under floorboards, around the trunks of trees, and up into someone's pocket. he kept receiving that image in his mind. could he do it? the fuse stitched into the cloth of the trouser leg. the man sleeping perhaps by a campfire, the fuse smouldering horizontal into his shirt pocket, blowing out the heart. in his preoccupations the fuse always zigzagged like a hound's nose along the ground, setting alight the ground cover till it was red lichen. hazen lewis did not teach his son anything, no legend, no base of theory. the boy watched him prepare charges or pack equipment neatly back into his wooden case. his father wore no metal on him – not a watch or belt buckle. he was a man who with his few props had become self-sufficient, as invisible as possible. the explosions jostled logs out of the water unharmed. he left a track of half-inch holes in the granite all down the depot lakes system and along the moira river system where he sometimes was hired. but these were as modest and minimal as they could be. a woodpecker's work. he never wore a hat. he was a big man, six-foot-six, a heavy body. he was a bad rider of horses and later on a bad driver of trucks. he could assemble river dynamite with his eyes closed. he was meticulous in washing his clothes every evening in case there were remnants, little seeds of explosive on his apparel. patrick scorned this obsession. his father took off his shirt one evening and threw it onto the campfire. the shirt fizzed and sprayed sparks over the knees of the loggers. there were abrupt lessons like this. it was strange for patrick to realize later that he had learned important things, the way children learn from watching how adults angle a hat or approach a strange dog. he knew how much a piece of dynamite the size of a bullfrog could destroy. but he absorbed everything from a distance. the only moments his father was verbal was when calling square dances in the yarker and tamworth hotels during the log drives. he was always called on and he walked up to the stage as if it were a duty and broke into verses, swirling around the guitars and fiddles, dropping in a last phrase tight before he hit the wall of the rhyme. taciturn about everything else, his father was taciturn in his square-dance calling. his words would slide noncommittal over the dance floor, the boy watching at the edge and mouthing the phrases to himself. not a muscle moved in the large body of his father as he stood there calling "little red wagon the axle draggin'." the unemotional tongue. patrick could see himself on stage striding up and down, his arms bent and cocky. "birdie fly out and the crow fly in – crow fly out and give birdie a spin," he would mutter to himself, later, in the daylight. one winter night when he was eleven years old, patrick walked out from the long kitchen. a blue moth had pulsed on the screen, bathed briefly in light, and then disappeared. into darkness. he did not think it would go far. he picked up the kerosene lamp and went out. a rare winter moth, it was scuffing along the snow asif injured and he could follow it easily. in the back garden he lost it, the turquoise moth arcing up into the sky beyond the radius of the kerosene light. what was a moth doing at this time of year? he hadn't seen any for months. it may have been bred in the chicken coop. he put the hurricane lamp onto a rock and. looked over the fields. among the trees in the distance he saw what looked like more bugs. lightning bugs within the trees by the river. but this was winter! he moved forward with the lamp. the distance was further than he thought. snow above the ankles of his untied boots. one hand in a pocket, the other holding a lamp. and a moon lost in the thickness of clouds so it did not shine a path for him towards the trees. all that gave direction was a blink of amber. already he knew it could not be lightning bugs. the last of the summer's fireflies had died somewhere in the folds of one of his handkerchiefs. (years later, clara making love to him in a car, catching his semen in a handkerchief and fiinging it out onto bushes on the side of the road. hey, lightning bug! he had said, laughing, offering no explanation.) he waded through the snow, past outcrops of granite, and into the trees where the snow was not as deep. the lights still blinked in front of him. there was laughter. now he knew what it was. he crept on into the familiar woods as if walking into, testing the rooms of a haunted house. he knew who it was but he did not know what he would see. then he was at the river. he put the lamp down beside the oak and walked in darkness towards the bank. the ice shone with light. it seemed for a moment that he had stumbled on a coven, or one of those strange druidic rituals – illustrations of which he had pored over in his favourite history book. but even to the boy of eleven, deep in the woods after midnight, this was obviously benign. something joyous. a gift. there were about ten men skating, part of a game. one chased the others and as soon as someone was touched he became the chaser. each man held in one hand a sheaf of cattails and the tops of these were on fire. this is what lit the ice and had blinked through the trees. they raced, swerved, fell and rolled on the ice to avoid each other but never let go of the rushes. when they collided sparks fell onto the ice and onto their dark clothes. this is what caused the howls of laughter – one of them stationary, struggling to shake off a fragment that had fallen inside his sleeve, yelling out for the others to stop. patrick was transfixed. skating the river at night, each of them moving like a wedge into the blackness magically revealing the grey bushes of the shore, his shore, his river. a tree branch reached out its hand frozen in the ice, and one of them skated under it, crouching - cattails held behind him like a flaming rooster tail. the boy knew they were the loggers from the camp. he longed to hold their hands and skate the length of the creek slowing down through cut rock and under bridges and into town with these men, knowing they would have to return to those dark cabins by the mill. it was not just the pleasure of skating. they could have done that during the day. this was against the night. the hard ice was so certain, they could leap into the air and crash down and it would hold them. their lanterns replaced with new rushes which let them go further past boundaries, speed! romance! one manwaltzing with his fire.... to the boy growing into his twelfth year, having lived all his life on that farm where day was work and, night was rest, nothing would be the same. but on this night he did not trust either himself or these strangers of another language enough to be able to step forward and join them. he turned back through the trees and fields carrying his own lamp. breaking the crust with each step seemed graceless and slow. so at this stage in his life his mind raced ahead of his body.

the bridge

a truck carries fire at five a. m. through central toronto, along dundas street and up parliament street, moving north. aboard the flatbed three men stare into passing darkness – their muscles relaxed in this last half-hour before work – as if they don't own the legs or the arms jostling against their bodies and the backboard of the ford. written in yellow over the green door is dominion bridge company. but for now all that is visible is the fire on the flatbed burning over the three-foot by three-foot metal dish, cooking the tar in a cauldron. leaving this odour on the streets for anyone who would step out into the early morning and swallow the air. the truck rolls burly under the arching trees. pauses at certain intersections where more workers jump onto the flatbed, and soon there are eight men, the fire crackling, hot tar now and then spitting onto the back of a neck or an ear. soon there are twenty, crowded and silent. the light begins to come out of the earth. they see their hands, the textures on a coat, the trees they had known were there. at the top of parliament street the truck turns east, passes the rosedale fill, and moves towards the half-built viaduct. the men jump off. the unfinished road is full of ruts and the fire and the lights of the truck bounce, the suspension wheezing. the truck travels so slowly the men are walking faster, in the cold dawn air, even though it is summer. later they will remove coats and sweaters, then by eleven their shirts, bending over the black rivers of tar in just their trousers, boots, and caps. but now the thin layer of frost is everywhere, coating the machines and cables, brittle on the rain puddles they step through. the fast evaporation of darkness. as light emerges they see their breath, the clarity of the air being breathed out of them. the truck finally stops at the edge of the viaduct, and its lights are turned off. *** the bridge goes up in a dream. it will link the east end with the centre of the city. it will carry traffic, water, and electricity across the don valley. it will carry trains that have not even been invented yet. night and day. fall light. snow light. they are always working – horses and wagons and men arriving forwork on the danforth side at the far end of the valley. there are over 4,000 photographs from various angles of the bridge in its time-lapse evolution. the piers sink into bedrock fifty feet below the surface through day and shale and quicksand – 45,000 cubic yards of earth are excavated. the network of scaffolding stretches up. men in a maze of wooden planks climb deep into the shattered light of blond wood. a man is an extension of hammer, drill, flame. drill smoke in his hair. a cap falls into the valley, gloves are buried in stone dust. then the new men arrive, the "electricals," laying grids of wire across the five arches, carrying the exotic three-bowl lights, and on october 18, 1918 it is completed. lounging in mid-air. the bridge. the bridge. christened ”prince edward.” the bloor street viaduct. *** during the political ceremonies a figure escaped by bicycle through the police barriers. the first member of the public. not the expected show car containing officials, but this one anonymous and cycling like hell to the east end of the city. in the photographs he is a blur of intent. he wants the virginity of it, the luxury of such space. he circles twice, the string of onions that he carries on his shoulder splaying out, and continues. but he was not the first. the previous midnight the workers had arrived and brushed away officials who guarded the bridge in preparation for the ceremonies the next day, moved with their own flickering lights – their candles for the bridge dead – like a wave of civilization, a net of summer insects over the valley. and the cyclist too on his flight claimed the bridge in that blurred movement, alone and illegal. thunderous applause greeted him at the far end. *** on the west side of the bridge is bloor street, on the east side is danforth avenue. originally cart roads, mud roads, planked in 1910, they are now being tarred. bricks are banged into the earth and narrow creeks of sand are poured in between them. the tar is spread. bitumiers, bitumatori, tarrers, get onto their knees and lean their weight over the wooden block irons, which arc and sweep. the smell of tar seeps through the porous body of their clothes. the black of it is permanent under the nails. they can feel the bricks under their kneecaps as they crawl backwards towards the bridge, their bodies almost horizontal over the viscous black river, their heads drunk within the fumes. hey, caravaggio! the young man gets up off his knees and looks back into the sun. he walks to the foreman, lets go of the two wooden blocks he is holding so they hang by the leather thongs from his belt, bouncing against his knees as he walks. each man carries the necessities of his trade with him. when caravaggio quits a year later he willcut the thongs with a fish knife and fling the blocks into the half-dry tar. now he walks back in a temper and gets down on his knees again. another fight with the foreman. all day they lean over tar, over the menty yards of black river that has been spread since morning. it glistens and eases in sunlight. schoolkids grab bits of tar and chew them, first cooling the pieces in their hands, then popping them into their mouths. it concentrates the saliva for spitting contests. the men plunk cans of beans into the blackness to heat them up for their lunch. in winter, snow removes the scent of tar, the scent of pitched cut wood. the don river floods below the unfinished bridge, ice banging at the feet of the recently built piers. on winter mornings men fan out nervous over the whiteness. where does the earth end? there are flares along the edge of the bridge on winter nights – worst shift of all – where they hammer the nails in through snow. the bridge builders balance on a strut, the flares wavering behind them, aiming their hammers towards the noise of a nail they cannot see. *** the last thing rowland harris, commissioner of public works would do in the evenings during its construction was have himself driven to the edge of the viaduct, to sit for a while. at midnight the half-built bridge over the valley seemed deserted – just lanterns tracing its outlines. but there was always a night shift of thirty or forty men. after a while harris removed himself from the car, lit a cigar, and walked onto the bridge. he loved this viaduct. it was his first child as head of public works, much of it planned before he took over but he had bullied it through. it was harris who envisioned that it could carry not just cars but trains on a lower trestle. it could also transport water from the east-end plants to the centre of the city. water was harris' great passion. he wanted giant water mains travelling across the valley as part of the viaduct. he slipped past the barrier and walked towards the working men. few of them spoke english but they knew who he was. sometimes he was accompanied by pomphrey, an architect, the strange one from england who was later to design for commissioner harris one of the city's grandest buildings – the water filtration plant in the east end. for harris the night allowed scope. night removed the limitations of detail and concentrated on form. harris would bring pomphrey with him, past the barrier, onto the first stage of the bridge that ended sixty yards out in the air. the wind moved like something ancient against them. all men on the bridge had to buckle on halter ropes. harris spoke of his plans to this five-foot-tall englishman, struggling his way into pomphrey's brain. before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting. one night they had driven there at eleven of clock, crossed the barrier, and attached themselves once again to the rope harnesses. this allowed them to stand near the edge to study the progress of the piers and the steel arches. there was a fire on the bridge where the night workers congregated, flinging logs and other remnants onto it every so often, warming themselves before they walked back and climbed over the edge of the bridge into the night. they were working on a wood-facing for the next pier so that concrete could be poured in. as they sawedand hammered, wind shook the light from the flares attached to the side of the abutment. above them, on the deck of the bridge, builders were carrying huge ingersoll-rand air compressors and cables. an april night in 1917. harris and pomphrey were on the bridge, in the dark wind. pomphrey had turned west and was suddenly stilled. his hand reached out to touch harris on the shoulder, a gesture he had never made before. -look! walking on the bridge were five nuns. past the dominion steel castings wind attacked the body directly. the nuns were walking past the first group of workers at the fire. the bus, harris thought, must have dropped them off near castle frank and the nuns had, with some confusion at that hour, walked the wrong way in the darkness. they had passed the black car under the trees and talking cheerfully stepped past the barrier into a landscape they did not know existed – onto a tentative carpet over the piers, among the night labourers. they saw the fire and the men. a few tried to wave them back. there was a mule attached to a wagon. the hiss and jump of machines made the ground under them lurch. a smell of creosote. one man was washing his face in a barrel of water. the nuns were moving towards a thirty-yard point on the bridge when the wind began to scatter them. they were thrown against the cement mixers and steam shovels, careering from side to side, in danger of going over the edge. some of the men grabbed and enclosed them, pulling leather straps over their shoulders, but two were still loose. harris and pomphrey at the far end looked on helplessly as one nun was lifted up and flung against the compressors. she stood up shakily and then the wind jerked her sideways, scraping her along the concrete and right off the edge of the bridge. she disappeared into the night by the third abutment, into the long depth of air which held nothing, only sometimes a rivet or a dropped hammer during the day. then there was no longer any fear on the bridge. the worst, the incredible, had happened. a nun had fallen off the prince edward viaduct before it was even finished. the men covered in wood shavings or granite dust held the women against them. and commissioner harris at the far end stared along the mad pathway. this was his first child and it had already become a murderer. *** the man in mid-air under the central arch saw the shape fall towards him, in that second knowing his rope would not hold them both. he reached to catch the figure while his other hand grabbed the metal pipe edge above him to lessen the sudden jerk on the rope. the new weight ripped the arm that held the pipe out of its socket and he screamed, so whoever might have heard him up there would have thought the scream was from the falling figure. the halter thulked, jerking his chest up to his throat.

