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Title: The Land of Look Behind

Author: Paul Cameron Brown

Release Date: January 6, 2010 [EBook #30874]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAND OF LOOK BEHIND ***




Produced by Sorour Imani.




FOREWORD


The Land of Look Behind hopes to be something of a rear-view mirror, at
once cocked to reveal our innermost dimensions while transporting that,
which by necessity, must lie beyond. Involving ourselves in any
interplay with flickering images, of course, must be more than fireside
watching and it is my hope the book will be seen not solely as a
collection of short stories, although these do figure prominently in
the narrative. Satire, "beast fables," and texts (single-page entries)
mingle casually with the longer tales. Regardless of the genre, they
hope to speak as a unit--to view the conflicting colours of a prism's
radiation. Allow me to detail what you can expect.

On the subject of Indian myths, these are entirely of my own making.
They are an attempt to visualize the mysteries of creation through
alien perspectives. Oral myths were Canada's indigenous literature. In
this vein, the writer resorts to utilizing the spoken ballad form in
some of his exercises. Some of the prose pieces reflect a mirror world
where the gazer chances upon reality with a new breath of
perception--much as the native people's world was to the arrival of the
whites. Bewilderment with the natural world is the keynote here. For
how many of us have wished, like the Indian, to clarify a particularly
taxing bit of life--to elucidate its function into a more recognizable
form?

On a larger plane, this is the issue before the book--the "terrible
algebra of our existences,"--explored with the urgency and sometime
seriousness it deserves.



The Land of Look Behind
 By Paul Cameron Brown

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  To Cross The Bay
  Upturn The Rock
  Seaeggs
  The Hire
  The Nightlamp
  The Strongbox
  The Sandpit
  The Wager
  Errands
  Ponchontas
  The Bloodfish
  The Garden Patch
  The Monarch
  Brébeuf
  City The Insects Invade
  Plaudits
  Summer's Clock
  Automobile Soft Legs
  The Pelly, The Powder and the Snake
  Jabiru
  Adua
  Rip



TO CROSS THE BAY

"I wouldn't try a crossing in weather like this," warned the old man.
"It's a bad time of year, what with the wind and all. Worse still, the
lake water is lethal by November. That means if you capsize it will be
the chill that does you in."

The old man stopped short, conscious of the look of defiance in the
youth's eyes. Young fool biting the nose to spite his face, he thought.

The marina was closed for the season, but the island's residents made
contact with the mainland one way or the other. Until mid-winter there
was a ferry service, but that assumed a fair bit of discipline from a
resident. He had to go and come when the province obliged. Young bloods
off to escape the monotony of Wolfe Island were only marginally willing
to conform their Saturday festivities with an arbitrary ruling. No, it
was too easy to keep a boat in tow at a friend's landing. Keep a bottle
to ward off the night's chill. A bottle for tonic against the elements
and a buttress against authority. The old man knew if he did not avail
this one a boat--a safe one at that--he would put his hands on a craft
of some sort. Accountability, he thought. They mustn't care about their
own lives. Still, there was a living to be made and it was a marina,
albeit a closed one. He would still get a boat one way or the other, he
mused again as he watched the light fade in the evening sky. He pulled
his collar sharply. Yellow leaves were beginning to form a mat on the
wooden stairs leading to the shed. He could just make out land's end
against a funnel gray sky. Better to advise the young man of the
dangers, suggest a daytime crossing. Perhaps even try a little reverse
psychology.

The boy, if he could be called that, was growing impatient.

"I'll be all right with a life-jacket. The boat won't be overloaded.
Just the three of us. My cousin and her kid are going with me."

The old man's eyes stirred from the damp reverie of the previous moment.

"I can't let you take a child out into that. The water's choppy at
best. You know next to nothing about handling a craft if she takes on
water or if it becomes turbulent. Why are you in such an all-fired
hurry to get across anyhow?"

"Let's just say it's my business. My uncle supplies you with business
during the summer months. He has a boat in tow here now. I'm
responsible. It's still normal weather for this time of year. Now step
aside and stop your glib patronizing and palming yourself off as an
expert on the sea."

"I can't stop you, son. I can only suggest, well that you await next
morning and only take two across at one time. Many a person has
received a cruel surprise out there. Why this area's full of tales
dating back to the earliest times concerning drownings. Why from the
time of the Loyalists up through my earliest childhood--all the time in
between that--my family has run the marina and it seems someone is
claimed yearly by this lake. The French didn't call it an inland ocean
for nothing. Some even claim there's tides--real swells that will take
a boat and . . . ."

"The French, the Loyalists. I'm not here to listen to a travelog. What
do I care if a long list of idiots blundered to their doom. I'm now and
intend to keep on living. What should I care about the past!"

"That may very well be, son, but nobody sets out to drown. Even on the
calmest days a sudden storm whips up and . . . I remember my daddy
telling of a group of early settlers up from the Bay of Quinte area
crossing to attend a church service--full seven of them drowned after a
heavy wind whipped . . . ."

"Church," snorted the other. "Well, I'm not going to any church that's
for sure." He broke into a snicker, his dark eyes flashing above a set
of stained teeth.

"Yes, I guess you're not. Your type will . . . ."

"My type, is it? My type is not so gutless as you, that's a fact. A
little natural obstacle doesn't send me shivering to the nearest root
cellar. This is near winter. You have to bloody well expect a little
discomfort at this time."

He had unnotched the first of several ropes securing the craft. The
boat, a little three seater, sturdy, but otherwise quite frail was
bobbing up then down as each successive dark wave hobnolled it against
the current. It looked for all the world like a large, red currant
fleshy against the wind. The young man checked the fuel, began to rev
the motor before glancing toward the distant shore. A package of
cigarettes emerged from his coat pocket. Blue gray puffs, sentinel
like, climbed the air about his person. He spat into the water and
proceeded to throw the match after it. Both whirled in the spray, then
disappeared from sight. The old man sensed his growing uneasiness but
that resilient pride checked any apparition of modesty.

"Put the fare on my uncle's account. I'll return the boat tomorrow
morning."

Little lights some ten miles distant were fingering the early darkness.
Something near the water's edge bobbed cork-like in the growing dusk.
Always the worst time of day, the old man pondered, a process of
diminishing returns. Not quite dark, sure as hell not light--an in
between shudder world, a limbo of gray.

"When will the girl and her baby be along?", the old man queried.

"I'll see to that. You never mind. Go back inside, pop, where it's
warm. You'll feel better. Entering the number and registration just
about does it. I'll keep you posted," he laughed a growing laugh that
tore soft wind from his mouth. He spat again, returned to his car and
was soon out of sight.

The old man looked wearily at the ground. He was recalling more and
more of that early story his dad passed down from his dad concerning
the overcrowded boat up Adolphustown way so many years ago. If God
allowed decent churchgoers to be snuffed from sight in the act of
attending His worship, think of what must await young fools who defy
His natural laws. To be drowned outright was bad enough. To meet death
on a fool's errand with a woman and child in tow for some vaguely evil
purpose was scant courtesy to their lives. He recalled seeing the
plaque near the church outside Adolphustown and wondering as a child
why, how, they could have met death that Sunday morning when crossing
the bay in so devout a fashion. He had never tried to anticipate God's
will or ponder events anymore than passing suggestion might receive.
The little white pioneer church near a knoll on a rising hill framed
the growing memory in his mind. A dirt road snaked up to its door with
the bay clearly visible from every pew completed the stucco walls that
dotted the heavy distance. A pretty enough place, especially in mid
summer with the smell of sweet hay in the nostrils or a full breakfast
under the belt with a pleasant drive out to smell the country air. Yes,
that little church made a lasting impression on any who might see it.
Certainly more for its serene presence than any link with that dark
episode in its past. At least this was the way he was thinking. Yet he
always wondered where the graves of those seven drowned might be. They
were pioneer graves, a mite shy of 200 years but they must exist. A
cold wind with the not too distant splash of some object brought his
thoughts back to the present. Wonder what happens to those drowning
today, he felt himself saying almost aloud. Do they really resemble the
element they've been cast from? I mean, are their lips really blue or
did fear choke all colour from their countenances? He thought of the
baby and its mother he had not met. Wondered if the next light he saw
midway out into the channel would be the same skiff he had registered
and had at least ostensibly given the O.K. to make the perilous
crossing. Many thoughts like these passed through his mind as he
swathed a scarf more fully around his neck.

"Must be cold, so cold down into that channel," he thought turning to
the stove door on his shanty. "I'll put a few extra logs on the fire,"
as he poked some tattered newspapers by the edge of the stove. He lit
his pipe and watched the smoke fade toward horizon's line where a skiff
disappeared from view. Half absentmindedly, he thought he measured a
headline describing a craft missing since, since ... No, he mused, just
my preoccupation, he thought settling down for a quiet smoke.



UPTURN THE ROCK

Upon the rocks where the baubles of broken blue glass wink at the sun
and gather strands of rusted wire with the occasional bloodroot
wildflower, a man is unbending in his efforts to construct a stone rail
fence. Specks of mica in the rock are like lizards basking in the heat
of a mid-day or a man's thumb placed squarely about these noisome
stones clattering as one more of their number comes to rest and home.

The line of cherokee rocks bends first up, then downward in movement
across the meadow much like a labouring oar listing but finally brought
into play. The glitter of turquoise water with jewels of light on her
passing wave--like wings entrances much as does this fence moving
smartly into the space of green and earth.

The man, a stooped farmer, has toiled for days to clear this land for
tillage. His impact seems negligible to efforts given yet gradually he
surmises a scant return is being paid. He picks a wildflower nudging
its face through calloused stone and watches the juice break onto
forward skin. An old saying reminds him insect bites will lessen should
he smear the liquid onto exposed limbs. He is perspiring now and the
rocks shove face-like projections into the consciousness of forest and
that periphery area, his clearing.

The fence begins to melt as if in a haze and the logic of clearing this
vast expanse of earth and rock escapes him. He thinks of each rock as
the buttress of a treasure box he has just hidden and is loath to
dislodge further stones. He ponders Christ's parable of the Kingdom of
Heaven likened unto treasure buried in a field. For reasons unclear but
not necessarily related to the blood juice, he imagines the fence to be
the one at Chancellorsville where a Union regiment died to a man and
was found by a burial brigade with apple blossoms stuck to each
bloodied face.

Evasive now, he perceives the fence to be the one stopping Pickett's
charge at Gettysburg or that fence at Mons in northern France which
turned a war. He begins to rummage through the piled stones for spent
bullets and other mementoes of a great battle. He relives the story of
the Angel of Mons[1].

