Love Letters of the Angels of Death (17 page)

Desperate gunmen pirating heavy equipment – this is what it takes to get the boomtown school to finally lock its doors. You strap Aaron and baby Levi into the car, take the detour around the police barricades, and gather at the school with the rest of the moms who aren't at work themselves. None of you is afraid of the beetle's rifle, and together you stand in the snow banks outside the school, pulling on the doors, imagining your kids sitting under their desks inside, away from the windows.

Outside the school, it's like a meeting of surly mother bears. “I bet they won't say a thing about this in the media,” one of the other bears snuffles through her muzzle at you. “All the news up here cares about reporting is the price of shares at the plants.”

Eventually, the principal cracks the front door and starts walking the kids out, bringing them to their mothers in small groups. The ones without parents in the crowd outside will just have to wait.

The beetle eventually burns off all the gas in the bulldozer. It shoots away all its rounds but one. And then it pleads with the police over its cell phone, asking them to go find the dowdy single mother who won't sleep with it anymore and bring her to the construction site so she can watch the beetle blast its brains out into the snow. The cops refuse to do it. Instead, they just arrest the beetle after the rye is all gone and the cold sets in.

Despite the months and months of cold, you never stop thinking about tarsand beetles. There's a handful of truisms we remember from our days as kids in school – something about fear being bred by ignorance. We do some research on tarsand beetles, hoping to cure this crazy phobic problem of yours.

“Don't call it ‘hysteria,'” you warn me. “That's a sexist term.”

Maybe you're right. But I never did try to call it hysteria.

“Okay. They're not actually called tarsand beetles,” you explain as you turn off the computer. “And they never really eat tar. They're supposed to be called spruce sawyers.”

“Well, that makes more sense.” I wonder if you realize your hands are in your hair, fingering it, strand by strand, as you speak.

“And the guy next door was wrong. They won't bite people. They don't even try to eat anything that isn't part of a dead tree. They're actually a vital part of the forest ecosystem.”

“Right.”

“What they do is they lay their eggs underneath the bark of dead softwood trees once it starts to get cold in the fall. And then their larvae hatch in the spring and eat up a bunch of the wood. So they're helping to break down old trees and renew the soil. They're decomposers. They're helping.”

I pull one of your hands away from your hair. “Of course they are.”

You turn your hand so its fingers are holding onto mine. “And I bet you can guess what their favourite habitats are: areas where land has recently been cleared for new construction – which means everywhere, around here. Oh, and they also love land burned out by forest fires.”

Forest fires – all those grey trees still un-fallen along the highway. They're standing out there waiting for your thick yellow hair to ride past them down the road, scattering the tarsand beetles you've ferried from the city.

The city makes it through another winter. It's well into spring when I come home from work to find the bottom third of your hair is white. You were in the backyard painting the new fence with a sticky alkyd wood stain when a tarsand beetle flew right at your face – legs dangling under its belly, antennae laid back. It probably just came to see what was making that fantastic turpentine smell. When you heard the low, horrible buzz-flap of its big black wings, some mindless, electrical spark in your spinal cord ordered your arm to flinch. As always, the reaction was too violent and a tall, toxic plume of white paint came rising out of the can. It splashed against your back as you fled, destroying both your ratty old T-shirt and your braided rope of blonde hair.

At the salon where they cut off four inches of your hair, you tell your story to the stylist. She clucks her tongue as she tries to pull a comb through your hair. “No one likes dem, my love. Dey was the devil when we was kids.”

“You had tarsand beetles back in Newfoundland?”

She shrugs into the mirror. “Well, we had June bugs. An' dey serves de same purpose.”

When you're home again, I try to be gracious about the haircut but it does make me sad. I meet you at the front door, pushing your hood away from your face, sliding my fingers underneath what's left of your hair, up the length of your neck to where it starts to grow out of your nape. It's not just shorter. It's darker – made up of the new hair you've grown over the winter, since the light went away. All that's left are the strands that haven't been out in the sun long enough for their pigments to break down, lightening enough to lose that bamboo colour Janae used to call “dishwater blonde.”

You won't look at me. “I had a lot of split ends that needed trimming anyway.”

“What are we going to do with you?” I say. “These bugs aren't going anywhere. This is their natural environment. They've been here since before the dinosaurs. They're leftover from when this place was still the great big, hot jungle that made the oil sands in the first place.”

But you don't apologize this time. Maybe you worked it all out in the hairdresser's chair. I don't know. Instead, you step away from me, opening the front door again, waving your arm toward the north.

Outside I hear the frogs creaking out some kind of love song for each other in the bog behind the trailer park boundaries, beneath the black spruce trees. I'm used to the trees now. At first sight they make most people worry about what must have happened to those poor, deformed Christmas trees. They like to think it's pollution, or something. But the short, ragged limbs all covered in lacy swags of lichen, the prickly balls of tangled needles at the tops of the trunks – that's just what perfectly normal, healthy black spruces look like. It's rare to see one more than fifty feet tall since they usually burn to the ground every thirty years. But I've heard the aerial photographers at the plant say that up in the Athabasca River delta there are black spruces as tall as smoke stacks, growing in the safety of the little islands standing out in the water where the fires can never reach them. But those aren't the trees in our neighbourhood. There they are outside the window, growing in the spongy clouds of the sphagnum moss on the other side of the fire break the city has scraped into the clay in a wide, weedy swath behind our fence.