the right arm was all agony now – but his hand's timing had been immaculate, the grace of the habit, and he found himself a moment later holding the figure against him dearly. he saw it was a black-garbed bird, a girl's white face. he saw this in the light that sprayed down inconstantly from a flare fifteen yards above them. they hung in the halter, pivoting over the valley, his broken arm loose on one side of him, holding the woman with the other. her body was in shock, her huge eyes staring into the face of nicholas temelcoff. scream, please, lady, he whispered, the pain terrible. he asked her to hold him by the shoulders, to take the weight off his one good arm. a sway in the wind. she could not speak though her eyes glared at him bright, just staring at him. scream, please. but she could not. during the night, the long chutes through which wet concrete slid were unused and hung loose so the open spouts wavered a few feet from the valley floor. the tops of these were about ten feet from him now. he knew this without seeing them, even though they fell outside the scope of light. if they attempted to slide the chute their weight would make it vertical and dangerous. they would have to go further – to reach the lower-deck level of the bridge where there were structures built for possible water mains. we have to swing. she had her hands around his shoulders now, the wind assaulting them. the two strangers were in each other's arms, beginning to swing wilder, once more, past the lip of the chute which had tempted them, till they were almost at the lower level of the rafters. he had his one good arm free. saving her now would be her responsibility. *** she was in shock, her face bright when they reached the lower level, like a woman with a fever. she was in no shape to be witnessed, her veil loose, her cropped hair open to the long wind down the valley. once they reached the catwalk she saved him from falling back into space. he was exhausted. she held him and walked with him like a lover along the unlit lower parapet towards the west end of the bridge. above them the others stood around the one fire, talking agitatedly. the women were still tethered to the men and not looking towards the stone edge where she had gone over, falling in darkness. the one with that small scar against her nose ... she was always falling into windows, against chairs. she was always unlucky. the commissioner's chauffeur slept in his car as temelcoff and the nun walked past, back on real earth away from the bridge. before they reached parliament street they cut south through the cemetery. he seemed about to faint and she held him against a gravestone. she forced him to, hold his arm rigid, his fist clenched. she put her hands underneath it like a stirrup and jerked upwards so he screamed out again, her whole body pushing up with all of her strength, groaning as if about to lift him and then holding him, clutching him tight. she had seen the sweat jump out of his face. get me a shot. get me.... she removed her veil and wrapped the arm tight against his side. parliament and dundas ... few more blocks. so she went down parliament street with him. where she was going she didn't know. on eastern avenue she knocked at the door he pointed to. all these abrupt requests – scream, swing, knock, get me. then a man opened the door and let them into the ohrida lake restaurant. thank you, kosta. go back to bed, i'll lock it. and theman, the friend, walked back upstairs. she stood in the middle of the restaurant in darkness. the chairs and tables were pushed back to, the edge of the room. temelcoff brought out a bottle of brandy from under the counter and picked up two small glasses in the fingers of the same hand. he guided her to a small table, then walked back and, with a switch behind the zinc counter, turned on a light near her table. there were crests on the wall. she still hadn't said a word. he remembered she had not even screamed when she fell. that had been him. *** nicholas temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. he is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. he descends into the air with no fear. he is a solitary. he assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat. the rope roars alongside him, slowing with the pressure of his half-gloved hands. he is burly on the ground and then falls with terrific speed, grace, using the wind to, push himself into corners of abutments so he can check driven rivets, sheering valves, the drying of the concrete under bearing plates and padstones. he stands in the air banging the crown pin into the upper cord and then shepherds the lower cord's slip-joint into position. even in archive photographs it is difficult to find him. again and again you see vista before you and the eye must search along the wall of sky to the speck of burned paper across the valley that is him, an exclamation mark, somewhere in the distance between bridge and river. he floats at the three hinges of the crescent-shaped steel arches. these knit the bridge together. the moment of cubism. he is happiest at daily chores – ferrying tools from pier down to trestle, or lumber that he pushes in the air before him as if swimming in a river. he is a spinner. he links everyone. he meets them as they cling – braced by wind against the metal they are rivetting or the wood sheeting they hammer into – but he has none of their fear. always he carries his own tackle, hunched under his ropes and dragging the shining pitons behind him. he sits on a coiled, seat of rope while he eats his lunch on the bridge. if he finishes early he cycles down parliament street to, the ohrida lake restaurant and sits in the darkness of the room as if he has had enough of light. enough of space. his work is so exceptional and time-saving he earns one dollar an hour while the other bridge workers receive forty cents. there is no jealousy towards him. no one dreams of doing half the things he does. for night work he is paid $ 1.25 swinging up into the rafters of a trestle holding a flare, free-falling like a dead star. he does not really need to see things, he has charted all that space, knows the pier footings, the width of the crosswalks in terms of seconds of movement – 281 feet and 6 inches make up the central span of the bridge. two flanking spans of 240 feet, two end spans of 158 feet. he slips into openings on the lower deck, tackles himself up to bridge level. he knows the precise height he is over the river, how long his ropes are, how many seconds he can free-fall to the pulley. it does not matter if it is day or night, he could be blindfolded. black space is time. after swinging for three seconds he puts his feet up to link with the concrete edge of the next pier. he knows his position in the air as if he is mercury slipping across a map.

