In the Skin of a Lion (12 page)

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.

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.

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.

Her hand came up to his face again, her fingers feeling his skin, the flesh on his cheek.

Her fingers moved into his scalp. He didn’t know where to put his hands. He couldn’t get them out of the way.

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.

She moved out of his hold and shrugged off her coat.

Patrick stood at the window looking out. She came up behind him.

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.

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.

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.

He gave his nervous laugh that she loved.

He looked directly into her eyes, aiming himself at her. The first time he had looked at her continually. There wasn’t any pain in his face, she noticed, just thirst.

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.

He turned his head and watched her face on the pillow looking up at the ceiling.

She leaned over and touched his chest.

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.

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.

PALACE OF PURIFICATION

I
N THE TUNNEL
under Lake Ontario two men shake hands on an incline of mud. Beside them a pickaxe and a lamp, their dirt-streaked faces pivoting to look towards the camera. For a moment, while the film receives the image, everything is still, the other tunnel workers silent. Then Arthur Goss the city photographer packs up his tripod and glass plates, unhooks the cord of lights that creates a vista of open tunnel behind the two men, walks with his equipment the fifty yards to the ladder, and climbs out into sunlight.

Work continues. The grunt into hard clay. The wet slap. Men burning rock and shattering it wherever they come across it. Filling hundreds of barrels with liquid mud and hauling them out of the tunnel. In the east end of the city a tunnel is being built out under the lake in order to lay intake pipes for the new waterworks.

It is 1930. The cut of the shovel into clay is all Patrick sees digging into the brown slippery darkness. He feels the whole continent in front of him. They dig underneath one of the largest lakes in North America beside a hissing lamp, racing with the speed of their shadows. Each blow against the shale wall jars up from the palms into the shoulders as if the body is hit. Exhaustion overpowers Patrick and the other tunnellers within twenty minutes, the arms itching, the chest dry. Then an hour
more, then another four hours till lunch when they have thirty minutes to eat.

During the eight-hour shifts no one speaks. Patrick is as silent as the Italians and Greeks towards the
bronco
foremen. For eight hours a day the air around them rolls in its dirty light. From somewhere else in the tunnel there is the permanent drone of pumps attempting to suck out the water, which is constantly at their heels. All morning they slip in the wet clay unable to stand properly, pissing where they work, eating where someone else left shit.

As the muckers move forward with their picks and shovels, the gunnite crew sprays a mixture of concrete and sand onto the walls, which would otherwise crumble after a few hours of exposure to the air. And if they are digging incorrectly – just one degree up, burrowing too close to the weight of Lake Ontario during this mad scheme by Commissioner Harris to collect lake water 3,300 yards out in the lake? They have all imagined the water heaving in, shouldering them aside in a fast death.

Whenever the tunnellers reach large walls of rock or shale beds the foreman clears the tunnel and the transportation mules are herded back. Then Patrick separates himself from the others. He removes his belt that has the buckle, pats his wet clothes for any other sign of metal, and hoists the box of dynamite onto his shoulder. With a lamp he walks towards the far reaches of the tunnel alone. There is no sound here – no wind, no noise of work. He hears only the slosh of his feet tromping through water, his own breathing in the darkness.

At the end of the tunnel he holds the lamp up against the dark wall, trying to imagine the structure of the rock in front of him, the shape, its possible fissures. He puts the lamp down and
augers out holes for the sticks of dynamite. Only at these times are his eyes close to what he digs into all day. The burn of the lamp spills against the wet earth as he works. Once it revealed the pale history of a fossil, a cone-shaped cephalopod, which he sheared free and dropped into his pocket.

Although he dynamites for the foreman, most of the time Patrick works with the muckers in the manual digging. He is paid extra for each of the charges laid. Nobody else wants the claustrophobic uncertainty of this work, but for Patrick this part is the only ease in this terrible place where he feels banished from the world. He carries out the old skill he learned from his father – although then it had been in sunlight, in rivers, logs tumbling over themselves slowly in the air.

He sidewinds the powder fuse, which will burn at two minutes to the yard, and ignites it. He picks up the lamp, and begins his walk back to the others. There is no hurry, there is no other light in the tunnel but this one lamp and as he moves his shadow shifts like a giant alongside him. When he reaches the others at the shaft he hears with them the crumple of noise as the shale displaces and the rock splinters into shards and flints in the far darkness under the lake.

As the day progresses heat rises in the tunnel. The men remove their shirts and hammer them into the hard walls with spikes. Patrick can recognize other tunnellers on the way home by the ragged hole in the back of their shirts. It is a code among them, like the path of a familiar thick bullet in the left shoulder blade. At the end of the day they climb from the tunnel into the desert of construction which had been Victoria Park Forest, where the waterworks is now being built. They see each other’s bodies steaming in the air.