As he dislodges more and more stones, he showers chunks of limestone
and granite backward onto the barren field. The shower of rock is
somewhat reminiscent of Ungava's meteor spray or splintered debris
forced down a soldier's foxhole. Perhaps a runic stone will fall from
tangled roots when he burns the dead stumps of trees deciphering once
and for all why men labour or think at all. The fence swirls on and on
in growing amnesia becoming the very touchstone of all purpose, stones
from Jericho's Wall or the passkeys taken from our material existence.
Gabriel, the archangel, will sound his trumpet here, he is assured. The
dead and unburied of nameless acts of toil and dread will stand a
stone's breadth across this fence. The Face of God will be seen in the
pact nature has made with earth and stone.

He turns and puts his hat by a tree, lifts a canteen and imagines what
all might be should vegetation ever be coded and stones prophets to
their accordion earth.

[1] Allied soldiers at the first battle of Mons believed certain of
their numbers had escaped destruction by the intervention of a Heavenly
spectre.



SEAEGGS

The reef was inviting, her languid coral nudging the breakers as they
returned from sea. From the instep of the dingy, the fisherman in his
broken English was advising the seated men of dangers indigenous to
these waters.

"None of that hostile marine life business, Steve--keep it simple--use
words he's familiar with," the man with a razor lip, Cliff, muttered to
his companion. The other was busy going through the motions in heavily
accented Spanish broadly emphasizing common words that lead to nods and
ballyhoo, those expected currencies of behavior.

"I'm getting through," came the reply. "Seems beyond the reef, dolphins
and the occasional shark gather. Good fishing, though--red snappers and
groupers with anemones along the bottom--the Mexicans eat those you
know--call'em seaeggs."

Cliff, only vaguely interested, beckoned Steve's attention back to that
one inescapable query--was it safe to dive.

Another brief flurry of words were exchanged with the fisherman raising
a bronzed arm to touch the crown of his cap. Some indecipherable
Spanish mutterings followed and another burst of loud exclamations
before Steve halted his forays into that basic issue of logic and
pernicity. Cliff eyed the two and then spoke again.

"I don't have to catch every word of his conversation to understand the
general drift of his speech. He feels some danger exists, so why chance
it? Why soften his warning with your doggerel translations. Your
Spanish is at least good enough to surmise what I'm instinctively
feeling. Let's quit and go ashore."

"Not so fast. The water's calm here and the visibility rings like a
bell. He mentioned sharks have been sighted here not that there's ever
been an attack."

"Yeah, well if there's never been a problem it's because this spot is
so isolated. Remember this area is no regular mecca for divers of any
type. Consider its remoteness and then do a little basic thinking as to
why no one has reported an aggressive White, let alone one barracuda
incident. I say it's not worth chancing and I can tell by his face that
even despite your bundle of pesos something has been set registering."

Steve feigned disinterest. Buckling his tanks, every nodule of
perspiration shone like beaded stud marks across his back. The salt on
their skins was razor sharp and the wind's jerky movement caused
incessant choppy movements about the breadth of the boat's rhythm. A
cross-section of moods was close to enveloping them. For one, the
afternoon sun was like a bayonet shoved through the thin sky.
Obtrusively red, it fumbled renewed sweat beads across each man's brow
like an eager dresser's haste with an awkward button. No sooner was one
silenced than another plodding moisture bead appeared. Only the Mexican
could remain unmoved to droplets skidding toward the vicinity of his
lower eyelid. It conjured up tales of flies crawling into the eyes of
aborigines in the Outback but without any apparent discomfort to the
owners of those eyes. The two Americans, distracted by their sweating,
cursed the heat and the loggerheads of their situation. No flies or
bobos, as they were know here, added to their misery given their great
distance offshore. Their greater paralysis of the will lay in the low
horizon of the shore receding, then, appearing silhouetted against
blows of driven water. This, then, was the mainstay of their
indecision. All that blue--the blue of shining sky married with further
Wedgwood blue sea careening in a plaster paris water dish, bounced up
as if up from the shadows and made renewed fear inevitable. The
fisherman, quiet above all this, seemed content to let inertia make her
case. He knew heat held a silent, unassailable logic. Sooner or later
the water would call or repel its protégés. His task was no easier
whatever their final deliberation. A long toil with stubborn currents
lay ahead, whatever. The journey to shore was inescapable. And so he
sat, patiently content to provide that most meager of gruel--his slight
infusion of calm and warning to the strange fellows he knew only as
Touristas or more profitably, "amigo," Steve and Cliff. His lines,
staked for fish, would remain regardless and the thin fingers of his
existence remained coiled about a routine as numbing as that the two
men had pretended to escape.

Now, at first furtively, then with the fury of an immense belch only
the sea could muster forth, a school of porpoises broke about the
little craft. Baleful but expression-filled eyes of each beast broke
with water, then took in as only an intelligent creature can, the
mission of the three surface beings. Each in a return splash shimmied
the dinghy making for a resurgence of what, until now, had been a
barely muted panic. Yet most of that brief moment was consumed in
expectation and, as suddenly as it had begun, the pregnancy of the
incantation was dissolved. Slipping beneath the waves, these most human
of fish returned to nurse from the ocean's depths.

"Five of them," Steve was yelling--all at least twelve feet in length.
Incredible.

The Mexican was smiling. Apparently what had taken place was not an
everyday occurrence even for the likes of a grizzled seafarer as
himself. Steve was found announcing something, too. Something to the
effect the animals were benign or all three wouldn't be able to renew
the urgency of the dive.

Cliff, as if moved by the last events or his friend's logic, also
appeared to have altered his position.

"See, that settles it. Porpoises are the natural enemies of sharks. A
school surrounds nursing calves and will, on occasion, rupture an
intruder by butting the offender's abdomen. We have no more reason to
fear. Any shark is long gone."

It was now Steve's turn to renew the apprehension. The size of the
animals and the crash of their drift against the boat, was sobering
reality of this stretch of water's potential for the unexpected.

"Cliff, I have all the makings of a complete smart ass. All this talk
of being an experienced diver--that's all armchair politics at this
point. Sure, I've done my bit in pools and their like. But the
immensity of this place terrifies me. Just staring down through the
shades of colour, seeing the breadth of that reef, what with all this
salt and heat, is taking its toll. I've lost my sense of the dramatic.
The rapture of the deep has been displaced by a chilling realization we
don't know the state of any conditions normally common knowledge before
a dive--drop-offs, undertows, further hostile marine life, the ...."

"Hostile marine life," back to that eh, chickenshit. Hey, where's your
wings, boy? That little show whetted my appetite. I'm all for seeing
what's below. Yet I'll give you this much. I'm sick of the confidence
racket we've been pitting against ourselves. What's more, my body
fluids are near depleted. I'm numb with heat--I can imagine myself
thirsty for disaster drinking seawater and thinking there's a spring
nearby. And that sun grows more forbidding the lower it drops. And, as
you say, I am also angered at ourselves for our naiveté. No one can
appreciate how enervating it is just watching our skin sear and peel
displaced of its water. That's been the real experience out here
today--seeing what this world does to an outsider. I imagine an odour
growing from my arm by the moment. All I can see is yours and his face
swimming before my eyes. I don't want to get punch drunk. I fear the
prospect of going down into whatever awaits us and struggling to
re-enter a little boat with a fisherman whose so hazed he's beyond
understanding what turmoil comprises our lot. I move we do go in, but
only at the insistence we ponder a little more firmly what the words,
"devil fish," moray and danger mean to cock and bull swaggers like
ourselves.

"This is no Keokuk, Iowa venture into the tristate area on a licensed
Mississippi riverboat. This is as bitching as blood can seem."



THE HIRE

"Corn's high this year," chirped the old woman, almost with a cackle.
"All's the better for them to hide in," the old woman was continuing,
her face a brazen mixture of distain and contempt.

"These come to the house, late model cars, too, and just wait. Lord if
I knows what for," her voice trailing off, reedy, almost water besotted
much as the likeness of an old boot, the colour of her wrinkled skin.

Old Meg was an authority of sorts in these parts. Seems she had had her
share of the strange and eventful in her time.

At the age of sixteen she had married. I'm speaking now of early in
this century, just as the car was making its appearance in this part of
eastern Ontario. Right away her new husband and she had bought a farm
some eight miles distance from Kincaid off Palace Road.

"Yeh, well we weren't in that house morn a week when the strangest
things began happenin'." That was the extent of her explanation as to
why she and her hubbies of a few months made the journey into town to
stay at her in-laws not once but every night of their married life for
over forty years.

Meg was a recalcitrant soul. Probably had she been born three centuries
earlier folks would have said worse. Certainly she said little and
allowed you to say scarce more. Why, even now she was staring at you,
just like her custom offering only a pittance of facts as to why there
occurred an exodus of cars to the lone side-road by the big weathered
house. A cynic would have begged the hire of something illicit to
summon numbers in that quantity. Old Meg let it be known it was
something more profound than that. Her every manner convinced you
comments as such were guilty of the grossest understatement.

Weird lights, barnyard animals could be seen in the house and a hulk of
a rusted car in the debris of a lawn. She was a widow of 18 years with
no one to call her home. To listen to the neighbours tell it, they were
alarmed, best as they could recollect, when the old Ford lumbered
toward town regular as ever each night at dusk.

"What ails those two," folk along the Palace would say. "You'd think
new marrieds wouldn't care to be disturbed. Maybe Humboldt's right when
he says there's some awful going's on there."

Rumors don't substantially change, I thought. Take, for instance,
stories people tell of old Lake on the Mountain in these parts: the
underground reservoir replete with ghostly lights, bottomless channels
and of a lake not giving up its dead. It was alarming alright to sit
across that expanse of water and see not a boat or hear a sound. Almost
as eerie as standing here looking at Meg talk of Humboldt's forecasting
eclipses back in '32. How he'd been right, dead right, each time with
his divining rod.

Meg was still on the subject of Humboldt. Seems as for all his
questions he had met a bitter end. To hear Meg tell it, one evening
after the leaves were down--a cold evening at that--Humboldt, a recluse
and bachelor recently separated from a sister with whom he had lived,
was fetching wood. Being old and a careless housekeeper, the old man
tripped and split his lantern. They found his charred remains near the
door of the woodhouse next morning. Meg had seen the flames light the
November sky. To hear her tell of it, that night had seen an uncommonly
large number of cars on the back roads off the Palace. Meg was not
drawing direct inferences, but I could see in the space between her
eyes a sly connection.

She was silent on such things, drew the conversation back then forth to
peculiarities surrounding the Ashley home. Meg was an Ashley. Since her
husband's death, she had stayed in the family home not only days but
those dreaded nights as well. I pressed for explanations.