a south river parrot hung in its cage by the doorway of the ohrida lake restaurant, too curious and interested in the events of the night to allow itself to be blanketed. it watched the woman who stood dead centre in the room in darkness. the man turned on one light behind the counter. nicholas temelcoff came over to the bird for a moment's visit after getting the drinks. "well, alicia, my heart, how are you?" and walked away not waiting for the bird's reply, the fingers of his left hand delicately holding the glasses, his arm cradling the bottle. he muttered as if continuing his conversation with the bird, in the large empty room. from noon till two it was full of men, eating and drinking. kosta the owner and his waiter performing raucous shows for the crowd – the boss yelling insults at the waiter, chasing him past customers. nicholas remembered the first time he had come there. the dark coats of men, the arguments of europe. he poured a brandy and pushed it over to her. "you don't have to drink this but you can if you wish. or see it as a courtesy. " he drank quickly and poured himself another. "thank you," he said, touching his arm curiously as if it were the arm of a stranger. she shook her head to communicate it was not all right, that it needed attention. "yes, but not now. now i want to sit here. " there was a silence between them. "just to drink and talk quietly.... it is always night here. people step in out of sunlight and must move slow in the darkness. " he drank again, lust for the pain." she smiled. "now music. " he stood up free of the table as he spoke and went behind the counter and turned the wireless on low. he spun the dial till there was bandstand. he sat down again opposite her. "lot of pain. but i feel good. " he leaned back in his chair, holding up his glass. "alive. " she picked up her glass and drank. "where did you get that scar?" he pointed. his thumb to the side of her nose. she pulled back. "don't be shy ... talk. you must talk. " he wanted her to come out to him, even in anger, though he didn't want anger. feeling such ease in the ohrida lake restaurant, feeling the struts of the chair along his back, her veil tight on his arm. he just wanted her there near him, night all around them, where he could look after her, bring her out of the shock with some grace. ”i got about twenty scars," he said, "all over me. one on my ear here. " he turned and leaned forward so the wall-light fell onto the side of his head. "see? also this under my chin, that also broke my jaw. a coiling wire did that. nearly kill me, broke my jaw. lots more. my knees. . . . " he talked on. hot tar burns on his arm. nails in his calves. drinking up, pouring her another shot, the woman's song on the radio. she heard the lyrics underneath temelcoff's monologue as he talked and half mouthed the song and searched into her bright face. like a woman with a fever. this is the first time she has sat in a macedonian bar, in any bar, with a drinking man. there is a faint glowfrom the varnished tables, the red checkered tablecloths of the day are folded and stacked. the alcove with its serving counter has an awning hanging over it. she realizes the darkness represents a macedonian night where customers sit outside at their tables. light can come only from the bar, the stars, the clock dressed in its orange and red electricity. so when customers step in at any time, what they are entering is an old courtyard of the balkans. a violin. olive trees. permanent evening. now the arbour-like wallpaper makes sense to her. now the parrot has a language. he talked on, slipping into phrases from the radio songs which is how he learned his words and pronunciations. he talked about himself, tired, unaware his voice split now into two languages, the woman hearing everything he said and trying to remember it all. he could see her eyes were alive, interpreting the room. he noticed the almost-tap of her finger to the radio music. the blue eyes stayed on him as he moved, leaning his head against the wall. he drank, his breath deep into the glass so the fumes would hit his eyes and the sting of it keep him awake. then he looked back at her. how old was she? her brown hair so short, so new to, the air. he wanted to coast his hand through it. ”i love your hair," he said. "thank you ... for the help. for taking the drink. " she leaned forward earnestly and looked at him, searching out his face now. words just on the far side of her skin, about to fall out. wanting to know his name which he had forgotten to, tell her. ”i love your hair. " his shoulder was against the wall and he was trying to look up. then his eyes were closed. so deeply asleep he would be gone for hours. she could twist him around like a puppet and he wouldn't waken. she felt as if she were the only one alive in this building. in such formal darkness. there was a terrible taste from that one drink still on her tongue, so she walked behind the zinc counter, turning on the tap to wash out her mouth. she moved the dial of the radio around a bit but brought it back securely to the same station. she was looking for that song he had half-sung along with earlier, the voice of the singer strangely powerful and lethargic. she saw herself in the mirror. a woman whose hair was showing, caught illicit. she did what he had wanted to do. she ran her hand over her hair briefly. then turned from her image. leaning forward, she laid her face on the cold zinc, the chill there even past midnight. upon her cheek, her eyelid. she let her skull roll to cool her forehead. the zinc was an edge of another country. she put her ear against the grey ocean of it. its memory of a day's glasses. the spill and the wiping cloth. confessional. tabula rasa. at the table she positioned the man comfortably so he would not fall on his arm. what is your name? she whispered. she bent down and kissed him, then began walking around the room. this orchard. strangers kiss softly as moths, she thought. *** in certain weather, when fog fills the valley, the men stay close to each other. they arrive for work and walk onto a path that disappears into whiteness. what country exists on the other side? they move in groups of three or four. many have already died during the building of the bridge. but especially on mornings like thisthere is a prehistoric fear, a giant bird lifting one of the men into the air.... nicholas has removed his hat, stepped into his harness, and dropped himself off the edge, falling thirty feet down through fog. he hangs under the spine of the bridge. he can see nothing, just his hands and the yard of pulley-rope above him. six in the morning and he's already lost to that community of men on the bridge who are also part of the fairy tale. he is parallel to the lattice-work of hanging structures. now he enters the cages of steel and wood like a diver entering a sunken vessel that could at any moment tip over into deeper fracture zones of the sea floor. nicholas temelcoff works as the guy derricks raise and lower the steel – assembling it further out towards the next pier. he directs the steel through the fog. he is a fragment at the end of the steel bone the derrick carries on the end of its sixty-foot boom. the steel and nicholas are raised up to a temporary track and from there the 'travellers' handle it. on the west end of the viaduct a traveller is used to erect the entire 150-foot span. the travellers are twin derricks fitted with lattice-work booms that can lift twelve tons into any position, like a carrot off the nose of the most recently built section of the bridge. nicholas is not attached to the travellers, his rope and pulleys link up only with the permanent steel of a completed section of the bridge. travellers have collapsed twice before this and fallen to the floor of the valley. he is not attaching himself to a falling structure. but he hangs beside it, in the blind whiteness, slipping down further within it until he can shepherd the new ribs of steel on to the end of the bridge. he bolts them in, having to free-fall in order to use all of his weight for the final turns of the giant wrench. he allows ten feet of loose rope on the pulley, attaches the wrench, then drops on to the two-foot handle, going down with it, and jars with the stiffening of the bolt, falling off into the air, and jars again when he reaches the end of the rope. he pulleys himself up and does it again. after ten minutes every bone feels broken – the air he stops in feels hard as concrete, his spine aching where the harness pulls him short. he rises with the traveller from the lower level, calling out numbers to the driver above him through the fog, alongside the clattering of the woodwork he holds on to, the creaks and bends of the lattice drowning out his call of one – two -three – four which is the only language he uses. he was doing this once when a traveller collapsed at night – the whole structure – the rope shredding around him. he let go, swinging into the darkness, anywhere that might be free of the fifteen tons of falling timber which crashed onto the lower level and then tumbled down into the valley, rattling and banging in space like a trolley full of metal. and on the far end of the swing, he knew he had escaped the timber, but not necessarily the arm-thick wires that were now uncoiling free, snaking powerfully in every direction through the air. on his return swing he curled into a ball to avoid them, hearing the wires whip laterally as they completed the energy of the break. his predecessor had been killed in a similar accident, cut, the upper half of his body found an hour later, still hanging in the halter. by eight a.m the fog is burned up and the men have already been working for over two hours. a smell of tar descends to nicholas as workers somewhere pour and begin to iron it level. he hangs waiting for the whistle that announces the next journey of the traveller. below him is the don river, the grand trunk, the cn and cp railway tracks, and rosedale valley road. he can see the houses and work shacks, the beautiful wooden sheeting of the abutment which looks like a revival tent. wind dries the sweat on him. he talks in english to himself.

she takes the first step out of the ohrida lake restaurant into the blue corridor – the narrow blue lane of light that leads to the street. what she will become she becomes in that minute before she is outside, before she steps into the six-a.m. morning. the parrot alicia regards her departure and then turns its attention back to the man asleep in the chair, one arm on the table, palm facing up as if awaiting donations. his head against the wall beside a crest. he is in darkness now, the open palm callused and hard. five years earlier or ten years into the future the woman would have smelled the flour in his hair, his body having slept next to, the dough, curling around it so his heat would make it rise. but now it was the hardness of his hands, the sound of them she would remember like wood against glass. *** commissioner harris never speaks to nicholas temelcoff but watches often as he hooks up and walks at the viaduct edge listening to the engineer taylor's various instructions. he appears abstracted but harris knows he listens carefully. nicholas never catches anyone's eye, as if he must hear the orders nakedly without seeing a face around the words. his eyes hook to objects. wood, a railing, a rope clip. he eats his sandwiches without looking at them, watching instead a man attaching a pulley to the elevated railings or studying the expensive leather on the shoes of the architects. he drinks water from a corked green bottle and his eyes are focused a hundred feet away. he never realizes how often he is watched by others. he has no clue that his gestures are extreme. he has no portrait of himself. so he appears to harris and the others as a boy: say, a fanatic about toy cars, some stage they all passed through years ago. nicholas strides the parapet looking sideways at the loops of rope and then, without pausing, steps into the clear air. now there is for harris nothing to see but the fizzing rope, a quick slither. nicholas stops twenty feet down with a thud against his heart. sometimes on the work deck they will hear him slowly begin to sing various songs, breaking down syllables and walking around them as if laying the clauses out like tackle on a pavement to be checked for worthiness, picking up one he fancies for a moment then replacing it with another. as with sight, because nicholas does not listen to most conversations around him, he assumes no one hears him. for nicholas language is much more difficult than what he does in space. he loves his new language, the terrible barriers of it. "'does she love me? – absolutely! do i love her? – positively!” nicholas sings out to the forty-foot pipe he ferries across the air towards the traveller. he knows harris. he knows harris by the time it takes him to walk the sixty-four feet six inches from sidewalk to sidewalk on the bridge and by his expensive tweed coat that cost more than the combined weeks' salaries of five bridge workers. the event that will light the way for immigration in north america is the talking picture. the silent film brings nothing but entertainment – a pie in the face, a fop being dragged by a bear out of a department store – all events governed by fate and timing, not language and argument. the tramp never changes the opinion of the policeman. the truncheon swings, the tramp scuttles through a corner window and disturbs the fatlady's ablutions. these comedies are nightmares. the audience emits horrified laughter as chaplin, blindfolded, rollerskates near the edge of the unbalconied mezzanine. no one shouts to warn him. he cannot talk or listen. north america is still without language, gestures and work and bloodlines are the only currency. but it was a spell of language that brought nicholas here, arriving in canada without a passport in – 1914, a great journey made in silence. hanging under the bridge, he describes the adventure to himself, just as he was told a fairy tale of upper america by those who returned to the macedonian villages, those first travellers who were the judas goats to the west. daniel stoyanoff had tempted them all. in north america everything was rich and dangerous. you went in as a sojourner and came back wealthy – daniel buying a farm with the compensation he had received for losing an arm during an accident in a meat factory. laughing about it! banging his other hand down hard onto the table and wheezing with laughter, calling them all fools, sheep! as if his arm had been a dry cow he had fooled the canadians with. nicholas had been stunned by the simplicity of the contract. he could see stoyanoff's body livid on the killing floor – standing in two inches of cow blood, screaming like nothing as much as cattle, his arm gone, his balance gone. he had returned to the village of oschima, his sleeve flapping like a scarf, and with cash for the land. he had looked for a wife with two arms and settled down. in ten years daniel stoyanoff had bored everyone in the village with his tall tales and he couldn't wait for children to grow up and become articulate so he could thrill them with his sojourner's story of upper america. what daniel told them was that he had in fact lost both arms in the accident, but he happened to be rooming with a tailor who was out of work and who had been, luckily, on the killing floors of schnaufer's that morning. dedora the tailor had pulled gut out of a passing cat, stitched daniel's right arm back on, and then turned for the other but a scrap dog had run off with it, one of those dogs that lounged by the doorway. whenever you looked up from cutting and slicing the carcasses you would see them, whenever you left work at the end of the day in your blood-soaked overalls and boots they followed you, licking and chewing your cuffs. stoyanoff's story was told to all children of the region at a certain age and he became a hero to them. look, he would say, stripping off his shirt in the oschima high street, irritating the customers of petroff's outdoor bar once more, look at what a good tailor dedora was – no hint of stitches. he drew an imaginary line around his good shoulder and the kids brought their eyes up dose, then went over to his other shoulder and saw the alternative, the grotesque stump. nicholas was twenty-five years old when war in the balkans began. after his village was burned he left with three friends on horseback. they rode one day and a whole night and another day down to trikala, carrying food and a sack of clothes. then they jumped on a train that was bound for athens. nicholas had a fever, he was delirious, needing air in the thick smoky compartments, wanting to climb up onto the roof. in greece they bribed the captain of a boat a napoleon each to carry them over to trieste. by now they all had fevers. they slept in the basement of a deserted factory, doing nothing, just trying to keep warm. there had to be no hint of illness before trying to get into switzerland. they were six or seven days in the factory basement,unaware of time. one almost died from the high fevers. they slept embracing each other to keep warm. they talked about daniel stoyanoff's america. on the train the swiss doctor examined everyone's eyes and let the four friends continue over the border. they were in france. in le havre they spoke to the captain of an old boat that carried animals. it was travelling to new brunswick. two of nicholas' friends died on the trip. an italian showed him how to drink blood in the animal pens to keep strong. it was a french boat called la siciliana. he still remembered the name, remembered landing in saint john and everyone think ing how primitive it looked. how primitive canada was. they had to walk half a mile to the station where they were to be examined. they took whatever they needed from the sacks of the two who had died and walked towards canada. their boat had been so filthy they were covered with lice. the steerage passengers put down their baggage by the outdoor taps near the toilets. they stripped naked and stood in front of their partners as if looking into a mirror. they began to remove the lice from each other and washed the dirt off with cold water and a cloth, working down the body. it was late november. they put on their clothes and went into the customs sheds. nicholas had no passport, he could not speak a word of english. he had ten napoleons, which he showed them to explain he wouldn't be dependent. they let him through. he was in upper america. he took a train for toronto, where there were many from his village; he would not be among strangers. but there was no work. so he took a train north to copper cliff, near sudbury, and worked there in a macedonian bakery. he was paid seven dollars a month with food and sleeping quarters. after six months he went to sault ste. marie. he still could hardly speak english and decided to go to school, working nights in another macedonian bakery. if he did not learn the language he would be lost. the school was free. the children in the class were ten years old and he was twenty-six. he used to get up at two in the morning and make dough and bake till 8:30. at nine he would go to school. the teachers were all young ladies and were very good people. during this time in the sault he had translation dreams – because of his fast and obsessive studying of english. in the dreams trees changed not just their names but their looks and character. men started answering in falsettos. dogs spoke out fast to him as they passed him on the street. when he returned to toronto all he needed was a voice for all this language. most immigrants learned their english from recorded songs or, until the talkies came, through mimicking actors on stage. it was a common habit to select one actor and follow him throughout his career, annoyed when he was given a small part, and seeing each of his plays as often as possible – sometimes as often as ten times during a run. usually by the end of an east-end production at the fox or parrot theatres the actors' speeches would be followed by growing echoes-as macedonians, finns, and greeks repeated the phrases after a half-second pause, trying to get the pronunciation right. this infuriated the actors, especially when a line such as "who put the stove in the living room, kristin?" – which had originally brought the house down – was now spoken simultaneously by at least seventy peopleand so tended to lose its spontaneity. when the matinee idol wayne burnett dropped dead during a performance, a sicilian butcher took over, knowing his lines and his blocking meticulously, and money did not have to be refunded. certain actors were popular because they spoke slowly. lethargic ballads, and a kind of blues where the first line of a verse is repeated three times, were in great demand. sojourners walked out of their accent into regional american voices. nicholas, unfortunately, would later choose fats waller as his model and so his emphasis on usually unnoticed syllables and the throwaway lines made him seem high-strung or dangerously anti-social or too loving. but during the time he worked on the bridge, he was seen as a recluse. he would begin sentences in his new language, mutter, and walk away. he became a vault of secrets and memories. privacy was the only weight he carried. none of his cohorts really knew him. this man, awkward in groups, would walk off and leave strange clues, about himself, like a dog's footprints on the snowed roof of a garage. *** hagh! a doctor attending his arm, this is what woke him, brought him out of his dream. hah! it was six hours since he had fallen asleep. kosta was there. he saw that the veil and his shirt had been cut open by the doctor. somehow, they said, he had managed to get his arm back into the socket. he jerked his hand to the veil, looking at it closely. she had stayed until kosta came down in the early morning. she talked to him about the arm, to get a doctor, she had to leave. she spoke? yes yes. what did she sound like? hah? what more did kosta know about her? he mentioned her black skirt. before he left, nicholas looked around the bar and found strips of the black habit she had cut away to make a skirt for the street. when he walks into the fresh air outside the ohrida lake restaurant, on the morning after the accident on the bridge, he sees the landscape as something altered, no longer so familiar that it is invisible to him. nicholas temelcoff walks now seeing parliament street from the point of view of the woman – who had looked through his belt-satchel while he slept, found his wide wire shears, and used them to cut away the black lengths of her habit. when he walks out of the ohrida lake restaurant that morning it is her weather he grows aware of. he knows he will find her. there are long courtships which are performed in absence. this one is built perhaps on his remark about her hair or her almost-silent question as he was falling off some tower or bridge into sleep. the verge of sleep was always terrifying to nicholas so he would drink himself into it blunting out the seconds of pure fear when he could not use his arms, would lie there knowing he'd witness the half-second fall before sleep, the fear of it greater than anything he felt on the viaduct or any task he carried out for the dominion bridge company. as he fell, he remembers later, he felt a woman's arm reaching for him, curious about his name.

