Helpless

Whether the town had remained all those years precisely as he remembered it, or whether memory itself, having outlived the people who first entrusted it with such burdens, had patiently rebuilt the place from weather, longing and those few objects that refuse to surrender themselves even after names have begun to do so, he could never afterward determine; he knew only that somewhere in the north of Ontario there had been, and perhaps still was, a little settlement gathered between black spruce, cedar swamp and lakes so broad and still that evening seemed not to descend upon them but to rise slowly out of them, carrying with it the smell of damp earth, split pine, cold iron and melted ice that had lain all day beneath the sun only to surrender its warmth almost at once when the light began to fail.

The houses had never been remarkable. Their paint peeled. Their roofs lifted a little each spring where frost had worked beneath the shingles. A dog slept beneath the McAllister porch with such unwavering devotion to the shade that children stepped around him without ever expecting him to wake. Old Mrs. Grasby swept her front steps before daylight, though the road beyond remained dust until noon and leaves returned each afternoon as faithfully as they had before, because there are certain labours which survive usefulness and become instead a way of measuring the hours left to a person. Ti-Gilles climbed the narrow stairs to the church loft every Saturday with the brass key hanging from a leather thong about his neck and wound the clock that no longer kept proper time, though no one could remember exactly when it had ceased to do so, and every Sunday the bell announced an hour that belonged neither to the week just finished nor the one about to begin, yet the ever-dwindling congregation came nevertheless, arriving by habit or hope or something lying too deeply between the two to require a name.

He remembered the town as quiet, although it had never truly possessed silence. The mill argued all day with the river. Crows cooed, clicked and quarrelled in the poplars, occasionally taking to the air in pairs to harass eagles and hawks and ospreys and vultures kettling effortlessly on columns of rising warm air. Somewhere a loose sheet of tin complained whenever the wind shifted from the lake, and every summer the screen door of his mother’s house, its spring stretched almost beyond recovery, closed itself with a long reluctant sigh that carried through the evening while coffee cooled upon the stove and flies circled the milk pail in the pantry. But afterward, whenever the place returned to him, it returned clothed in silence, as though memory, unable to preserve every separate sound, had discarded them one by one until only the room they had enclosed remained. All his changes were there.

It might even be that the windows behind the stars were never so blue as he afterward believed them to have been. Glass gathers colours from whatever it cannot hold, and perhaps it was only because the first stars had begun appearing before the lamps were lit that the panes seemed to hover somewhere between earth and heaven; perhaps the yellow moon had not always risen so large above the cedar ridge, nor the thermal-riding raptors circled with such grim and solemn certainty. Yet whenever they came — and they did come, whether in truth or only in recollection — they passed overhead without haste, their wings laying broad shadows across the fields and the roofs and the eyes turned upward, and during those few moments one might look at a neighbour one had known since childhood and discover, not a stranger exactly, but the father in the son’s posture, the grandmother in the girl’s patient hands, grief passing through generations with the quiet persistence of groundwater finding again an old channel beneath frozen earth.

Only afterward were chains added to the doors, though he could not have said when they had first been fastened or by whom. The doors themselves opened readily enough. Neighbours entered without knocking. Children crossed one another’s kitchens as freely as fields. Iceboxes were raided. Cribbage played. Nascent adolescent anomie experienced, futile yearning looks exchanged. The screen door sighed, struck its frame, sighed again. Yet something else, impossible to point toward because it occupied no visible place, had gradually settled between one heart and the next, not all at once but by such small accumulations that no single day announced its arrival: a letter postponed until spring, a hand not extended because yesterday there had been time enough, a name left unspoken at a funeral because everyone already knew who was meant, affection mistaken for endurance until, after enough seasons had passed, neither resembled the other.

Perhaps this happened everywhere. Perhaps it belonged only to that town. Perhaps there had been no town at all, only a country the heart invents because it cannot bear to admit that the place where it first learned love and loss has vanished into ordinary geography. He had ceased trying to decide. He knew only that, when sleep came uncertainly in distant cities whose lights possessed neither the patience nor the darkness of those northern evenings, he sometimes heard again that old spring complaining as the screen door eased itself shut, and for an instant before waking it seemed someone had opened it from within, not to leave the house but to admit whoever had at last found the road home, while above the trees great birds crossed the night in silence — not because they made no sound, but because from so great a height no human ear could follow them — and the moon climbed once more above the ridge, old enough now to remember every face that had looked toward it, indifferent enough to keep them all lying in the burned-out basement of memory.