“Look out there. Do you see that?” you ask me. “That is the end of all human things. Those horrible little spruces go on and on and on out there, uninterrupted all the way up to the Arctic. And I'm in here with the baby and the little boys, looking out at it all day, every day. I'm just left here, wondering if the school's been locked down, or the bridge has gone out, or the forest is on fire again. So, Brigs, as long as we live here I have two options for managing my mental health –”

“Close the door. It still gets cold out there at night –”

“Listen. I can stop trying to fight back this bush fever, you know. I can give into it and let myself go crazy. I could go crazy. People here do it all the time. And then you'd have to get a flashlight and a hook and a big net to come pull me out of the muskeg and drag me back.”

I know I shouldn't be laughing but I do it anyway.

“Or,” you begin again, “or we can stick with the second option. I can keep on neatly consolidating all my anxiety and only resort to freaking out and screaming and running and destroying myself in the presence of that one big, nasty bug.”

I take hold of the open door, gripping it high over your head. I'm pushing it closed when you stop me – standing in front of it, holding it open, rooting your feet into the floor and bracing the door open with your hip.

“The bugs aren't even nasty,” I say. “You told me so yourself. Remember? Tarsand beetles are just spruce sawyers – part of the boreal ecosystem. And the worst thing they've ever done to you is bump into you long enough to make sure you're not a dead spruce tree who needs some help with your rotting – ”

You gasp. “Rotting?” And then you pivot out of the open doorway and lunge into me, grabbing two fistfuls of my shirt. “Rotting?”

You're trying to shake me. It's got me laughing so hard I actually sway, knocking you sideways, stumbling past you, banging against the open door, slamming it shut.

Twenty

We're here in the foyer of this dark brown downtown restaurant in the city, looking for Derek – your brother.

“He's going to order something boozy and drink it right in front of me just to see if I'll freak out at him,” you warn us.

I reach down and squeeze your shoulder through your new pea coat. Because it was a gift I bought for you when you weren't around, the wool is dyed red. I know you never would have chosen it yourself. Derek will know it too.

I can hear you exhale as you open your cell phone and scroll through the list of incoming calls. “Where the heck is he?”

I nod and jerk my thumb at the door made of smoked glass in the wall beside us. “He's got to be in the bar.”

You slump, sinking away from your red shoulders, shrinking even smaller. “Well, let's go in and find him then.”

Behind the glass door, Derek is in the bar. He sees my large, pale face through the shadows as soon as I step inside, and he's waving at us from his seat in a corner. He's not drunk, but he is loud – though he's always been loud. We move toward him, surrounding his perch at a tiny, high table with a metal top cast to look like a manhole cover.

“Hey. Sit down. I wanna ask you something.”

“Yeah? What?”

“I wanna know how your family history research is going.” He's already asking even though you haven't finished climbing up onto the stool beside him.

It's a weird thing for him to ask. What does he care about all that obsessive family tree stuff anymore? It makes you mad. “Derek – I've got four kids under the age of nine to take care of all day long. They're incredibly time-consuming and I don't have a lot left for – ”

“Hey, I'm not trying to make you feel lazy. It's just an innocent question.”

“Sure.”

“I'm asking because I ran into this guy, online – he's, like, Dad's second cousin once removed, or something – and he knows a ton about our family's roots.”

“Great.” You're nodding. “No, that's really great.”

“Yeah. So anyways, this same guy made a trip all the way out to the Maritimes just so he could walk through the old graveyards taking pictures of all the headstones with familiar names on them.”

We get it. It's just like it was when we went looking for Lost Caroline's grave, out there in the woods.

“And while he's out there, he finds the grave of our own great-grandfather. That's Dad's grandfather who – ”

“ – who died before Dad was even born so they never met,” you interrupt. “I know that – we all know that.”

“Right, but you don't know the rest of it yet.” Derek is leaning over the table like he's telling us a secret. “So the cemetery caretakers see Dad's cousin standing there, taking pictures of our great-grandfather's grave, and they come rushing right out to meet him – like he's a celebrity or something. And then they tell him the story.” Derek gulps a mouthful of yeasty yellow grain juice from the glass sweating on the table in front of him. “See, right after the war, our great-grandfather's body was – exhumed. Did you know that?”

You sit back. “No. Why the heck would they do that?”

“Well, he was originally buried in some kind of charity plot for poor people, and when one of his sons finally made enough money to move him into the posh district of the graveyard, they went ahead and had it done. Caused a huge fight between all the brothers and sisters, but they did it anyway. And while the body was being moved,” Derek glances behind us, “someone took a good look at it.”

We're both frowning now. “At what?”

“At him – at the body.”

“Somebody opened our great-grandfather's coffin – after burial?”