he is aware of her now, the twin. what holds them together is not the act which saved her life but those moments since. the lost song on the radio. his offhand and relaxed flattery to a nun with regard to her beauty. then he had leaned his head back, closed his eyes for too long, and slept. a week later he rejoins the flatbed truck that carries the tar and fire, jumps on with the other men, and is back working at the bridge. his arm healed, he swings from pier d to pier c, ignores the stories he hears of the nun who disappeared. he lies supine on the end of his tether looking up towards the struts of the bridge, pivoting slowly. he knows the panorama of the valley better than any engineer. like a bird. better than edmund burke, the bridge's architect, or harris, better than the surveyors of 1912 when they worked blind through the bush. the panorama revolves with him and he hangs in this long silent courtship, her absence making him look everywhere. in a year he will open up a bakery with the money he has saved. he releases the catch on the pulley and slides free of the bridge.

the searcher patrick lewis arrived in the city of toronto as if it were land after years at sea. growing up in the country had governed his childhood: the small village of bellrock, the highway of river down which the log drivers came drinking, working raucous, and in the spring leaving the inhabitants shocked within the silence. now, at twenty-one, he had been drawn out from, that small town like a piece of metal and dropped under the vast arches of union station to begin his life once more. he owned nothing, had scarcely any money. there was a piece of feldspar in his pocket that his fingers had stumbled over during the train journey. he was an immigrant to the city. what remained in patrick from, his childhood were letters frozen inside mailboxes after ice storms. what he remembered was loving only things to do with colour, hating the whiteness, stepping into the warm brown universe of barns, the breath and steam of cattle rolling out, the acrid shit and urine he could summon up even now in the heart of toronto. the smell had paraded grandly over his first seduction in a hay bed, the angry girl slapping him when both were full and guilty. what he remembered was frozen laundry, carrying overalls like a body into the kitchen and, seating them in a chair, hoping his father would see them before they melted and lolled over the table. then summer. blackflies and mosquitoes. leaping not into hay but into the black underwater colour of creek, walking naked to the farmhouse, chewing rhubarb, clothes under one arm. you bit the glossy skin of the raw rhubarb and ripped its fibres open and sucked the flavour out. you put the smallest pellet of raspberry onto your tongue and opened it delicately with your teeth. you stood in a field on a hot day obsessed with this precise taste. now, in the city, he was new even to himself, the past locked away. he saw his image in the glass of telephone booths. he ran his hands over the smooth pink marble pillars that reached up into the rotunda. this train station was a palace, its niches and caverns an intimate city. he could be shaved, eat a meal, or have his shoes coloured.

he saw a man with three suitcases, well-dressed, shouting out in another language. the man's eyes burned through everyone who at first received his scream personally. but the phrases were for angels in the air to, assist him or for demons to, leave him. two days later patrick returned to pick up his luggage from a locker. he saw the man again, still unable to, move from his safe zone, in a different suit, as if one step away was the quicksand of the new world. patrick sat on a bench and watched the tides of movement, felt the reverberations of trade. he spoke out his name and it struggled up in a hollow echo, and was lost in the high air of union station. no one turned. they were in the belly of a whale. when ambrose small, the millionaire, disappeared in 1919, it was discovered that the police had his bertillon record. between 1889 and 1923 the bertillon identification system was used to locate criminals and missing persons. bertillon's method consisted of the measurement of certain parts of the body: the length of head, width of head, length of right ear, length of left foot, length of left middle finger, the length of left forearm. in homes and prisons and mortuaries all over north america limbs were measured and the results sent in to the toronto police. during the fever of the case over 5,000 people claimed to be ambrose small. they claimed they had amnesia, were kidnapped in a brown sack, were disfigured, were hidden in geological holes in the scarborough bluffs, were stretched to longer than five foot six inches on racks, were overfed, had all their hair removed, had their memories wiped clean by certain foods, had their pigmentation altered, were turned into women, had the length of their right ear changed, were in the meantime hungry and penniless and would someone mail $500 to nelson, b.c., or wichita, kansas, or cornerbrook, newfoundland. a woman in hamilton saw ambrose with his throat cut. she woke one morning to feel blood on the pillow, looked up and saw someone was sawing her neck, and she said i am ambrose small. then she woke up again. another had a vision that she was unlocking the safe at the grand opera house and saw a curled-up skeleton inside resting on documents. the press leapt upon every possibility. mystery man of north resembles small -star, may 27,1921 remains may be exhumed if further clues come to light. skeleton found in whitby field -telegram, june2,1921 "the possibility that it might be ambrose small occurred to me when we were digging it up," acting chief thomas reflected this evening. iowa detective is certain he has found a.j. small -mail, august 16,1921john brophy, head of brophy detective agency, iowa, who was ousted from his job as assistant chief of police, claims to have a man under guard whom he has identified as a.i. small. brophy said he would produce small when the canadian authorities are ready to pay the reward offered. "the man is small," he said. the man was recovering from a pistol wound in the neck, concussion of the brain and minor injuries. both his legs had been cut off near the knees. "i will tell you what small told me after he had identified his own picture," he said. "'all i can remember is that there was a blow and then darkness, then terrible suffering. from then on i remembered nothing until i was brought here. i think i was in omaha, that's all."' between 1910 and 1919 ambrose small had been the jackal of toronto's business world. he was a manipulator of deals and property, working his way up from nothing into the world of theatre management. he bought toronto's grand opera house when he was twenty-eight years old, and then proceeded to buy theatres all over the province – in st. catharine's, kingston, arkona, petrolia, peterborough, and paris, ontario, until he held the whole web of theatre traffic in his outstretched arms. he built the grand in london, ontario – the largest theatre in north america, save for shea's hippodrome. he owned ninety-six theatres. he became a gambler at the track, obsessed with greyhounds. he married theresa kormann, and in so doing alienated his sisters. his wife was a prohibitionist and small offered her the theatre for one night a week and she put on temperance shows and nobody came. "pass by the open doorway, ignore the foul saloon," the chorus sang to a mostly empty auditorium. on other nights, performances of ben-hur and naughty miss louise packed the theatre. in the glen road house, small held appalling parties. showgirls, live peacocks, staggered out drunk in the morning hours and strolled aimlessly home along the rosedale streets – the chauffeurs of the rich following at a tactful distance in their car. in paris, ontario, he met an actress named clara dickens and she became his lover. she was twenty-one years old and small was thirty-five and he charmed her with his variousness. he was a spinner. he was bare-knuckle capitalism. he was a hawk who hovered over the whole province, swooping down for the kill, buying up every field of wealth, and eating the profit in mid-air. he was a jackal. this is what the press called him and he laughed at them, spun a thread around his critics and bought them up. either he owned people or they were his enemies. no compatriots. no prisoners. in the tenth century, he liked to say, the price of a greyhound or a hawk was the same as that for a man. each morning he rose and walked to his offices at the grand theatre on adelaide street. he got there at least an hour before any of his staff and plotted out the day. this was the time he loved most, choreographing his schemes, theorizing on bids and counter-bids and interest rates and the breaking point of his adversaries. he pulled out an imported avocado pear, sliced it into thin green moons, and sat at his roll-top desk eating it and thinking. by the time his staff arrived he had worked out all possible scenarios at his empty desk. he went down to the barbershop, lay back, and was shaved and manicured. his day was over. the machine ofambrose small began to tick across the city. with his lover clara dickens he was gregarious, generous, charming. seeing him once or twice a week she knew the best of ambrose. she steered him away from his peacock parties. they went on excursions. he bought hotels, he bought houses under different names all over ontario. "i'm a thief," he'd say. "all thieves must plan their escape routes. " the names of the towns, his pseudonyms, slipped memorized into his brain, unrecorded. anywhere else. he bought or consumed, it seemed to clara, anything he alighted on. on december 16, 1919, ambrose small failed to keep an appointment. a million dollars had been taken from his bank account. he had either been murdered or was missing. his body, alive or dead, was never found. most criminal investigations in the early part of the century were dignified and leisurely. villains took their time, they took trains and ships. in 1910, dr. crippen's arrest on board a liner, through the use of a radiophone (while he was reading the four just men), was thought by the public to be in bad taste. but there was something about the ambrose small case that created a feeling of open season. it was an opportunity for complaint about the state of the world; small's blatant capitalism had clarified the gulf between the rich and the starving. for the first year after small's disappearance the public watched the police try to solve the case. but when they failed, and when the family put up an $80,000 reward for the millionaire's whereabouts, the public shouldered itself into the case. now everyone looked for him. by 1921, one could be hired by a company at $ 4 a week as a 'searcher' and these individuals roamed the city and the smaller towns dragging suspicious strangers into police stations and having their measurements taken under the bertillon process. the searchers resembled the press gangs of earlier centuries, and there were many rival organizations at work, investing in the project as if it were an oil field or a gold mine. in l924, after working for a year at various jobs in toronto, patrick lewis became a searcher. the organizations were still active. it did not matter that five years had passed. no body had been found to fit small's bertillon chart and hordes of the otherwise unemployed were being hired. in these hard times any hope of a 'gusher' or 'strike' was worth pursuing. the search had turned the millionaire's body into a rare coin, a piece of financial property. what held most interest for patrick was the collection of letters the police had handed over to the family. gradually he came into contact with small's two sisters, who until then had found no one to take the letters seriously. cranks, mediums, blackmail threats, the claims of kidnappers – the police and small's wife had scorned them all. patrick was befriended by the sisters at their house on isabella street. clara dickens knew him best, they told him. she was the rare lover. talk to briffa, said the sisters, he also thought she was the perfect woman for ambrose – not theresa, the wife, the saint. patrick took the train to paris, ontario, and met the radio actress clara dickens. she stood in the hall beside her mother and said she would not speak about ambrose small. she claimed not to have seen him since he disappeared. he stood there watching her. she asked him to leave.