"But if you wouldn't stay a night with Charlie when he was alive--the
two of you--when you were married and had the companionship, why would
you dare now? If you made the journey into town each night religiously
for forty years only staying here during the daylight hours, how can
you bring yourself to remain now?"

The question seemed logical enough, but seemed to irritate her. But was
I trespassing too indelicately on the subject of the late model cars or
probing into a veiled past too transparently?

"Yourn a relative of Conrad's,"--Jean's I heard her say. To my
surprise, I told her my aunt had often taken me by this house on the
way to Kincaid. As a child, the house in its unkempt stage had made a
lasting impression on me. Brooding, enormously lonesome, the derelict
house slouched against a weathered fence in a loathsome fashion.
Overcast skies or darkness gave it the appearance of containing as many
goblins or trolls as fancy might see fit to inhabit, I thought of a
magnificent set of ruins, something Hawthorne might have used for his
Seven Gables or a nigh perfect setting for a decadent family in the
throes of their own poverty--some chilling Gothic charmer!

What was more, the chief inhabitant of such a home seemed straight off
the grill of the gingerbread lady or the hag who forced her fattening
children to hold out fingers to see if they were plump enough for the
oven. Sufficiently chilling for a precocious mind--the place guaranteed
sleeplessness for nights on end. Visions of the old woman, cat in hand,
standing on the deck of her flag ship-like house, ghastly in its gloom,
rifled through my consciousness. The abundance of animals and the
witchy control she exerted over them, simply reinforced the spell over
an impressionable child. Every detail was complete, right down to that
proverbial one decayed tooth dangling from the centre of her facial
cavity. One could only expect her to jabber in cackles instead of
sentences for her memory to be entrenched deeper in every aspect.

More startled now than taken back, I summoned my organizational
abilities to make sense of what she had imparted to me.

"Jean ever tell you of Direxa?"

The name jolted me. I summoned forth the pieces in a haphazard way. An
old woman who traveled miles from Hay Bay into town to sell her produce
sped across my mind. Consistent to the end, she sauntered through
drudgery and routine until they claimed her sanity.

"Must be the climate in these parts," I found myself saying drily in
the back of my throat. Meg was staring at me. I made an attempt to put
my eyes off her.

I nodded my agreement indicating I had heard the name.

"Yes, Direxa. Of good Puritan stock, I added."

She spoke no agreement this time and told me to consult her if I had
questions.

"Direxa, she's long dead!"

"I know, she still talks to me," Meg whispered turning to walk away.

In a typical fashion, I thought of the lore concerning the supernatural
adolescent reading had brought me--the Superstition mountains of
Arizona, dream time and the Darling range in Australia's north, the
Snowmen, the Wendigo tales of the Coast Salish Indians. These, it
seemed, were not more exotic than the home spun tales of my province's
eastern townships, Lennox and Addington. Those two ghostly minutemen
drilling in the marshes of the Ontario Coomb, Canada's answer to the
Fens district of East Anglica. Strange, much as my presence here
volunteering information to a woman who freely talked in lurid details
concerning poor Humboldt's death but not of cars that visited these
roads at night, clairvoyance, poltergeists or spells that bound her to
a second home.



THE NIGHTLAMP

Like a wail in the back of an inflammed throat came that protracted
noise once again. Interminably, the rhythmic pitch of pounding grew
louder as if several loose stones had swished themselves against the
larger cylinder of his room. Already, the steady rap of a hammer's edge
oozed from night's blackness disparate as a voice muffled in protest
against an exhausting load.

Again, the unyielding barricade of sound renewed itself much as a
headlight might fall against the path of a dazed woodland animal. The
same enervating crust of unreality accompanied this sound as must, he
imagined, light that focused itself upon a stunned rabbit at a roadside
clearing.

Steady now, it peaked again after a small hiatus interrupted only by
the staccato bumping of his own heart within thin visceral walls.
Catching the bed-sheets in his hand and moving to switch the nightlamp
on as his feet touched floor, Durfield let his eyes grow accustomed to
the bright light now filtering across the room. Same turmoil as with
the ruddy animal immobilized in its tracks, he thought, excepting now
the darkness coiled in wait instead of that speeding car. Same fate, he
pondered, nearly aloud. No, not really, because I have a vestige of
control here, he reassured himself. The lamp-switch allows me, of
course, to commandeer the ignition keys to this vehicular room. I have
mastery of my environment, however limited. The fawn or hare has no
more free will in that regard than a stone spinning upon itself through
orbital space. The animal freezing in its tracks is but a by-product of
its own misshapen destiny--a projection of inward fear itself. Instinct
knows only one route when threatened, he theorized. I, at least, have
that avenue of self-preservation plus the dimension of reason. That and
that alone separates me from the splattered remnants of a deer against
the highway. Its over-specialization dooms or pre-dates its response.
So very predictable, he mused fingering the face of his big, green
lettered clock. I'm different, he began reassuring himself adjusting
his eyes to the flooding light a little less nervously. I have the
calling card of reason plus an instinctual nature. The two should
compliment one another. Why, take that accursed noise. I can attempt
its categorization in hope of dispelling the fear of the unknown.
What's more, I can move to lessen its impact or remove it altogether.
In effect, I can take the edge off its annoyance altogether and sleep
peacefully for the rest of the evening. If only I could identify its
source!

Still, it was so very still in the room now. It was as if the advance
of light had checked the noise, whatever its origin acting as a
deterrent to its raucous splendour. Yes, that's it, he thought. The
light in some fashion interfered or dispels the racket that spawns the
darkness. How irrational. What a repudiation of his earlier thesis that
man, as a rational being, manipulated his surroundings as opposed to
being the mere lackey of circumstance. Yet, there was but one way to
determine the logistics of his theory, he reasoned. Apply brakes to the
light and brace oneself for the possible resumption of the unearthly
noise.

Did he dare? Did he, in a Profroukian sense, care to challenge the
impetus of the moment--that crackle of sound made as it darned a wavy
edge over the liquid crack of an audible wave? Could he presume to roll
up his trouser legs, eat the allegorical peach or clutch the parchment
of his being to prepare a loosing onto the gates of night? A strange
synthesis for a man priding himself on logic, he muttered quickening
the thought process. Carefully, he prepared himself for the venture.
Barely a flick away, he imagined a surge of electricity to go rifling
through the inroads of his body, illuminating in garish sequence the
duality of his true nature--lucidity and ghost fear. He was ready to
examine the Hegelian fusion of his private universe.

The light remained off. Unbearable became the mental jousting going
forth across the diameter of his brain, that circle of intense inner
reasoning. Yet nothing threatening had yet developed. No formidable
barrage of sound like the last time just bare minutes before when the
noise had tormented him so. No creeping need to silence the unexplained
droning that parried his sanity. But where did that place his theory on
darkness and a correlation with the heightened noise's proliferation?
What if the noise should return when, say, he awoke tomorrow in the
luxury of a room bathed in morning's warm gaze? How might he cope amid
sheer inconsistencies, such contradictions like that?

Now the uninterrupted silence assumed growing dimensions. There was
nothing amiss, yet nothing resolved either. The sound and fury existed
in a mute silence, growing within the totality beyond categorization.
After all, it was darkest before dawn. And when did a fat man look his
most corpulent--next to one deprived of flesh, of course. One could not
react too carefully juxtaposed against glaring opposites in a universe
filled with few resolutions. No, he would not be lulled into a false
confidence, into the luxury of seemingly overcoming the mystery of his
baffling noise. In all sincerity, he must anticipate everything.

Perhaps the very silence harboured little noises like maggots invisible
to the eye? Invisible, yet nonetheless there, brooding for an assault
beneath a limpid surface? Yes, the enemy--that pestilent noise was
still in its lair watching his fragile kingdom, eyeing an opening,
searching out his jugular. He would blunt it, though. Under no
circumstances would he crack. Not the likes of him. Must remain calm at
all costs, he cautioned himself. He must remain master of the
situation, not be alarmed should the phantom noise return. After all,
in darkness lay his chance to test his theory of the sound's
interrelation with shadow. Without darkness, there was no sure way to
clear this mess up once and for all.

The doctor searched again for a pulse, then shook a wearied head. The
bedclothes were damp with perspiration and the room lay ajar with
evidence of disarray. Durfield's eyes stared voluminously through their
sockets and seemed fixed to the furthest wall of his bedroom. At the
room's opening lay an overturned table with the smashed remains of a
deflected lamp with its nightshade crumpled lying by the base of the
wall.

"I just got up for a drink in the minute of the night and stumbled
against the door," the younger brother was explaining. "I could barely
even see the door, honest. I didn't mean to wake him or anything like
that. He's given me heck before."

The doctor closed the eyelids against pupils bulging in a vaccuous
profusion. He said nothing, but renewed his glance at the broken glass
and dark spot on the coiled rug where spilt water had made a
crevice-like opening over the linoleum and upturned nightstand.



THE STRONGBOX

"He was always the one to figure things," remarked Humboldt. "Always
the smart ass type, big jawed lazy bones--couldn't make a good farmer
out of that sort. Didn't want to do much of anything 'cept run. All his
money went on his car. Drinking in the Richelieu most every night. I
suspect that's where he were coming from when it happened."

Humboldt leaned back against the store front. Twice weekly he'd take a
cab into town to fetch sundry articles as he said--one day went for
shopping t'other for visitin'. Retirement had given him the necessary
time to concentrate almost exclusively on the latter. This was the
first trip in this week and already the day was abuzz with talk of the
recent mishap.

"Now let me get this straight," Russell was interjecting. "According to
what Humboldt says, the car just plain left the highway and crashed
through the barrier where seven meets the Bath road."

"That's what Thompson was saying and he was talking to the widder
Jocelyn the very morning after. Makin' a run into Kincaid and happened
to see the downed guard-rail. Accordin' to the widder, she was awakened
late Saturday night by the crash. She wasn't what you call definite
seening how it was in the middle of the night and all, but still claims
it scared her half to death the thought of that car entering the lake."

"Serve's 'im right," Humboldt began again. "Probably smokin' drugs and
boozin'. Ain't no proper place for the likes of him, anyhow. Just plain
crazy. Why that Scots boy was a born no good. Heard tell he let berries
fall off their stems rather than pick them, then go to town to buy a
quart basket. Blamed foolishness. Why me and Jimmy Robinson remember
hayin' with their old man when he'd fork a bale then sit under the tree
and smoke. Gave up farmin' good land to guard at Ronald Bay. Between
stints on welfare, of course. The two of them, Ester and he sitting in
that kitchen--too damn lazy to rototiller that garden. Had a big bitch
dog, Buzzy--tail like an ice pick that was always swishing and chased
my stock afore I got Scot to tie him down."