“Yup. It was ten years since he was first buried, and they opened it right up.”

You cock your head to one side. “Why would anybody ever do that?”

Derek sits back and waves both his arms. “How the hell should I know?”

“I have no idea. But it's a fair enough question for me to ask, isn't it – ”

“Then what happened?” I interrupt.

Derek takes another drink. “Right. So great-granddad's lying there inside the coffin, over ten years after they ran him through their shoddy, wartime embalming routine and buried him in the mud in the cheapest box they could find. And here's where the story gets – awesome. The caretakers told Dad's cousin that inside the coffin, the body looked like they'd just wheeled him off the hearse that morning.”

You tilt your head to the other side.

Derek's tapping one fingertip against the tabletop in time with the words as he speaks. “Meaning, he didn't rot – all that time down there and he did not rot. They say his suit jacket had a little fuzzy white stuff growing on the lapel where a flower had been but otherwise he was perfect.”

Now you're shaking your head. “Derek, that story isn't true. It's an urban legend those caretakers are passing on from second-, third- or fourth-hand accounts. And those stories must have already been exaggerated in the first place so – ”

“I knew you were going to say that.” He jabs his finger toward you. “But why? Short of driving across country and digging him up ourselves to take a second look, there's nothing we can do to prove it either way. Every word of what those caretakers said could have been absolutely true.” He folds his arms across his front. “What do you make of it, Brigs?”

I clear my throat. “Must have been a cool, dry area they buried him in – at the start.”

“Dry? In the poor people section of a Maritime graveyard? I don't think there's any such thing as a dry area in a place like that.” Derek is talking to me but he nudges you with his elbow. And you're limp enough that you sway on top of your high stool when he touches you. “Oh, cheer up,” he bawls at you. “Don't you get it? We are literal descendants of the undead. We're one-eighth vampire. These days that's got better social cachet than being one-quarter royalty.”

You laugh so loudly a few of the other people in the bar turn to look. “Derek – you've been using this to meet women.”

“And why not?” Derek slaps me on the back. “Vampires are smokin' hot, right Brigs? You know her well enough that you're not even surprised to hear what she really is, are you? You were just waiting for someone like a cemetery caretaker to stand up and expose us all, weren't you, Brigs?” He pokes you with his elbow again. “Look at him.”

You do look at me. Your skin and hair and eyes – as always, there's hardly any pigment in any of them. The red of your coat reflects off your neck like it's a blank white screen. And I notice again how the skin in certain parts of your face – over your temples and around your eyes – is transparent enough for me to see the webs of blue veins that run beneath it.

But I just bow my head and laugh.

Derek waves his hand in your face. “Listen, forget about the vampire thing if you don't like it. Whatever. I just wanted to tell you all this because I know you've got that phobia about – rotting.” He flicks a glance at me when he says it, like he's sorry. “And it's not that I don't get that. I do. I mean, I can't imagine what you guys must have – ”

“It's okay,” I shrug. “We're okay.”

“But,” he begins again, looking down at the top of your head, “don't – don't cremate yourself, okay? Burning is not the only way to get around rotting. You don't have to do it–”

You roll your head on your shoulders. “Derek – ”

“–Because even after we die and get buried and everything, people like us – we won't necessarily have to end up like – like everybody else.” This is where he silently tries to apologize to me again.

You're making that scoffing sound.

“Just – stop, okay,” Derek blurts it out. “Quit being so greedy when it comes to death in the family. You act like you're the only one of us who knows anything about death – and it's not true.”

You're not scoffing anymore. You're smiling into your hand. “Vampires,” you say. “Here Derek, I've got something for you to look up on YouTube when you get home.”

I already know what you're going to say. For some reason, it makes me sit up taller in my seat.

“Go home, get on YouTube, and type in a search for ‘Incorrupt Saints.'” That's what you say as you slide off the edge of your barstool to stand on the floor.

But Derek's got one of those fancy computer cell phones and he's on the Internet already, right there in the bar. “Does ‘incorrupt' have one R or two?”

“Come on, Brigs, let's get back to the boys,” you're saying.

I lean close to him before I start to follow you out the door. “Hey, do you need any money?”

“Not this time. I'm good.” He actually looks up from his screen and grins at me.

The video clip of the grainy still photos of the Incorrupt Saints is loading on the tiny computer screen suspended between his fingers. In a minute, its soundtrack will start to play. It won't be the Eastern Orthodox chanting we heard in the version of the video that we watched at home. Instead it will be a maudlin Christian song, sung in a high tenor and in Tagalog, an urban Filipino language I never did learn to speak very well when I was living there, out in the jungles. The song will be loud, and Derek will curse and scramble to crank the volume into silence. But before it all starts, he has time to ask me one more thing. “Hey, keep her out of the furnace, would ya Brigs? Seriously...”

You don't turn around to look at us as you grab for the handle bolted to the smoked glass exit door. You're leaving but you're calling back to your brother as if the two of you are working on a crossword puzzle together.

“That's ‘incorrupt' – with two Rs.”