in the books he read, women were rescued from runaway horses, from frozen pond accidents. clara dickens stood on the edge of the world of wealth. when she spoke to him she had been bending to one side as she attached an earring, gazing into the hall mirror, dismissing him, their eyes catching in the reflection. he was dazzled by her – her long white arms, the faint hair on the back of her neck – as if she without turning had fired a gun over her shoulder and mortally wounded him. the 'rare lover',the 'perfect woman'. and what else was she, apart from being the lover of ambrose small? dressed up, about to go out, she had looked like a damsel fly, the sequins and gauze up to her neck. but there was something about the way she stood there, not turning around to talk to him properly. when he went back the next morning she opened the door, her sleeves rolled up, those arms covered with flour up to her elbows. -i thought you were rich, he said. -why? do you want me to hire you to find my beloved? all that evening and late into the morning hours patrick tried to seduce clara dickens and then the next day when he was exhausted she seduced him. he was reading through the old news clippings about ambrose in the paris library when clara arrived. he was almost asleep over the 1919 files, his cheek awkward on his shoulder as if someone had come up to him in the silence of the reading room and broken his neck. she strolled into the library dressed in white and stood in front of the bookshelves. - i'll drive you back to the arlington hotel. her voice wakened him. she turned a chair around so she could straddle it and she leaned forward, her elbows against its back. in her white dress she seemed the focus of all sunlight in the library. there was laughter and then tenseness on her face. her long arm reached forward and picked up a clipping. - you think i am the line to him, don't you? you think that he must have left his shadow on me. he couldn't talk back against her beauty. he noticed a fragment of water under her eyelid, a sun tear she was unaware of. - come. i'll drive you back to the hotel. at that hour he did not think of seduction. he was exhausted by all their conversations the previous night on her porch overlooking broadway street. they had been outrageous and flamboyant in each other's company, their arguments like duets. he normally took months to approach someone, and at the slightest rejection he would turn and never go back. but he argued just so they could remain together on that porch deep in moonlight, half-laughing at the other's ploys. she wouldn't let him kiss her or hold her standing up – didn't want all of their bodies touching, that possibility. they had walked in rain beside the grand river towards her car. a gift from ambrose, no doubt, he thought to himself. he was so tired there was no sophistication or cunning in him that night. and she herself did notknow how to deal with this sudden obsession for her. she had driven him slowly back to the arlington hotel and they sat in the car. -tomorrow the library for me, he said. -i could come and join you. she clicked her tongue and jerked her head to the side suggestively. it was two in the morning. she sat half-facing him, her feet already out of their shoes, one knee pointed towards him by the gear-shift. she let him kiss her goodnight and he sat there for a moment gazing at her face patterned by streetlight. he got out and closed the door too energetically and realized after he had taken three steps how that had sounded. he turned back. -that wasn't a slam. -i know. she was sitting there very alone, still, looking towards the seat he had left, her head down. -goodnight. -goodnight, patrick. now they stepped from the news library into bright sunlight and they got into her car, patrick carrying his cardboard box of notes. both of them were so tired they hardly spoke during the drive back to the hotel. his room when they got there was full of bright daylight and traffic noises came through the open window. they slept almost immediately, holding each other's hands. when he woke, her eyes were studying him. only her dark neck and face were visible. he felt awkward, having slept in his clothes. -hello. -sing to me, she murmured. -what? -i want it formal. can you sing? she smiled and he moved across the bed to her softness. after they had made love he brought his pillow as close as he could for comfortable focus and gazed at her. when he woke she was gone, there was no answeron her telephone. he came back to the bed and inhaled whatever perfume there was left on the pillow. *** -patrick, is that you? -yes, clara. -doesn't sound like you. -i was asleep. -i'm taking you somewhere. pick up some booze. and a corkscrew. i've got the food. we should be away a few days. it was a winding road they drove on towards paris plains, past gorges and tobacco fields. -we're going to my friend's farmhouse. -ambrose? -no, her name is alice. i'll tell you about her later. -you've got all the time in the damn world now. -later. they entered a small farmhouse which had a woodstove in the kitchen. bird feathers had been prised under the edges of wallpaper, here and there. in the front room there was a bed in an alcove, windows on three sides of it. a mat on the floor. there was hardly any furniture. it looked to him like the quarters of a monk. the friend was not to arrive for a couple of days, clara said. later that night they lay on the bed by the three windows, barely dressed. he liked to sleep separate, in his own world, but with her he kept waking, reaching to hold her flesh against him. during the night clara turned slowly like something on the floor of the ocean. she would put more and more clothes on in the darkness. she was always cold at night, in this room of the sea. -you awake? -what time is it? she said. -still night. -ahh.

-i love you. were you ever in love? apart from ambrose. -yeah. he was put off by her casual admission. -i fell in love with a guy named stump jones when i was sixteen. -stump! -there was a problem with the name. -i'll say. -goodnight, patrick, i'm sleepy. -hey! he got up and strolled around the farmhouse happier and more at ease than he had ever been. she was already back in deep sleep, snoring, wearing one of his shirts to keep warm. a smile on her face. clara the smirker. he wanted to get hold of stump jones and beat the hell out of him. sixteen! where had he been at sixteen? she had been small's lover, stump's lover, and who else? he found himself at this hour in the spell of her body, within the complex architecture of her past. he had been looking through the window for over ten minutes when he suddenly focused on a shadow on the glass and saw it was a tree frog. he lit the oil lamp and held it up to the creature. a pseudacris triseriata. hello friend, he breathed towards the pale-green speckled body hanging against the pane. -clara ... -what is it? -ambrose. -what! -come here, i want you to see this. she looked at the window and then back at him, refusing to speak. -he wants you with all your clothes off. -it's three in the morning, patrick, you're supposed to be asleep. you're supposed to be searching for my beloved. (beloved! he grinned.) do you want to make love, is that it? -it's a tree frog! -a tree frog in the moonlight is not rare. -yes it is, they only come out during the day. he wants to consider your thorax, your abdomen. love was like childhood for him. it opened him up, he was silly and relaxed. she was wide awake, watching him as if he were crazy. -is this some kind of bolshevik gesture? she unbuttoned the shirt, stood between him and the glass. - tomorrow night he'll probably bring his pals to see you. some places call them bell frogs. when they get excited they make a sound like a bell. sometimes they bark like dogs. she leaned forward and put her mouth to the green belly against the glass and kissed it. - hello ambrose, she whispered, how are you doing? patrick put his arms around her and held her breasts. -marry me, willya . . . he started barking. -one of these days, soon, i'll go. -to join ambrose. -yes. . . i know he's alive. -i have a fear i won't see you again. -you talk on, patrick, but you have no remorse. -a strange word. it suggests a turning around on yourself. -don't speak. here ... he met ambrose in a dream. at the door he said, "there is this grey figure attached to my body, patrick. i want you to cut it off me." they were old friends. all patrick had was a penknife. he unfolded the blade and made ambrose move into the hall, underneath the one light near the iron elevators. it was easier to see what it was now. a grey peacock had been sewn onto his friend. patrick began to cut it away. ambrose was quiet. there appeared to be no pain at all. patrick got down to the ankles and with a final saw from the knife the surplus figure curled off. it lay there like excess undercarpeting that had not been clearedaway. they walked back to small's door, shook hands, and parted. as he was falling through the final buildings of his dream he heard the news of small's murder – he had been found vertically sliced in two. -what? -i said, were you dreaming? -i don't know. why? -you were twitching. -hmmm. what kind of twitching? -you know, like a dog asleep in front of the fire. -maybe i was chasing a rabbit. they were sitting on the floor leaning into the corner of the room, her mouth on his nipple, her hand moving his cock slowly. an intricate science, his whole body imprisoned there, a ship in a bottle. i'm going to come. come in my mouth. moving forward, his fingers pulling back her hair like torn silk, he ejaculated, disappearing into her. she crooked her finger, motioning, and he bent down and put his mouth on hers. he took it, the white character, and they passed it back and forth between them till it no longer existed, till they didn't know who had him like a lost planet somewhere in the body. the next day they drove along the country roads in her packard. he watched her as she spoke of the wheeler needle works where her father had worked, the medusa factory by the railway. -this is the tour of my teenage life, patrick. i'll show you where i almost got seduced. -the crucial years. -yes. he loved the eroticism of her history, the knowledge of where she sat in schoolrooms, her favourite brand of pencil at the age of nine. details flooded his heart. clara said once, "when i know a man well socially, the only way i'll ever get to know him better will be to sleep with him." seduction was the natural progression of curiosity. and during these days he found he had become interested only in her, her childhood, her radio work, this landscape in which she had grown up. he no longer wanted small, he wanted to exorcise small from clara's mind. it was raining and they couldn't get out of the car. she rolled down the window. -this is where i used to bury my lunch. taking his pocket handkerchief, she wet a corner with her tongue.