The conversation slowly became a praise of working values with an
occasional homily to flaunt the more ensconced rural virtues. Humboldt
referred to the List brothers both dead lazy and drinkers, too, as the
dialogue became more dogmatic.

"Seems he'd had to swear off the bottle or go blind," Humboldt
continued.

"And you know what List said? Guess I've seen all that's worth seeing.
He ended up in a sanitorium in Stephensville. The other stayed on
allowing bush to burst up through the cement walk and a tree to come
through the drive shed. Imagine that."

Humboldt and his friend were grinning the same wide smile. Apart from
an occasional story of their own garrulousness or resentment against
authority, their past was free of such tales and they knew it. It was
enough to make a man feel proud knowing he had nothing to live down.
Humboldt was cradling a watermelon to take back. His time was old and
he was given to all sorts of quirks he would never have allowed himself
but even five years ago--like taking a taxi, selling part of his farm
or, worse yet, eating good weiners on any but festive occasions. Such
things, he had once remarked, were the very stuff of foolishness.

The taxi would only take him to the end of the long lane. Punctuated by
his mailbox and an old haying shed, the driveway was well over a mile
from the house. The road was all that remained of an old county line
that had since fallen into disuse. Provided considerable privacy, he
thought, well in tune to his love of isolation. Barring, of course,
those bi-weekly ventures into town. Yes, they were needed.

Pulling the latch over the door and stooping to rekindle the fire, many
would have thought such an existence unbearably dull. Not so, Humboldt.
Since his sister had died it was true he had sometimes felt the need
for companionship but this was a world of his own making. He felt the
thrill of self-accomplishment knowing it was his land. He was alone
with memories. Quietly rocking by the fire, he began to doze off,
little thinking materials like old magazines, old rags to start a fire
lay strewn about the floor. Basic cleanliness had been an early
casualty since the sister's death. Gone was the regimen of order and
weekly cleans until now the house was like a dusty candle box. Still,
his was an orderly world. Soft fashioned, it was free of the tatters
that change brings. He thought of the years, the steady labour in the
fields, the thriftiness, his distrust of banks, the big city--the new
highway that had compelled the sale of the "lower 40" and all the rest
of that blamed idiocy.

The fire was gentle and massaged the chill from his fingers. An old
man's fingers. Honest hands not creased with pleasure but with familiar
toil. He used to liken his life to that drive into town. Steady, small
pastimes where every bend was anticipated before rounding it like the
neat little farms all in rows. His warmth was in the security of the
knowable, he thought nodding off. He was thinking little thoughts like
strawberries in spring or what the icy water must have felt like
closing around the throat of Scot. If he had only lived like himself,
got into farming and enjoyed life instead of dashing off to lose touch
with reality. Yes, old ways were best.

"Seems we've got two things to stir folks up with in this town," the
officer, a new constable with the OPP in Kincaid was saying.

"It looks like a routine blaze what with all the junk laying around but
we'll have to check out all possibilities seeing that Humboldt had the
reputation of having lots stashed away. We all supposed the old man
kept considerable money hidden in the house. Checks confirm no bank
accounts so a strongbox is suspected. It may be that some of the damage
here was not the work of fire alone. These are things we would like to
probe, Jake, and would appreciate any help you might provide." The
officer was looking straight at Jake asking his questions routinely,
matter of factly.

Jake surveyed the still smouldering ruins. Only the brick chimney still
stood. They had found Humboldt's body by the door. Apparently a clear
case of smoke inhalation before he was burned. Yet the scene betrayed
Jake's own involvement. Surveying anew the debris, Jake began to
reassemble recent events and his stake in having Scot rob Humboldt. The
policeman was saying nothing of any valuables found on the dead Scot.
This worried him, especially those heirloom bits containing Humboldt
Bennett's name. Perhaps, perhaps yes I could figure that the money
spilled out of the wrecked car or a strongbox now lies at the bottom of
the lake, Jake was thinking to himself. Yes, that could very well be,
he thought.

Still, I wonder, yes really wonder had Scot managed to locate
Humboldt's nest egg at all? And what if Scot's drowning occurred before
the robbery, before he could rob Humboldt at all? If so, this would
explain why no money had been found and that no one so far had the
presence of mind to connect the two episodes. Or were the police
withholding this information for reasons of their own? Still, how could
the two incidents be woven together by the authorities when Humboldt
was freely talking of the Scot disaster only yesterday. Unless, yes
damn Scot, evidence was found of Scot rummaging around Humboldt's
property the day Humboldt was in town! That would be just like Scot to
disobey a good game plan!

He was thinking now which, of all possibilities, would implicate his
name the least. Wiping his brow and trying to remain calm, he pressed
the investigating officer as any concerned neighbour might. After all,
he was Humboldt's closest friend.

Yet to Jake's mind another probability was presenting itself. Humboldt,
on returning home from his visit to town yesterday, might have found
himself robbed, his place pilfered and, in his angst, knocked over a
lantern or, worse, suffered a stroke in the ensuing panic.

"Can a coroner establish if heart failure occurred prior to
asphyxiation?" he found himself muttering half-absentmindedly.

Jake was hoping so. Gingerly, he fingered memories of what he would
have done had Scot returned the night as intended. Still, if all held
true, there was nothing to implicate him, even if Humboldt had died
unexpectedly. Jake was in the process of reassuring himself. All had
been taken care of. Scot dead and now the car a convenient
shambles--the only possible source of clues or evidence. How tidy fate
had been. Strange. If only he had managed to get the money prior to
Scot inadvertently doing away with himself. He smiled, how lucky he had
been. Especially now, that Humboldt, too, was dead of God knows what
and he, he was no worse off for his pains. He still might locate a
cache or two on the property when all this blew over.

The other side of Jake's personality was now exerting itself, the
peasant cunning of folk long inured to the earth's rhythmic cycles. He
knew of the officer's steady gaze and his ploy. The officer was playing
it smart, letting Jake see all the possibilities when asking his
opinion. First mention the near likelihood of a robbery but be vague on
the question of accomplices. And, of course, the question of the
necessary instigation. Jake was wondering if he were looking a little
too detached from his friend's death. A little too sincere? Then there
was the issue of a second coroner if the evidence seemed inconclusive.
Wild fantasies swept through his now activated brain. Did he dare?
Might he risk it? Would the officer be ... well receptive to a little
more ... er fact finding? And the best way to approach him? Hmmm.

Jake stared at the charred hulk of a bedpost. Humboldt's? The long
deceased sister probably. He couldn't rightly tell but did recall
Humboldt hadn't removed the bedding at the time of her death. Either
way, he mused, he would have to let events take their course or steer
them back his way at once. He pressed his manured boot over a darkened
brick kicking it free.

"Am I free, uh, to go?" Jake asked the constable.

"Free to go, why, why shouldn't you be Mr. Wright?"



THE SANDPIT

Bertrand had been surprised by the recoil of his father's rifle. He had
not prepared for the sight of the weasel pasted against the barn door,
a dozen pellets alone penetrating its upper neck and mid-thorax region.
A mass of blood and fur seemed to have been twisted onto the vicinity
of the latch then held in place as if from afar by many bullet-like
prongs. Surely, the calibre of the shotgun was too strong for his
choice of game.

Bertrand had a tendency for overkill. Possessing a temperament and a
super-charged imagination that demanded structure even when little
existed naturally, his mania for organization had presented itself on
innumerable occasions about the homestead. There had been the case of
his clearing a brood of starlings from the drive house. A messy
business, if you let it but from one Bertrand would not flinch. A half
dozen squawking, flightless birds coiled above the door in the attic
were disposed of. After all, it was his job to end the clatter and they
were an obscene, noxious bird what with laying their eggs in songbirds'
nests and crowding out more desirable species. Moreover, their very
presence constituted an eyesore and that, coupled with their grating
noise, concluded their fate. They were pests, simple and unadulterated,
and on a farm any such nuisance had to be wrenched aside. Still, he had
not drowned them like unwanted kittens or burned them out like that
nest of yellow jackets in the currant bush. A simple twist of their
neck either between the fingers of his leathered gloves (he disliked
the feel of flesh on feather so this necessitated hunting for a thick
pair of mittens), or placing the head of the screaming nestling under
one's boot did the business. Almost effortlessly, but again nothing
about tending land was done entirely without deliberation or exertion.
Structure and foresight held things together. It was the nature of the
beast.

And so it was with Bertrand's decision to hunt bees. The best method to
oust any hive from its perch, so talk ran, was to wrap an old cloth
about a stick and daub it with flammable pitch. Once lit, it made an
impressive torch and could be brandished against pests of any
description. As a kid, Bertrand recalled killing bumblebees in the old
woodshed with a fly swatter. Now that was some kind of action which
allowed the adversary manoeuvrability above and beyond that of skulking
bees with a flame or killing baby birds. The enraged swarm would charge
out from paper lairs encircled about the inner walls of a shed through
whatever chinks or holes led to their tormentors. A little smoke
applied judiciously, moreover, would send dozens piling out the holes
in threesomes so that only a good, well balanced swat could hope to
silence several existing at once. At times, the bees would threaten to
get the upper hand and Bertrand and a friend would get panicky, think
of the Alamo or just about any heroic last stand made possible by sheer
courage.

Once, as a torrent of wasps had flown angrily out a large chink in the
wood, Bertrand had been hit squarely in the forehead causing him to
abandon his post leaving poor Alex a near victim. Fortunately, fear had
given proverbial wings to their feet and they had outdistanced the
swarm out the shed toward the relative safety of the house. In
recalling the story, endless rejoinders were made back and forth as to
what would have happened had a river been the only salvation. Could
they have outfoxed the bees, held their breath long enough and swam the
distance or would the cagey bees, if pressed, have waited patiently
above the surface to wreck revenge? Bertrand did not have answers to
these questions but it made for good speculation, bravado and late
evening entertainment. Killing enraged bees with a swatter or the end
of a broom or plank was keen sport and one culled with knife edge
excitement. He craved excitement almost as much as his regimen demanded
rigidity. And to be fair, he had heard all wasps were quite savage and
retained venom in their sting that could prove lethal to the elderly or
infirm. It was a quick rationalization, then, to believe such creatures
were of the same stock and trade as weasels, starlings or the other
unwanted denizens of his father's farm. Why, more people died of wasp
stings than of snakebite in North America annually. Something had to be
done about that outrage.

Late summer is a time yellow jackets have primed their airborne paper
lodges with enough sustenance needed to carry through from fall to
winter. Some mature nests average the breadth of a good sized milk pail
but Bertrand had heard tell of an occasional oddity exceeding the
circumference of a waste paper container. Just the thought brought the
fire into his eyes. Oh, to find such a one on a search and destroy
mission then lodge a tent pole up its arse! A good bout of artillery
practice might then follow--rocks at 40 paces until the enemy had been
given a sound thrashing. They shall not pass was the watchword of the
night.

Alex had been reluctant to accompany Bertrand northward through the
lower forty toward 3 mile wood. For one thing Bertrand had not been
specific about the actual purpose of the errand so he had surmised it
to be mere peg-legging or a chance to kick up a little steam. What
finally swayed him was the mentioning of a visit to the sand pit toward
the end of the miles. Now this was something he had rarely visited and
it did present some possibilities for exploring. In spite of warnings
to stay clear of the pit, every boy along the river had a fascination
with the dunes and gorges pock marking that bit of earth. Wind
sculptured landforms notwithstanding, imagination unfettered itself in
myriad forms that stretched from shades of Arabian Nights to more
recent movies wherein the protagonist had to climb a seemingly endless
mound of sand to fulfill a sadistic command. Plenty of ammunition
there! Perhaps something to the effect of double nought seven might be
conjured from that heap of sand.

Images of gouged out earth, mole hills and a troglodyte's existence in
the trenches of Verdun flickered across Bertrand's mind. An old
grandfather and trunks of adventure books in his attic had fascinated
him with story after story around a winter's fire about men burrowing
like moles during World War One. This and the primeval urge to dig and
bury lurked fiercely in the breast of the newly erect carnivore, the
man child.

It was not long in coming. True to form during the woodward trek, a
wasp's nest had been located and, once clubbed with a stick, yielded a
livid horde. What was more, this time no adventure book heroics took
hold. Instead, stung and dazed, his face a mass of welts, one of their
number crashed through brambles and thickets toward the sand and gravel
pit. In a few more strides, Alex would be over its outer perimeter
spiralling down endless chutes of dirt. Suffocation and the random jerk
of limbs caught in some nightmarish bog would overpower any resistance.

In a mind made panicky with fear, Bertrand recalls a spate of facts
from the natural world. Any item grounded in natural fact was
accredited with near reverence and infallibility. Alex's upcoming fate
would even be held explicable if seen through this context.

Wasps in their predator state have been known to render spiders
senseless, then bury them encrusted with eggs.

An ant lion will dig an entrapment, then hiding behind a blind, await
the unwary.

Caterpillars are butchered by flying insects with jaws extended for
that sole purpose of slaughter. Less luckier ones live on as hosts for
mounds of greedy larvae.

Bertrand stirred himself from his covering. Having climbed into a low
lying cavity of limestone shelves, he was able to elude his pursuers.
His thoughts wander again to Alex. Had Alex heeded local caution
concerning the sand pit in his panic stricken flight? Unlikely, as Alex
was unclear of the exact presence of the quarry and could not be
expected to realize its many treacheries if terror stricken.

Like the starling young, Alex had been sluggish, refusing to be stirred
until prodded by a stronger outside stimulus. And, as with the
nestlings, Alex had succumbed to laws red in fang and claw, cause and
effect relationships.

Emptying the last stone from his knapsack, Bertrand imagines the huzzah
of battle to have cleared this forest glade. He perceives the clenched
stone to be the stream smoothed missile David used in overpowering
Goliath-the last silver thimble fired at Goliad[1].

With a cry, he implores Alex to come forth and stand his
ground--sensation and imagery roam lawlessly in his brain as mop up
operations are set to begin.

[1] Site of a second Texan massacre in the war of independence with
Mexico.

THE WAGER

"We think by feeling. What else is there to know." Theodore Roethke

"I can live an adventuresome life vicariously through my characters.
It's inexpensive and a dandy form of ready made self-expression. The
perfect sort of sublimation exists after all. For years I wore myself
out trying to amass enough experience to commence serious writing. You
know the having to see all and do all syndrome. I realize the pursuit
of that plateaus sheer idiocy as it remains ever distant as one grows
older."

Wenceslaus at that point placed his pen down and turned to open a
glossy picture print of a ship under full sail, a clipper mail packet
on the China run over a century ago.

"Shakespeare never experienced the myriad situations he subjected his
characters to--how could he--except perhaps subliminally. Jules Verne
must have employed a similar type of wish fulfillment with his
prophetic writings that splashed a hundred years into the present. What
I propose doing is to animate my earliest atavistic yearnings in a like
fashion. I hope to give scenarios embedded in the innermost recesses of
my psyche time to materialize, to exude from the substance of dynamic
characterization. In short, the cave wall pictures Plato mentioned,
hitherto until now dim and elusive flickers, will become flesh and bone
entities within their own right."

Wenceslaus reached back propping a foot against the table containing an
old woodcut with some masking tape and a copy of Stendal's Rouge et le
Noir. I thought of him subconsciously acting out the role of his many
anti-heroes by parading their values through the pages of his many
would-be books. Rather impatiently I moved to counter his studied
expression.

"And what of actual events rooted in your own experience? How will you
give your characters real presence, an allowance to take away from them
unintentional archetypes or woodiness? What are your chances of
breathing life into these shadow forms without some common backdrop
with which to share a basic empathy?"

He continued to maintain his stare, not even breaking the gaze to light
a cigarette or reach for his mug of coffee. He replied with a little
annoyance.

"Words, nothing but smoke screens to conceal a bankruptcy of the
thought process. How on earth do you propose I make love to every woman
alive, explore every crevice of this earth? Surely, you aren't serious
with this mumble about animating characters. I propose to let the
characters speak of real ingredients through the force of actual
events."

"Animation is for cartoons, not serious playwrights. I'm surprised at
you," he went on. "What you are advocating is a bilateral pool of
shared traits. I venture to say such a thing is not only patently
absurd but unnecessary." He had let the coffee grow cold and turned to
it with renewed annoyance.

The wind, it seemed, too, was expressing a little of the afternoon's
short-tempered.

"Pity we live in this climate. All bluster and snow. Hardly the
stuffing from which romantic heroes are made," he said stiffly.

"And what of Tolstoy, London, or Service?" I nearly whined back at him.
"They used lack of glamour in their settings to their advantage.
Primeval landscapes are not only physical but the force behind many a
fanciful mind. That's the artificiality I was concerned with earlier.
Next you will be playing the Gauguin adventurer convinced your lack of
inspiration or ready talent is attributable to March weariness rather
than to personal shortcomings. You will spend all your time searching
for that thatched cottage in picturesque Arly country."

"Let me offer some more unwanted advice," I said, renewing the attack.
"Remember the example of William Turner, the English landscape painter?
He embodied in this next example what I attempted to clarify by
argument. In crossing to Calais he had himself strapped to the mast at
storm's height so that he might better witness the pummeling of his own
ship. A breakthrough in the use of colour lead to the hey day of
romanticism and preparation for neo-impressionism. This all came
through one man's willingness to live events in the flesh not by
haphazard random reading."

Wenceslaus was staring out the window apparently unmoved by what I, in
my vanity, thought the near-definitive illustration.

"So you suggest that for me to write effectively about a given period I
must breathe the very strains, the odours, verisimilitude of the age?
By that account no one would be accredited teaching Macedonian history
unless he first had witnessed the Hellenic revival in the first
millennium before Christ. I would bloody well have to be impervious to
all the dictates of common sense to follow through on your suggestions!"

"To prolong your garrulous argument, let me continue with this case in
point: to understand the problems of the blacks or talk intelligently
about the colour bar I would have to dye my skin and assume the
identity of a Negro. Is this correct?"

"Well, hasn't that been done?" I replied carefully.

"Yes, but not for the reasons you advance."

"For sociological reasons, for the sake of novelty to do ...", he
finished with a gesture.

"This argument is growing stale and circular, he began anew. Quite
frankly, I grow tired of you and your pedantics. You remind me of the
Medieval Schoolmen and their emphasis on clarification to the point of
excluding Truth. Yes, even Truth if it could not be neatly packaged in
their air-tight groupings."

I perceived Wenceslaus, in a moment of understatement, to be more than
a little disaffected.

"And isn't it you who argues the finer shades between thisness and
whatness, thickness and opaque intrusions at this juncture?" I was now
needling him with his own wealth of details.

"Opaque intrusions," a bewildered smile now entering his face.

"Take out your razor, Ockham." [1]

Wenceslaus fingered the mug more openly. I didn't know who was baiting
whom. I thought I had bested him but realized in doing so I was only
personifying the shallowness I strove to dismantle through argument.

"Wenceslaus, Wenceslaus, let's cease this before emotion colours our
better judgment. Let us stop for the time being and let a wager stand."

"A wager?"

"Yes, you know of Pascal and his wager on faith?"

"Vaguely, but I'm tired of this thumb-pressing."

"I know, but hear me out."

"What we wish to establish here," I began, "is the superiority of
experience over imagination, actual events to intellect."

"Precisely," I maintained. "Let each of us do a bibliographical survey
establishing the whereabouts of most authors' inspiration. The Muse as
it were, that is the point whereby a given author is ready to grasp
order from the chaos of eclecticism. Not exhaustively, of course, just
a random selection of say ten and then report back to one another. Each
must promise to abide by the general consensus of the search."

"Such a thing will deteriorate to mere sham, a freshman's guide to the
use of periodical literature, he parodied holding a hand aloft like a
scolding professor."

"It's one step in the direction toward delineating how others reacted
to a similar problem."

"Fair then. We'll try it. But isn't it doomed to a split vote by the
very choice of our authors, we having had some previous contact with
their lives and thus knowing under which force the man propelled his
search?"

"Partially, but we are after the division point, that hiatus in time
whereby each no longer procured experience but began to write. That's
our quest. The movement towards actual writing, why the mood descended
on whom when it did at its precise locus in time."

"Locus?"

"Yes you know locus, in mathematics."

"What have we accomplished," he said turning to me wearily.

Tongue in cheek I replied by his very gestures he was experiencing a
weariness with the thought process and embarking on the need to try the
experience route.

"Sophistry," he cried aloud. "Pure bullshit. But we will let the wager
stand and upon it our friendship, our acquaintanceship all I associate
with the likes of you and yours. And, further, for argument's sake,
argument itself."

"Aye, let all that stand and more. Let's get Faustian about this and
raise the tempo, I nearly implored. One, by virtue of his defeat must
swear off writing for a full three months. He must promise not to
desecrate paper with tainted thought until the ink of this clamour gels
as a sturdy lesson to his peevishness."

"Awkward, but interesting. Continue."

"Nothing more, just this little writing circle shall have the papal
rite to banish anyone from its blessed entourage for violating the
tenets of established truth. Let's rest our case for argument's sake,
on this and all that has transpired today."