-you've got mud on you, she said, rubbing his forehead. all these gestures removed place, country, everything. he felt he had to come back to the world. -tell me something about ambrose quickly. -whenever he lied his voice became quiet and reasonable. -what else. -we used to fuck on the cayuga. -the day ferry? jesus, on the cayuga ? he was drawing out her history with small, a splinter from a lady's palm. he was constantly appalled. -would it be forgivable to say i stayed with him because he gave me a piano? -what are you telling me? -i loved the piano. it was something to get lost in. my exit, my privacy. he had his money, gambling, he had his winning elsewhere. i had my radio work and my piano. everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy. and you? -i don't know. -there was a time when i could have slept with his friend briffa, for instance. around him the air was always fraught with possibilities. -i like fraught air. -briffa was lovely. european courtesy, a suggestion of brutality, happily married. i liked him because he was shaved down and focused. he decorated theatres. he had his vision, and that of course is a great aphrodisiac. the only man i met who had a vision. ambrose didn't. but he drew people like briffa and others around him. nobody else would touch them, let alone give them jobs. it was a battle – small and his friends against the rest. ambrose was laying siege, attacking all those remnants of wealthy families who really were the end of the line. -and you were the pianist. -yes, the pianist, the musical interlude, the romance in the afternoon. -he was the, first to bugger me. patrick lay shocked and still beside her in the afternoon sunlight. when he spoke of his own past he was notcalm like her. he flashed over previous relationships, often in bad humour. he would disclose the truth of his past only if interrogated with a specific question. he defended himself for most of the time with a habit of vagueness. there was a wall in him that no one reached. not even clara, though she assumed it had deformed him. a tiny stone swallowed years back that had grown with him and which he carried around because he could not shed it. his motive for hiding it had probably extinguished itself years earlier.... patrick and his small unimportant stone. it had entered him at the wrong time in his life. then it had been a flint of terror. he could have easily turned aside at the age of seven or twenty, and just spat it out and kept on walking, and forgotten it by the next street corner. so we are built. -who are your friends, patrick? -you. only you. -alice comes tomorrow. -we should go then. -no, we can stay. you'll like her. but sometime after that i'll leave you. -for ambrose. -yes, for ambrose. and you must never follow me. -it takes me a long time to forgive. -don't worry, patrick. things fill in. people are replaced. he wondered if at first she had been something he wanted to steal, not because she was clara but because she belonged to the enemy. but now there was her character. this daughter of the foreman at wheeler needle works, who seemed to have entered him like a spirit, bullying his private nature. she had been the lover of ambrose small, had been caught in the slow discreet wheel of the rich. and she would have learned those subtle rules that came alongside their gifts. she started laughing, the hair on her temples still wet after their lovemaking. he sensed suddenly the sweat on himself as well. as he held her, he still didn't know who she was. after midnight clara strolls behind her friend alice, removes the shawl from her shoulders, and ties it on as a headband. patrick watches clara intently – the bones, the planes of lamplight on her face, hair no longer in the way. follow me, she could say in her shawl headband, and he would be one of the gadarene swine. -did i tell you, clara laughs, how i helped my father shave dogs? a true story. my father loved to hunt. hehad four redbone hounds, with no names – they disappeared so often we used numbers. during the summer, hunters steal dogs and my father was always worried about theft. so we'd drive to the worst barber in paris and ask him to clip the dogs. he was always insulted by this, though he had not much other business. i'd sit in the barber chair and hold the dog in my lap while it got clipped, and then we drove back with naked dogs. at home my dad got out his cow razor. he'd shave the midriffs to the skin, then we'd hose them and leave them to dry in the sun. after lunch my father wrote out dickens 1, dickens 2, and dickens 3 with tree paint in neat letters on their sides. i was allowed to paint the name on the last dog. we had to hold them to the ground until the paint dried properly. i wrote dickens 4. those were favourite times. all day we'd talk about things i was not sure of. about plants, what wine tasted like. he put me right on how to have babies. i thought i had to take a watermelon seed, put it between two pieces of bread and drink lots of water. i thought this was how my parents talked when they were alone. we'd chat to the dogs too who were nonplussed, looking thin and naked. sometimes it seemed to me i'd just had four babies. great times. then my father died of a stroke when i was fifteen. dammit. -yeah, says patrick, my father too.... my father was a wizard, he could blow logs right out of the water. -what happened? -he got killed setting charges in a feldspar mine. the company had tried to go too deep and the section above him collapsed. there wasn't an explosion. the shelf just slid down with him into the cave and drowned him. he was buried in feldspar. i didn't even know what it was. they use it in everything – chinaware, tiles, pottery, inlaid table tops, even in artificial teeth. i lost him there. -here's to holy fathers, alice says, holding up her glass. conversation dips again into childhood but the friend alice plucks only details from the present to celebrate. she reveals no past, remains sourceless, like those statues of men with wrapped heads who symbolize undiscovered rivers. all night as they talk the sky and the fields outside seem potent with summer storm. the night kitchen with these two actresses is overwhelming. clara and alice slip into tongues, impersonate people, and keep each other talking long into the night. patrick is suddenly an audience. they imitate the way men smoke. they discuss how women laugh – from the raucous to the sullen to the mercenary. he is in a room full of diverse laughter, looking back and forth from clara's vividness and erotic movement, even when she stretches, to alice's paleness and suppressed energy. "my pale friend," clara had called her. at three in the morning there is thunder in the distance. patrick cannot keep his eyes open. he says goodnight, and abandons himself to the sofa, closing the door to the kitchen. the two women continue talking and laughing, a glance of sheet lightning miles away. after an hour or so they say to each other, "let's get him. " in the darkness of the farmhouse clara and alice approach his bed. they carry candles and a large roll of paper, whispering to each other. they uncover the face of patrick hidden in the green blanket. this isenough. the candles are placed on a straightback chair. they cut the paper with draper's scissors and pin the four corners of it to the floor. they begin to draw hard and quickly, as if copying down a blueprint in a foreign country. it seems as illicit as that. approaching a sleeping man to see what he will reveal of himself in his portrait at this time of the night. he sleeps, and during the next while they work together on the same sheet which sometimes tears with the force of the crayon. they have done this often to each other, these spirit paintings, the head leaking purple or yellow – auras of jealousy and desire. given the vagueness of his covered body, they draw upon all they know or can guess about him. they kneel, their heads bright beside the candlelight, crayoning against the texture of the floor. anger, honesty, stumble out. one travels along a descant of insight and the other follows, completes the phrase, making the gesture safe. a cave mural. the yellow light flickers upon his face against the sofa cushion, upon the two women sweating during this close night, their heads down as if pulling something out of a river. one leans back to stretch while the other explores the portrait. "are we witches?" alice asks. clara begins to laugh. she moans like a spirit looking for the keyhole out of the room. she places her hands on the frail walls, then her mouth explodes with noise and she tugs alice out into the ontario night. they crash down the wood steps, clara's growls unnaming things, their bodies rolling among the low moon flowers and grass and then leaping up as the rain breaks free of the locked heat clouds, running into the thunder of a dark field, through the stomach-high beans and corn, the damp rustle of it against their skirts and outstretched arms – the house fever slipping away from them. the rain comes through their thin cotton clothes against their muscles. alice sweeps back her wet hair. a sudden flinging of sheet lightning and clara sees alice subliminal in movement almost rising up into the air, shirt removed, so her body can meet the rain, the rest of her ascent lost to darkness till the next brief flutter of light when they hold a birch tree in their clasped hands, lean back and swing within the rain. they crawl delirious together in the blackness. there is no moon. there is the moon flower in its small power of accuracy, like a compass pointing to where the moon is, so they can bay towards its absence. *** he moves quietly through the house in the early morning. at the top of the stairs he looks through a small round window into the fields. this is a fragile farmhouse. he has felt the winds shake it during the night. now there is a strange peace, grass and trees seen through the white light of morning, the two women asleep. yesterday they were up at dawn flinging rhubarb across the room at each other – as he discovered, waking to riotous laughter. he found them in the midst of battle, alice bent over in laughter, in tears, and clara suddenly sheepish when she saw him enter the kitchen. now there is no noise but the creak of his moving. in the bedroom he finds them asleep in each other's arms, unaware of daylight filling the room. he touches the elbow of alice gull and her flesh shifts away. he puts his hand into her palm and she grips it unconsciously, not fully awake.

-hi. -i have to go soon, he says. a train. -ummm. we left you a present from last night. -yes? -she'll explain it later. she stretches carefully without disturbing clara. -throw me a shirt, i'll have breakfast with you. in the kitchen patrick cuts open a grapefruit and hands her half. alice shakes her head. she remains sitting on the stool in the long pink shirt and watches him move, efficient in her kitchen. he slides through company, she notices, as anonymously as possible. she points to certain drawers silently when he asks for spoons or a spatula. patrick is not a breakfast talker and in fifteen minutes he is ready to leave. she holds his arm at the door. he kisses her accidentally too close to the eye. -give her a kiss for me. -i will. -tell her i'll see her tonight at the hotel. -okay. she closes the door firmly and watches him through the window on his walk to the train station, striding from one frame of glass to another. she climbs back into bed with clara, puts her arm around her to accept the warmth she has lost by rising. welcomes the sleepy haven of monday morning. his mind remains against them, like an impress of his hand on their sleeping flesh, the cold train window at his cheek. hungry for clara, he thinks about alice as if he has not focused on her before, as if alice being touched by clara has grown magically, fully formed. *** in the arlington hotel that night he studies the large drawing clara has tacked to the door. he has come off well, clara tells him, the soul is pliable. he does not believe her. unless his soul expands during sleep, unless sleep somehow attaches the disparate elements of his character. perhaps the portrait will teach him. he loves the closeness between the two women and he enjoys their gift of his supposedly guardless nature.