My companion was working on a pair of stubborn galoshes as I prepared
my coat for a quick exit through the snow.

The workings of Truth, all debate seemed so pointless after all--just
an elixir for resentment with the shifting sands of mood ever ready to
wash away any permanency. Like snow, words reigned as queen of the
elements for an appointed time, then they, too, passed away.

I had the feeling I had witnessed more than a huffy outburst within
myself against winter's dreary confines or the frustration of a limited
talent.

I had expressed the narrowing of tolerance and the box canyon of a
roped spirit that clamours for freedom on the wind of a signal fury.

I paused and went forth into the storm.

[1] A Medieval Schoolman celebrated Or his sharpness.


ERRANDS

We repeat, the aim of the IRA has always been the liberation of our
homeland. Any who aid or abet the enemy must fall full prey to force of
arms. (The Republican Proclamation)

Somewhere in the distance a dog kept at his baying. A long mournful
whelping that seemed torn from the damp night's very throat. Sean could
not help but hear it; so deeply did the dog's vocal cords implant sound
upon human ears. He could not help but think of the provos warning
nuzzled like that dog's steady cry over and over into the fabric of
one's memory swift as searing iron.

"Aid or abet," he murmured softly to himself, "a long distance is
covered by such a comment."

His Catholic heritage did him no justice in resolving the torment. By
birth, name even appearance and occupation--all such persuasions meant
he should embrace what the Republicans preached. One no sooner got his
name on their lips, Sean Paddy MacGuire than they knew him Catholic.
Two grandfathers had died in the troubles prior to Erie's break with
Westminster. That alone should dictate undying hatred for the English
and their stooges, the Prods, in Ulster. He found little comfort,
though, in the ever continuing war of nerves. Yet the manifesto bade
every Catholic to think with his blood and put shoulder to duty.

Sean emptied his glass, left his seat at the window's ledge and made
for the tavern door. Sectarian violence often came to pubs and was
drawn clearly along denominational lines. O'Leary's was an obvious
target for Protestant extremists that much he knew. Still, a man needed
a pint from time to time so he doubted if he would discontinue the
practice.

He shook his gabardine jacket clear of his arm and stepped into the
night. Overhead a moon glimpsing the clouds made through an effortless
sky. He might, should impulse seize him, step through the border area
of Protestant Ulster to reach his home near Falls Road. Suddenly, the
pub door became a fringe of orange heat amid whirls of smoke. Barely
clear of the doorway, MacGuire was propelled by the force of the
explosion's impact clear of danger. Dazed and uncomprehending, the full
realization of his chance good fortune not yet registered, he stood
watching the flames etch their amber fingers through the archway into
the pilings about the roof. Elsewhere, two figures ran through the
night scarce turning to watch their most recent torching. Had he a
revolver bringing them down would have been matter of fact, at least
the part of squeezing several bullets in succession about their
direction. He had no such weapon and could only watch them make good
their escape.

From the vicinity of the blast Sean could make out only engulfing fire
spreading itself over the full circumference of O'Leary's pub. Placing
coat against face, he edged closer to the door in hope of entering the
building. Common sense told him anyone in the interior of the pub would
be cremated by now. Foolish to speculate further about them, he winced.
The demolished doorway also seemed to exclude any survivors since in
all likelihood the blast had originated from those quarters. Silently,
he tried to reconstruct the former faces about a room which minutes
before had seen quiet patrons sipping a pre-supper drink. He was close
enough to peer about the ruins of the entrance. A form or rather a
booted figure face down under what appeared a fallen beam lay
motionless before him. Astride the man, he half dragged then manacled
the bleeding figure clear of the surging flames. Ensuring his immediate
safety, MacGuire went a second time into the now inferno like remains
of O'Leary's. Conscious now of the enormity of the blast as sirens
wailed and a clatter of noise began, grim faced police and officers
whose job it was to make sense of such happenings began to arrive. He
was about to attempt a second entry when a wall of fire ended further
heroism. He could not visualize anyone surviving twin disasters of
explosion and torch. For a scant moment he watched the smoke billow
into the sky illuminating the shabby houses of the neighbourhood.
Nowhere could he find it within himself to hate. This surprised, even
frightened him. An utter exhaustion filled him as he turned to see whom
chance had allowed escape from the fire.

His shadow cast a tower's presence about the parking lot onto the
prostrate form. Swallowing hard, MacGuire prepared to stare into the
face of the man he had carved from fire's possession. In a single
motion, once his fist grabbed the man's clothing, a muzzle lay against
his throat.

"Thought I was through eh, damned Mickey," the fierce eyes seemed to
speak all at once. "I've killed tonight. I'd soon as kill you now and
complete the errand 'cepting I may need the temporary use of your skin.
Now get to your feet."

MacGuire obliged the blackened face with nostril openings gaping hate.
Already he was calculating his chances. The area was filling with
people. The light from the raging building had ended their darkness.
The gunman shoved the revolver again into his face. The man seemed to
enjoy his threats of pistol whipping and promised death. MacGuire
looked once again into the face more from force of the last twenty
minutes' unreality than any perplexity of fear.

Got to think fast, must use the chance card of generosity for all its
worth, he thought.

"I saved your life," he pronounced slowly. It met the anticipated
response. In that slow second when his gaze met his assailant an
opportunity afforded itself. The gunman in a mock gesture of
appreciation had trained the weapon barely upward into his reach. In a
single motion, half embrace and step into his adversary's stride, he
had the man over. MacGuire was instantly aware of his opponent's
strength. Enraged at the ruse's success, he glanced a blow across the
Catholic's forehead.

"Guess you're happy he's dead," the soldier was saying as he helped
wrap a bandage into place. "We're grateful for any extremist's death.
Makes our job a lot easier," he was almost laughing now. Death wore
such an ordinary face when it courted so often.

Sean had yet to reply. He was staring at the shovel with the snapped
handle. The blade had separated on impact against the terrorist's head.
The man was nowhere to be seen. Rescue squads--the familiar ambulance,
fire brigades were attempting a body count in the rubble of O'Leary's.

"Say, you alright? I said guess you're pleased you managed to pull away
from that one," the lively soldier virtually leered as he pressed again
for some comment.

"The dog . . . his noise, did you . . . ."

"No," the soldier stared uncomprehending.



PONCHONTAS

Years ago, when life was too violent for any to live very old, the
Spirit invented a ruse to give great age to Man.

Late one fall, Ponchontas was keeping a slow fire to smoke his strips
of salmon. It occurred to him that by stoking the flames gently with
bits of chips, the fire would burn not only smoother, but more evenly.

Ponchontas held the block firmly and brought his axe to play on the
extended limb. Suddenly, his grip faltered and the blade struck flesh
drawing blood. Panicky, he thrashed about the sand scattering it into
the face of the fire. Quite by accident, you see, as his foot only
convulsed the pain his bleeding arm felt. One by one, the blood fell in
drops then trickles, rivulets until a veritable torrent seemed loosed.
Ponchontas screamed till the woods listened. The spirit that governs
the pulp of the wood and the sap to rise took pity on Ponchontas. It
curdled the sap to thick resins in the chopped wood and the gummy resin
fell to the forest floor. As it lay so glutenous, the Earth Mother was
also quickened to show sympathy. This she did by touching the marrow of
the hurting wood. By a thick chain of being, Ponchontas felt his skin
harden. The painful throb soon began to leave the wound and the scar
healed. Immediately, he was on his knees imploring the spirits. He
begged what small favour he might return. The reply was instantaneous.

"Liberate three husks in your crib."

Then, with much saying and thoughts multiplying forth within his head,
he gave word to the council of Voices. Once dispatched, the three ears
lost their kernels giving old women to this day their namesake of beady
eyes. The abandoned husks became their withered forms and sacks of corn
were found to be "old bags." The empty rinds became harridans'
cancelled lives. Tares in the fruit were seen as the trials and
vicissitudes of this life, wormholes as their tears. So, in an act of
mercy, old women and crones were born saving future generations the
misery of living too old.

To this day, an old woman often has a husky voice and an ear for
medicine.



THE BLOODFISH

A story about tears that became minnows and sobs large fishes in their
place.

Once, when the sky was young and the spirits were expressing their
wishes, peals of light and thunder damaged the heavens until they were
swollen and purple. Rain fell like leaves as the victors banished the
fallen from the clouds. The vanquished were ordered to supply the empty
lakes with forms fitting their previous ways. Swimming in oblivion,
they only stopped to rest in reed beds on August days when the Great
Spirit smothered his anger.

The evil ones assumed the course of large blood fish scraping the silt
bottoms in reminder of their reduced state. All sorts of creatures--the
catfish with his whiskers to remind the new creature man of his
pre-human state and the eel and lamprey with their sharp eyes to
disclose to the world the inherent baseness of their rebellious nature.
The giant of the deep--the sturgeon--had a sucker form mouth. Every
time man lifted him across the keel of a boat he would see his
obsequious face panting to the sky.

In fact, when sturgeon or the spirit commanded to be pike were caught,
the thrash of their tails sent small tears as ripples across the lake.
These stirred sand people and minnows were born. Each sob from dying
pike's tail, doomed to a long toothy snout for her disobedience by
Manitou, formed a larger fish. In this way, fish were ever reminded of
their punishment and man kept fed.

The Indians enjoyed new food as plenteous as the grains of golden earth
on each lake's face.




THE GARDEN PATCH

Gourd was taken to task when she understood the limitations the garden
patch had placed upon her people.

It was early fall and the dancers of the vegetable kingdom paraded
their charms in bright, full regalia. Across the earth in splotches of
colour, the tomatoes scented a good fall. So, too, the kingly husks of
corn and the melons, spinach and cucumber in turn eyed the approaching
season in growing faith. Each had a succulent function and dangled
their inviting flesh to the beholder.

But, alas, what did gourd promise? She was deeply conscious of lacking
the forward brightness of tomato and pumpkin. She lacked leafy greens
so evidently prized and when her fellow vegetables covered the brown
soil in preparation for the fine day they would bask across a kitchen
table, it was almost too much for the sensitive gourd to stomach. Why
even squash, which she felt closest to, had more of a function than
she. So versatile did the big neighbour seem in comparison to herself,
the ugly dwarf.

She was on the verge of casting herself in despair across the rickety
fence or joining the long, black embers of a dead fire young boys had
prepared months back. Surely, she was the outcast of the plant world.
How grotesque her features were, so hard and unpliable seemed her
flesh. Even her skin tones were half-caste. No recipes called for her
presence. A mood of growing helplessness seemed to envelop her.

A boy, the earlier fire setter, is describing an odd vegetable, tubular
and often misshapen, that was excellent for all sorts of childhood
pursuits--making paperweights, building scarecrows and decorating
mantles.

"If only people knew," he bubbles.

"Still more success stories," the little gourd cries on hearing the
child's comment.

"At least I won't have to be humbled in her presence," the gourd
thought, her self confidence shattered.

And with that the little gourd approached the Vegetable King and asked
to use her remaining wish. For in those days all living things were
handed one means for improving themselves.

"I resolve to be a new edible," she sighed, "something other than a
gnomish gourd. Make, O King, a glorious . . . pumpkin." But the
Vegetable King decided not to abandon his earlier invention and so
gourds live on. Distant relatives of the bright, new pumpkin, but their
inspiration nonetheless.




THE MONARCH

She wanted her beauty too soon and must now forfeit it for the moment.

One day, when the Earth was a glorious garden and ruled by a brilliant
sun flower towering above the plants of her domain, Monarch butterfly,
not yet her familiar orange, complained she wished to be large as a
bird with petal wings translucent to the sun, folding with the rain.
Sunflower, taken back by this unusual demand, sought to humble Monarch.

"Henceforth for your imprudence, each one of your race must toil for
your wings. No more shall you enjoy fruits without labour. By daring to
be mighty you will begin existence as a pale, green egg hardly
distinguishable from the lowliest leaf. Moreover, as a reminder of your
insolence, you must pass through four purgatorial stages. The bitterest
bane of your people will be the bread of the milkweed."

"You wish to aggrandise yourself? So be it--you will shed your skin
like a snake and hang upside down in stupor for weeks on end. Only
then, will I allow you to retain your former excellence."

And with that, sunflower drew hard upon her curse and winter formed.
She, too, planted seed-eggs across the face of the earth. Her face lost
its radiance by fall and her petals cried to the ground. Even today,
when people eat of her wealth they devour it with salt. This is in
remembrance that, in cursing Monarch, she, too, felt her own wrath for
salt is more bitter than the bane of the milkweed.



BRÉBEUF

Brébeuf is looking at the land that bears his namesake. He has no
recollection of the horrors to come for his gaze unfolds as if in a
dream.

The wide expanse of blue water pleases him. Certainly the area holds
potential--many hard and softwooded trees not unlike his native
Brittany. In the warm glow of a July morning, he belittles his
misfortunes, the present trials sapping little Ste. Marie.

The kindly father dashes the recent sleep from his eyes with cold brook
water. The shimmer seems to fit the haze his current thoughts pivot in.
Sweet water country might yet prove both fortress for Christian souls
and strength at feeding Louis' New French dream.

The sun is no longer in the sky. Instead a ghoulish orange disc
fastened between sharpened sticks is brought closer and closer to the
white face. He is maddened with pain. The circular nature of the mind
in torment flits to the earlier morning rumination. Someone spills part
of a hissing kettle on the fire in mock ritual of the Baptism. Too
abundant waters, ah yes that could prove a difficulty in cultivating
this pleasant land. The swinish feast in preparation re-echoes thoughts
of ample provisions so vital to this distant land.

An Indian brave stands holding the scalp, his face with all the leer of
a carnival barker three centuries hence intent on making a sale.



CITY THE INSECTS INVADE

"From the indigo straits to Ossian's seas, on pink and orange sands
washed by the vinous sky, crystal boulevards have just arisen and
crossed, immoderately inhabitedby poor young families who get their
food at the green grocers. Nothing rich-the city." Arthur Rimbaud


The old man sleeps with his weeping. Another old one pauses with her
cats on a fire escape while nursing a sore like a precious stone. A
garbage can is an herbivore grazing on stalks of ringworm. Vermin are
the pool sharks of this brothel polishing off the tenements' fur lined
rails.

At last, the skid of tires tears a hole in the river bank. Sand-fleas
and blowflies become nightriders marauding a new turf of godzilla cars.
An urchin dangles his stolen wristwatch like a fish in a bottle while
shoals of centipedes make a beeline in a poseidon stampede. Filthy rags
are prayer cakes left over from the last sabbat and become holed
coffins for those still searching for involvement.

Islands drift into protoplasm atolls as the city stalks itself.
Cockroaches are the plumbers of eternity. Rapid fire legs sidestep the
etchings of industrious ants while silverfish are the boatmen trouncing
human oars. Living is a Stegasorous swinging its tail.

Scraps are inviting guests as insects lord over a habitat free of
blight and homuncular stain.


PLAUDITS

Loki, the Norwegian god of mischief, sends out a lithesome blonde with
a slinkiness that ravishes the libido. She presses her dream-like form
against the windowpane. The night is soft about the city's lights.
Water cascades in the distance, while small, black crickets' shovel
sounds around pricked ears. The diminished man ignores this, instead
busying himself with drawing lions on a vast sheet of blank paper.
There is no word for happiness in the Malawi tongue and this disturbs
him. What far reaching implications for the people of Africa.

He stands and downs a drink to ease his parched mouth. A moisture ring
blurs one of his lions, and, again, he will lose the battle against the
king of beasts tonight.



SUMMER'S CLOCK

"And the day is a wounded boy." Garcia Lorca

Two is a fonder number gracing the clock than one--a relief from
monogamy, a rightful place to start. Three is too midway, cantankerous
in its sound, still four is drab and stony and the sun lies too low in
the sky for any truthful expression of real afternoon. Five is somewhat
better, the sky is pressuring evening and, by six, is big with shadows
that foresee the coming dark.

With seven, ambers and misty wraps are charged in pastel tones
celebrating the arrival of eight. At nine, all pretense is dropped that
its still daylight and colours lie bludgeoned--extinguished in the
dark. Ten through near dawn is blissful and quiet, no confusing
escapades of shifting light. Only the hour before dawn promises a
summer respite any different than the cue sung at midnight.

The absence of colour and light diminish confusion over the sun's
relative positioning. One need experience no mood fluctuations over
birth or hasty departure of the day. In the broad smile of no light,
the frock of virginal black remains securely intact.



AUTOMOBILE SOFT LEGS

"The world's smallest painting ... Our Beautiful Canada was painted
with a single hair and the aid of a microscope. The artist considers
his price of seven million dollars not too high."

The Globe and Mail, January 25, 1979.

Now, it came to pass that a seasoned young diner by the name of Simon
decided to revolutionize the restaurant trade. It was his firm desire
to bring some chutzpah into the all too predictable and dreary cuisine
on this part of the continent. From the first, Simon maintained that
food and pleasure were inseparable. Moreover, since food could be a
vehicle for fantasy, even more tellingly it could provide an outlet for
self-expression.

The lily pad pizza was typical of his new approach and was a twofold
operation: a parent might buy an inflatable plastic "pizza," the size
and shape of a small wading pool. It had an edible spout and dehydrated
"sister," pizzas attached to the parent ship that allowed a child to
fantasize while sailing and enjoying his favourite food. If that
sounded too decadent or illusion inspiring, a sleeker model existed
minus the extras--in other words the green wading pool size pizza
unruffled by further wizardry.

Simon always maintained not everyone could handle too much
soft-pedalled reality. Out of the dense formations of endless fast food
chains, Simon's novelties were to titillate the jaded restaurant goer.

Interpretive signs and amenities guided the erstwhile onlooker to the
"ultimate," in fantasy dining. Rhinocerous pizza was served flanked on
an inflatable horn. For the less adventuresome, a lobster pizza with
drawn butter could be had either with tangy dough balanced along its
claws or imprints of lobster cut into the succulent crust. Children
loved the lily pad pizzas and mothers discovered how delightful baby
tears were when presented in tastefully done little cups. Terrariums
soon arrived and were pedalled shamelessly. Some outlets claimed
"billions and billions," were sold.

Simon also cornered the potent swamp water drink market and was having
his empire go "wet." The familiar Chartreuse would now be available at
request and a grown up might indulge primal fantasies along with a
taste to be a gardener, rake and glutton all at once. Special suites
were rumoured to exist patterned after the Poconos in Pennsylvania
where a couple could bathe in a pizza-shaped tub embroidered with baby
tears, fountains, tropical lianas and all the air plants one could
stand pressed against your steamy shower. Pizza machines for a quarter
lined the tubs and one operation had dispensed with coins altogether
issuing instead rubber baby tears that substituted for money. They
could be strung around the neck like shark's teeth. Swamp water in
little jars added a further touch to this risqué scene.

But, of course, for the really discriminating the boar's head feast was
the sign of a truly adventuresome palate. A Black Forest effect could
be conjured up complete with moveable props. A pig's head stuffed with
not the familiar apple but instead each tusk hollowed bulging with
pizza. Another version saw rhinocerous shaped pizzas rolled in the
style of Yap Island discs, that land being noted for its odd wheel like
currency. A boar's head contoured in the recognizable shape but with
tusks only made of pizza was a favourite alternative. After all,
gourmands bought escargots in order to fill their shells then, after
washing, repeated the process on future occasions. And, most certainly,
no one could deny that Simon's ideas were anymore outlandish than the
epicurean Romish feasts of peacock tongues and assorted other naughty
delicacies. His was but an updated version appealing to the mobile
North American lifestyle. Frisbees even began to resemble pizza and
trampolines approached that air. It was all the rage to be Italian and
boast of one's prowess in demolishing mounds of pizza.

Yet trouble was afoot for Simon and his proteges. The very real
puritanical element in society saw Simon's chain of exotic pizza
emporiums in the same league as exotic dancers and sought to banish
them, seeing that gluttony was akin to lust. Therefore, pizza pie body
parlour rubs began to vanish.

Moreover, peevishly spiteful children insisted on spreading rumours
that Simon's operations used day-glow worms as substitutes for
pepperoni and unwashed algae as a base for pasta crusts. People began
to question the wisdom of letting children act out their fantasies with
food as that commodity was a very emotional subject and a testing
ground for good parenting. Psychologists soon began to join the
harangue and claim the pizza emperor was a poorly toilet trained
debauchee acting out repressed impulses in the form of a greedy diner.
Some, in fact, claimed he was in the anal stage of his development and
that his taste was all in his mouth. Food faddists and health nuts
wondered aloud about the wisdom of combining so much dough with gelatin
plant fibre. It seemed most everyone was rushing to deflate the pizza
bubble and end our love affair with the anchovy.

Unemployed pizza cooks and pizza rub girls were soon at the end of the
dough line. In fact, so great was the influx of misplaced persons that
the term "on the dough," for a time replaced "dole," as an euphemism
for hard times. Extortionists began to muscle in asking for their share
of the pizza pie. Newspapers began gloating over the imminent bust of
the "infantile," pizza passion.