-what did you think of her? -i liked her. -she's a great actress. -on the radio? -no, on the stage. -better than you, is she? -by a hundred miles. -yes, i liked her. later he will think of the seconds when he was almost asleep and they entered the dark room with candles. the approach of magicians. he feels more community remembering this than anything in his life. patrick and the two women. a study for the new world. judith and holofernes. st. jerome and the lion. patrick and the two women. he loves the tableau, even though being asleep he had not witnessed the ceremony. sometimes when he is alone patrick will blindfold himself and move around a room, slowly at first, then faster until he is immaculate and magical in it. he will parade, turn suddenly away from lampshades, duck under hanging plants, even run across the room and leap in his darkness over small tables. all night long patrick and clara have talked, the name of ambrose like a drip of water in their conversation. all night they have talked about her plan to join her 'beloved,' the sound of his name like a poison, like the word nicotine. she will leave tomorrow. she will not tell him where small is. she demands that he not try to follow her after they drive to toronto to put her on the train. patrick feels he knows nothing of most of clara's life. he keeps finding and losing parts of her, as if opening a drawer to discover another mask. they sit half-dressed on the bed on this last morning. all night long they have talked and he has felt inarticulate against the power of his unseen enemy, unable to persuade clara out of this journey towards ambrose. he offers to perform his trick for her, draws her long silk shawl from the sleeve of her coat, doubles it, and ties it around his eyes. he positions clara on the bed and tells her not to move. then he takes off into the room – at first using his hands for security, then ignoring them, just throwing his body within an inch of the window, swooping his head down parallel to shelves while he rushes across the room in straight lines, in curves, as if he has the mechanism of a bat in his human blood. he leaps across the bed delighted at her shriek. he is magnificent. he is perfect, she thinks. he mutters to her as he moves – "watch this tray" – as he flings it up and catches it. "and this eggshell on the floor which i'll crush like the bones of stump jones. you are so beautiful, clara, i'll never go blind. i want to go to sleep gazing at your face each night. i couldn't be satisfied with just touching you, smellingyou." he throws an apple into her lap, rips the date off the calendar. "i practised some nights when you were asleep." he leans forward and bites the apple, chewing and talking. she refuses all this and moves off the bed, positioning herself on the northeast corner of the rug. she puts her palms against her ears to stop hearing his endearments and stands there with her elbows sticking out. he is moving, almost frantic, now yelling his love. she can still hear him, and presses her palms tighter against the sides of her head, and closes her eyes. she feels the floor shudder under her, feels she is surrounded, contained by his whirling. suddenly she is hit hard and her left hand jars against her skull, knocking her over. she gets to her knees, dazed, and looks around. patrick is grabbing a part of the sheet towards his face. he is snuffling, blood begins to come out of his nose onto the sheet. the blindfold is around his neck like a collar. he looks up at her and, as if he can't see her, turns back to the sheet as he continues to bleed. - you moved. i told you not to. you moved. she still cannot stand up from the pain and the dizziness. she knows if she tries to stand she will fall over again. so she sits where she is. patrick is bent over watching the sheet in his hands. so much for the human element, he thinks. all his life patrick lewis has lived beside novels and their clear stories. authors accompanying their heroes clarified motives. world events raised characters from destitution. the books would conclude with all wills rectified and all romances solvent. even the spurned lover accepted the fact that the conflict had ended. after clara leaves him, patrick cleans his room on queen street obsessively. soap crystals fizz in a pail, the mop slices the week's dust. then he sits in the only dry corner where he has previously placed cigarettes and smokes the roxy, dropping ash into the bucket beside him. the room smells like a clean butcher shop. the furniture – a table, a chair, and an iguana cage – is piled on the bed at the street end of the room. sometimes he leaves a book in this corner. he has already smelled the pages, touched the print's indentations. now he can devour it like a loaf of bread with his bare hands. he wipes cigarette ash off his arm and opens wild geese. "it was not openly spoken of, but the family was waiting for caleb gare. even lind archer, the new school teacher, who had come late that afternoon all the way from yellow post with the indian mail carrier and must therefore be hungry, was waiting." clara wiping his forehead with her handkerchief. "the rocker seemed to say, 'caleb! caleb! caleb!' it amused the teacher, rather wanly." her ear listening to the skin that covered patrick's heart. he feeds the iguana, holding the vetch an inch from the neutral mouth. only the eyelid sliding down changes its expression. an animal born of another planet. he strokes the jaw with the flower. through the window he sees men appear in the blue toronto sky, inching into the air, scaffolding it. pieces of clara float around him. a kiss at union station, her mouth half-open.

-i'm sorry to ask you but i can't take it across the country. will you keep him? -what is this, a door prize? -don't talk like that, patrick. -let it free, dammit. -it's blind! stumbling back from argument. -feed it clover and vetch, lots of water. rattle the cage before you put food in. just to let him know. so he had watched clara climb, prim, silver-buckled, into the train. he walked home with the cage banging against his knee, threw in a cabbage, and left the animal alone for a week. it heard his tirades, the broken cups and glasses. the iguana knew clara dickens, knowledge of her was there within its medieval body. patrick believed in archaic words like befall and doomed. the doom of patrick lewis. the doom of ambrose small. the words suggested spells and visions, a choreography of fate. a long time ago he had been told never to follow her. if patrick was a hero he could come down on small like an arrow. he could lead an iguana on a silver leash to its mistress. dear clara all these strange half-lit lives. rosedale like an aquarium at night. underwater trees. you in a long black dress walking without shoes in ambrose's long garden while his wife slept upstairs. howling up to disturb her night. the soft rich. ambrose had class because he had you. that's what they all knew – those half-formed people who were born with money and who did nothing except keep it like a thermometer up their ass. the mean rich. the soft rich. i know why you went with ambrose. he was the harbour rat. an immigrant rat. he had to win or he lost everything. the others just had to get their oldest son into upper canada college. crop rotation. the only' one who could slide over the wall, skip along the broken glass, was small. but i don't want small, i want you.... dear clara all night the tense and bitter conversations of lovers after they exit from the greenwood bar across the street from my room. i lie by the window for summer air, and late-night couples assuming privacy seduce or accuse or fight. no i didn't. i'm sorry. goddamn you! whispered. the slap, the blow of scorned love, the nails of the other in their rake across his eyes. this battle for territory, clara, ownership and want, the fast breath of a fuck, human or cat – supernatural moans, moon talk – her hands over the face making him less anonymous, the back of her coat against brick. you were telling him something, what were you telling him? damn you! what! nothing! i keep waking to sudden intimacy. once i heard a strange humming below and looked out. a man with a carpet draped over his shoulder accompanied by a red dog. it was the neighbourhood thief, caravaggio, returning from work. he passed calmly under me, absorbed in the eating of sicilian ice cream.... i woke to your voice in danger. you were whispering. i thought at first it was dialogue from the street but it was you and i froze in the darkness – a possible dream i did not wish to let slip. i know your hesitations, your cracking voice when you are lying or getting drunk. these are familiar to me. clara? i said into the darkness, it's okay, it's okay. i was standing on the mattress at the foot of the bed. i could have touched the ceiling with both hands. but you didn't listen. i was aware of wind coming in off the street. a male voice laughed in your company. i turned and saw the lit cream-yellow of the radio dial. it was mystery hour, a replay from two or three years back. i had slept through hours of broadcasting and woke only to the pitch of your breaking voice. you had a bit part. in the plot you had fallen on bad times. at union station i refused to leave you. your face angry against the bedford limestone, damn you, patrick, leave me alone! your hair crashes against it as you gesture and break free of me. at gate 5 you stop, pause in the steam, putting your hands up in surrender like a cowboy. a truce. no we did not walk up those steps, our fingers locked like cogs. you were escaping the claustrophobia an obsessed lover brings. we placed our arms on each other's shoulders, panting. your face poured its look out. dear clara i came up to you and asked for a dance. the man with you punched me in the face. i asked you once more and he punched me in the face. i wiped off the blood below my eye. five minutes later i came back to your table and his men attacked me, leaving me in a back alley. in this dream i hadn't seen you for a long time and i loved you in your dress. it was a big celebration of some sort, you were with honourable company. i would be looking at your face and a hand would hit me. i would fall to the floor. i'd be lying there looking at your dress, then dragged away. i finally came back and asked you to dance. two things happened. for a brief while we were dancing. i wanted to hold you close but i did not want to get blood on you and you said, "it's all right, patrick," and then i was watching your face as they began forcing me back to the alley. the dream ended with me plotting with the chinese to break up the party. *** he opened the door to her and stepped back quickly, appalled. he had not expected her. he walked into the empty rooms, gesturing towards the broken things he was trying to assemble, broken glass and crockery, things he had flung long ago, after clara had gone. -what are those things? -glass, a crossword puzzle . . . a story. alice grinned at him. how much did she know about him and clara anyway?

-i'm trying to get my life in order, he said. -well, this should begin it. she moved around the room, touching nothing, as if everything in the sparse living room were potent and part of his cure. -how long has she been gone? a year and a half? two years? -longer. not long enough. he spoke in bursts. sentences needed additions, parentheses, to clarify not the information but his state. - give me a coffee, patrick. there was more than five feet between them. when she moved closer towards a news clipping attached to the wall, he automatically moved further back. he felt dangerous. alice seemed older, confident. she removed her coat and laid it on the ground by the door. he followed her into the kitchen, pumped water into the saucepan for coffee, and lit the gas. there were no chairs so she sat on the counter opposite, watching him at the stove. she was safe there. -you look tired, she said. -oh, i'm okay. physically i'm fine, just my mind. i'm lucky, whatever state i'm in my body takes care of itself. it was his longest speech for months. -i'm the reverse. that's the only way i can tell if i'm in bad shape mentally, through my body. -well, you're an actress, right? -that's right. his eyes were on everything but her, a bad sign. she slid off the counter and approached him, then stopped, inches away. his eyes caught hers, moved away, and then settled safely on her cheek. - the next move, patrick. his first smile for months. he leaned forward and clung to her to stop her vanishing. she was smaller than he imagined. she wasn't thin, or very small, but he had thought her body against him would be a different size. he could see the red in her hair by the temples, the lines under her eyes. the water in the saucepan was boiling and they did not move. they stood together feeling each other's spines, each other's hair at the back of the neck. relax, she said, and he wanted to collapse against her, be carried by her into foreign countries, into the ocean, into bed, anywhere. he had been alone too long. this was a time when returning from work he would fall nightly into a cave of dreams, so later he was not sure ithappened. it had been sudden, nothing was played out to conclusion, nothing solved by their time together, but it somehow kept him alive. she had come that day, he thought later, not for passion, but to save him, to veer him to some reality. if anyone knew where clara was, she did. he had almost walked past alice the previous week, outside the parrot theatre. he had not seen her since the farmhouse near paris plains, two years earlier, and he had hardly recognized her. but she had yelled his name. -were you at the play? -no... he shrugged distractedly. his face and eyes were wild, were seeing nothing on the street around him. his clothes old, unironed, the collar bent up. -what are you doing now? she asked. he moved himself away from her extended arm. -i'm working at a lumber yard. -come and see the play some night. meet me afterwards. -yes, all right. the 'yes' was so he could get away. he had wanted to shake her to pieces, blame her for clara. it seemed it was all a game of theatre the two of them had performed against him. a woman's education, removing his cleverness, even his revenge. he had turned and walked away from her. now, taking alice's smallest finger, he walked with her from the kitchen. -how long have you lived here? -almost a year. -there's just a bed! -there's an iguana. -oh you've got him. in bed her nature, her transparency, had startled him. as did her sudden animal growl onto his shoulder when she lay on top of him. they lay there in the blank room. -i think her mother knows where she is, patrick.

-possibly. -you should look for her. -she told me not to. -you must remove her shadow from you. -i know that. -then when we meet again we can talk ... we can say hello. she said that so strangely he would later recall it differently – clothed in sarcasm or tentative love or sadness. she had lost an earring when she got up. she said it didn't matter, that it was artificial. *** he went to see clara's mother in paris and had a late dinner with her. -when she married she eloped. but that didn't last long. -she married stump jones? -and divorced him. anyway, too many people laughed at his name. it was a terrible thing to live with and he would not change it. she was only eighteen. he said he'd gotten used to it. -what was he like? -stump was good-looking and bad-tempered. it was the snickering over hotel registers that got to her. patrick lewis, now, that's a brick of a name. she told me a good deal about you. -what did she say? -that you were probably a romantic bolshevik from southern ontario. -well, i'm an eastern ontario boy. go on. -she said she seduced you. -she said that ... she said things like that to you? -yes. -did she ever keep in touch with stump?

-i don't think so. -do you have a photograph of them? -forget her, patrick, it's been over two years. he laughed. mrs. dickens got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen. he thought she was angry, felt him rude, so he followed her and started apologizing. she pulled open the cupboard drawer and handed him the honeymoon photograph. both of them against some damn rocks. stump looked okay, but it was her face he kept gazing at. so young, her hair almost blonde then, not dark as it was now. a fuller face, innocent. -it's a foolish face, he said, not quite believing it was the same person. -yes, said her mother, she was foolish then. -where is she? -i don't like him. -nobody does. do you know where she is? -in a place small knows you will never look ... in a place he knows you will never go back to. -what do you mean? but he knew then. knew exactly where they were. he had been the searcher who had gazed across maps and seen every name except the one which was so well-known it had remained, like his childhood, invisible to him. *** patrick stares at the thin layer of moonlight on the wall. his body feels like the shadow of someone in chains. he had awakened once to clara whispering at the foot of his bed in this paris hotel room. soaking wet. two in the morning. she'd slid the buttons through the damp holes of her dress ... and another time crawled from their bed to warm her hands on the radiator.... he undreams himself, remembers she has left him. gets out of bed and walks to the wall beside the radiator against which she had leaned. he is standing in their old room at the arlington hotel. without turning on any light he bends down and puts his face close to the wall at stomach level. here they had pushed in frenzy, sexual madness. he finds the faint impression of her backbone on the white paint.

ambrose small holds a wooden match above his head, its glare falling onto the shoulders of his nightshirt. four in the morning. above him a silk bag holds naphtha. he has heard noises. his other hand turns a brass handle. now the flame and gas combine and his room breaks open in yellow light. patrick lewis is sitting in an armchair, overcoat on, looking straight at him. small draws up a chair. a mutual excitement, as if each were looking into a mirror. -where do you want me to begin, says small, with my childhood? patrick smiles. -i don't want to talk about you, small. i want clara. something about her cast a spell on me.... i don't know what it is. -it's her unfinished nature, ambrose says quietly. -perhaps. -who else knows i am here? -no one. i came just to talk to her. -i'll wake clara. go outside, she'll come out and listen to you. patrick steps outside into the dark night and sits in one of the two chairs on the grass. he is among blue trees, he can smell gum on the branches. he can hear the river. he knows this place from his childhood, the large house belonging to the rathbun timber company, which he had passed every day during the log drives. a last remnant from that era. he walks to the window and looks in. there is no longer light. ambrose must have carried the lamp back into the bedroom of the house. water from the eaves dribbles onto patrick's coat, some on his neck, and he steps back, stretching in the darkness. but there had been no rain. he notices a metal smell. he moves his eyes above the ledge of the window and simultaneously knows it has nothing to do with rain. he smells and feels kerosene pour across his shoulders, hears the rasp of the match that will kill him in the hand of small who crouches on the roof. patrick sees it fall like a knighthood towards his shoulders. he is running along the rock path to the river before he knows for certain he is on fire. his hand pulls the knife out of his pocket and uses it to slice open the coat as he runs. he stops and begins to laugh. he is all right. then he sees light in the trees around him and knows he is a hunchback of fire, and he runs – past the barrel for burning garbage, past the boat on the sand – and falls stomach down in the shallows, splashing forward. the air caught in his coat is a bubble on fire burning above the water. he turns and falls onto his back. he remains in the water, only his head visible, scared to allow his shoulders into the air. there is no pain except in his hands, which still hold on to the knife. he sticks it into the river bottom. patrick can feel the cuts in his palm. he can feel the itch on his chest from slashing open the coat.

he looks past his hand just in time. ambrose is standing on the beach. the bottle with the burning-cloth neck is travelling in the air and the explosion when it hits the water makes the river around him jump like a basket of fish, makes the night silver. patrick's left eye goes linen white, and he knows he is possibly blind there. he reaches for the knife and stumbles out, wading free of the water. ambrose hasn't moved. he doesn't move as patrick steps up to him and cuts him at the shoulder. then patrick is running towards the old hotel in the village of bellrock, a mile away. he does not trust himself to use shortcuts over the fields so he stays with the road, running past the house he was born in, over the bridge he had fished off, and up the stairs into the hotel room. when patrick woke, he could still not see properly out of one eye. his wet clothes were bunched on a chair in front of the small grate. now and then he would get up, wrap the thin quilt around his chest, and sit by the window looking down at the river. the same river, downstream from small's house, depot creek, scarred where the loggers tore open the banks to build dams. some kids were fishing knee-deep by the dock. he sat at the window feeling the leak of air through the glass. his hands stiff on his lap seemed to be someone else's hands that he was looking at in a picture. he heard clara's voice on the other side of the door. he saw his ghost in the mirror. he pushed back the bolt with his shoulder, the quilt like a cape over him. - turn the handle, i can't do that. as she came in, he moved his hands out of the way, the paws of a boxer. it hurt to put them down at his side. -oh god it is you. -hello, clara. she stood there, her coat open, her hands in her pockets. she was taking in what he looked like. his face was wet and he realized his damaged eye was crying, he was unable to control it. if you can't see you can't control anything, he thought. patrick had imagined her so often when she had not been wearing these clothes. he lifted his left arm up to wipe his face with the quilt but when his arm got to the level of his shoulder it began to shake. she came forward and wiped his cheek with her open hand, then put the wet hand of salt to her mouth. - i can't see out of this eye. her hand came up to his face again, her fingers feeling his skin, the flesh on his cheek. -can you feel that? -yes. her fingers moved into his scalp. he didn't know where to put his hands. he couldn't get them out of the way.

-what's wrong? -my hands. -put them around me, we have touched before. -i don't want you to think ... he grinned and his face ached. they stood then like that in the room. his hands on either side of the rough material of her coat, her fingers gently parting his hair to feel his scalp. -there's blood here. what the hell were you two doing? she moved out of his hold and shrugged off her coat. -i know a doctor in town, but i'll clean you up first. patrick stood at the window looking out. she came up behind him. -i've imagined us meeting all over the world, patrick, but i never thought we'd meet here. by this river you told me about. she put her head against him and they were still, as if asleep. her finger traced a delicate line down along his shoulder, parallel to a cut. - it would be terrible if we met under perfect conditions. don't you think? with a bowl of hot water beside her, she worked the dried blood out of his hair. he was tired and fought to stay awake. she squeezed the cloth dry and started washing his cuts, the one on his chest, his shoulder, and then finally his hands, getting him to gradually move his stiff fingers. - do you have your shaving stuff? yes, you must. she touched the menthol pencil to three cuts in front of his ear, then suggested that she shave him. she rinsed the razor and sat in front of him, straddling the chair. -how are you, patrick? he gave his nervous laugh that she loved. -i'm on the verge as usual. -don't lose that. he looked directly into her eyes, aiming himself at her. the first time he had looked at her continually. therewasn't any pain in his face, she noticed, just thirst. -talk to me, clara. -all these small scars ... she wiped the razor on the quilt. he looked older. more brittle. this was the way to know somebody's face, she thought. she should have shaved him before. she should have understood his breakable quality sooner. he was a creature of habit, he belonged with the last century. she wanted to paint his face, to follow the lines of his cheek and eyebrow with colours. make another spirit painting of him. he was less neutral now, his skin like the texture of a cave that would transform anything painted on it. she lathered his face, wanting to sculpt him. with her finger she wrote dickens 5 on his forehead. "i don't want you lost, patrick. i can't have you but i don't want you to get lost. " she stepped bowlegged off the chair and stretched her body to break the cramp, moving backwards until she was leaning against the wallpaper. then she walked to the window. she saw him gazing straight ahead towards the wallpaper, as if she had left her body there. flowers, vines, now and then an english pheasant in the foliage, now and then a rip caused by a drunk logger in other times trying to get out of the room, unable to find the door. he sat looking at that landscape in front of him. -do you know this area had a small sighting? it made the toronto papers and i knew it was no coincidence. he had to be living in the town i came from because you were with him. he grilled you the way i did. isn't that right? -he wanted to know where you came from. i didn't tell him much. he wasn't interested in you, patrick. he's a rich man who escaped from a rich shoe. he protects himself. he will never believe it was me you came after. he turned his head and watched her face on the pillow looking up at the ceiling. -in a way i knew i'd be injured when i saw you again. i had dreams about coming up to you at dances and being beaten back. she leaned over and touched his chest. -the doctor put on a good dressing. -does small know you're here with me? -probably, but don't talk about him, patrick. i'll go back in the morning. when she looked at his face a short while later he was asleep. the medication had made him drowsy all evening. she kept watching him a long time. around three in the morning she felt his body against her. they touched, both moving careful of his wounds, all over each other as if meeting in a dream. later she made her way to the bathroom and came back in a silhouette. he was comfortable and tired. -goodnight, clara.

-goodnight, patrick lewis. my friend. he slept gripping her hand. she dressed in the darkness and left without waking him. the sun came up over goose island, hitting the tin roof of mr. moir's house as she walked home, past the grants and the meeks. she saw young george grant with his brother russell coming back with the cows and they spoke for a few minutes. she continued to the bend in the road and down the curling path to the house they lived in and would probably move from now. she felt somehow deliriously happy between the two points of this journey. when she reached the house she didn't go in but went down to the beach and sat facing the water, leaning against the red boat. it was cold but she had her coat on and she was thinking. not knowing what was happening now at the hotel, that with the light patrick had awakened to find the sheets thick with blood which had escaped from his dressings, from their moving together in the darkness, discovering even the print of her hand perfect on the wallpaper, a print of blood on the english flowers of his bedroom where she had leaned to balance herself in their lovemaking as she crouched over him. the dressings hung off him like a limp white rib while ambrose came down from the house and saw her sitting there thinking, looking at patrick's river.