Still, Simon confided his trust in the same observation that must have
motivated Lord Sandwich when he launched his invention. People will
always search out the delicious and the readily available. What could
be more elementary than meat between bread, frogs on lily pads, protein
over raw vegetables, food amidst food?

Simon set his heart to selling automobile soft legs to hosts of touchy
epicures who really wondered at this juncture if anything that unusual
could really taste like chicken.



THE PELLY, THE POWDER AND THE SNAKE

The cowboy's overriding presence in North America's mythology is not
difficult to understand.

Perhaps the great lone land ethos of endurance, stamina,
self-resourcefulness and "a man's got to do what a man's got to do,"
John Wayne brand of thoroughness, still endures more so than once
admitted. Talking in these terms usually elicits a responsive chord.
Everyone has felt that, at one time or the other, only his carabine
(wits) stood between him and the fate accorded to the Sundance Kid. As
life increases in complexity, in all probability there will be a
tendency to create myths or revive tales from the past to help blaze
trails. The westerner personifies close shaves with danger. So, too,
surviving in the corporate jungle implies a similar fixation in
manufacturing responsive heroes to see us through.

In one scenario, the setting of a gruelling contest at the managerial
level becomes "highnoon," for the Earp brothers. The plug uglies in the
vein of the Claytons are the bush-wackers waiting to play upon any
opening. The board room assumes the air of OK Corral with old Doc
Halliday leaning on the fence or a tombstone, if the exchange goes
dismally.

Most of us would naturally see little identification with the
Renaissance condottieri or mercenary or understand the Laager[1]
mentality of the white South African. Yet we do have some input into
what the bounty hunter is capable of or the ramifications of being
dry-gulched by an insensitive or unfeeling person. All have had to
cross their Badlands, ride roughshod above the timberline or grab for
cover to avoid a ricochet.

The two legged coyotes are still with us no matter how humanitarian we
might fancy ourselves.

The Ox-Bow Incident[2] can overtake most anyone, although the saying
"meeting one's Waterloo," seems at this writing more commonplace. In
ramrodding an outfit to market, or seeing a plan to completion, all
must stand clear of brackish water, wolfsbane and loco weed. Place
these symbolist terms in their updated context and you will understand
a hockey player's nickname "cowboy," and the slow irrelevance of that
veneer time.

A primeval instinct beckons through time to the campfire. And I suppose
a campfire logic might be said to exist in all of us. The thinking of
things out carefully over a second and third cup of coffee, cautious
self exploratory reasoning. Today, any job ad will still warn: "Only
the aggressive with a proven trail record need apply." Myths and more
myths, the saga makers are legends in their own time, recreating
themselves shamelessly.

It may be time to pull on the reins, but allow one last indulgence. Who
is the modern centurion? The town marshal finds his present niche in
foreman, boss man, supervisor(?) The heart is a lonely hunter and
amidst renegades, mavericks and poisoned water holes, the modern
Cincinnatus[3] or wagon-master will be found contending with an array
of tenderfoots, greenhorns and Jimson weeds up the Chisholm Trail
through the Cimarron to market.

Chiggers, jerky, sweat beetles and hardtack are but mementoes of this
earlier romantic interlude.

[1] The formation of a circle shaped wagon train to ward off danger at
the time of the Utilanders trek across the Transvaal to the Orange Free
State.

[2] Popular novel written in the early nineteen forties.

[3] Legendary Roman hero who safeguarded a vital bridge into the city
from the Etruscans.




JABIRU

Clarence, the pipe stem would grow hot with rage, then become agitated
over his apparent inability to stop smoking. You see, he was a misfit
in more ways than one. He didn't snap firmly in place when ordered, and
more importantly, he resented the appendicular attachment to a place
and time not his own choosing.

Clarence would stew near the pipe bowl, rife with burnt ends and
hacking smoke. The pipe had a bite and it was he who enlisted its
bitter end.

Now Clarence had designs of escaping tobacco road. He envisaged a
future free of pool hall smells and the glandular malfunctioning of his
predator owner. They say the stem of a pipe pressed against one's
tongue for extended periods of time will cause aggravation, perhaps
"malignant growths," worse yet, cancer. To Clarence, however, it was he
who was sickened by the onrush of brown saliva and halitosis as his
compulsive partner pressed his bones to an opened jaw. He felt like
Cain and wished he could kill this man with the jawbone of his own ass.
At the very least Clarence wanted to be something more than an after
dinner pipe. He wished a certain notoriety, a dance on pigeon feathers,
to be a pipe of Nordic proportions--a yard's length of smoke. If he was
to be engrossed in smoke, he at least wished it to arrive in exotic
blends, from textures rich with the warmth of their climes. Turkish
root, jabiru, all were curiously better than the stuffy domestics he
had come to know.

But alas, Clarence for all his fuming saw nothing ahead but more of the
depressing humidor. His lot was to be a rack in a provincial smokehouse
kept aglow by a poor man's fervour for post-natal security. The
additive was relaxation and his world was to be as commonplace as the
hearth. Home was a blackened stem yellowing with age against a
bewhiskered face. There was no knowing when a pang of nicotine might
hit, so he spent his off hours in a coat pocket or a sleeve's rear end
eyeing the world from a very shaky distance. Life was indeed strange
when one was rudely hauled out of near hibernation into the brunt of
day, stuffed into an asphyxiating batch of tacky powder, then pressed
into open flame. Afterwards, further indignities were exacted as one's
head was slammed against the pavement or struck on the heal of a
manured boot. Existing was not sweet (barring Prince Albert) but likely
to be hellishly warm or worse, infuriatingly commonplace. Still, he
comforted himself on the knowledge Alex the cigarette could sense his
end more dreadfully as a butt in some pool-side urinal. At least, his
demise would be a trifling more dignified--or so he assumed.

Now it came to pass that Clarence's owner was passing through a
metamorphosis of sorts where he believed a meerschaum pipe would ease
the tobacco habit. At once, Clarence faced the twin prospect of being
not only redundant but phased out as an aging health risk. This was
clearly the siren call to action.

Clarence thought of suicidal urges. He would lodge himself in his
owner's windpipe. He would fall from grace with a thud, enmeshing
himself in a thousand pieces at his distant relative's feet.
Least-wise, he would rot in a sewer near a busy bus stop replete with
all the dronings of archaic feet. Or, or he reasoned, he would outwit
his opponent and maintain his old hegemony. Oblivion seemed a more
forbidding fate than drudgery.

For sometime, Clarence had watched the new meerschaum from a distance.
Its lily white figure elicited a plan. He would disgorge from the pit
of his favourite ashtray all the toxins lodged in the burnt up tobacco.
He would prove white was an aberration. He and he alone would disfigure
her perfection. A good pipe should camouflage its owner's hazards. He
had only to tar and weather his rival or await the smoke to cloud the
delicate perfection of that effeminate form.

Reveling in the sense of this new found power, Clarence became puffed
up with more than his own smoke, and his thoughts fell into a dry
rattle. The owner feeling this unaccustomed rush of heat and
experiencing hard drawing from his companion, vigorously tapped the
stem against an open door's edge. He muttered something to the effect
about the clogged nature of his old instrument and how refreshing his
next smoke promised to be.

And so it would, without the residue of filth lodged inside the once
trusty pipe.



ADUA

Adua had never regarded his life as a pantomime. He wanted so much to
please. As a dandelion, he thought of himself as little brother to the
sun catching her yellow butter in his eyes.

It came as no small surprise, then, when Adua learned of the world's
misgivings toward him. Other flowers, far less nobly constructed,
seemed held in such greater esteem. The first shred of evidence of this
that Adua was indeed not a bountiful plant came when cattle distained
his presence. Later, a smelly herbicide was used in his presence and
Adua knew all was not well. Most discomforting, however, was the manner
in which other flowers measured up in comparison to Adua. Even flowers
that Adua considered quite ordinary seemed, tongue in cheek, to fare
much more prettily.

"Adua, Adua as the wind blows so do the poppies grow."

Somehow, Adua heard that refrain while nodding his head in the summer
heat. He had grown accustomed to the red blotches that spilled their
colour so near to his own colony. To him, their mauve crimsons were
gaudy, a shrieking red quite unlike his gentle yellow nectar. He was
feeling quite smug that, at least compared to that recluse, his kind
were visibly better.

But then, proximity to the poppy family started him thinking. Firstly,
unlike his brothers, the poppies were well tended. A dutiful human
watered and caressed the plants commenting on the fullness of the pod
and the grandeur of their petals. Yet, all Adua could see was a lot of
goitered looking droopy herbage. As time went on, it became painfully
obvious that the big house and her attendants had established clearly a
floral arrangement that did not include dandelions. Adua grudgingly
admitted some of his cousins, in careful manicured garden beds,
deserved their swooning praise. But not, not the poppies. Why, they
were not even solid North Americans like himself. They had no native
roots in the solid soil of his pastureland. The poppy was an Oriental
import, too foreign to be assimilated. And what of its reputation for
buccaneering. In some countries it was illegal even to grow them!
Wasn't it worse than the demon weed since its seeds carried the
substance necessary for narcotics? Surely, anything brewed of opium
should be shunned in real life. Convinced of his moral superiority,
Adua could at least comfort himself with the realization his breed was
of a fine upstanding kind, even if reduced by circumstance to humble
origins. His kind went about their business peacefully enough.

As summer ripened into fall after all dandelions had long stopped
blooming, Adua was content to pass his declining months as a stringy
plant. It was then Adua came to learn more painful truths stalked the
earth. Other flowers were plucked for corsages, arrayed in stately
carriages for banquets, had toasts drunk to them and found themselves
into the hair of pretty maidens. The most Adua had ever seen his
dandelions construed for in the spring was a mere ringlet chain. True,
hardy souls brewed a concoction of dandelion wine but what good was
that if it was rebuked with taunts of "too bitter," or "how crass,"?

As the cold winds licked about him, gone were the memories of his
tussled gold headdress worn a season ago. He was about to commandeer
the last of his strength before frost demanded his shop close for the
winter. Through progeny produced months before, his kind would spend
the cold in tolerable warmth as a seed. Germination was such a
marvelous adventure. And what of poppy'? Instead of feeling that burst
of speed and sense of the unknown flitting across creation as he had
like a parachutist ages ago, her brood had to stay bundled up in a pod.
How dull, thought Adua.

Then, as Adua prepared to tuck himself in for the winter, life handed
him but one more setback. It was nearing the eleventh of November, and
a curious custom was presenting itself. To be sure, Adua had seen real
flowers adorn lapels of both men and women as well as bridal wreathes
of the most exquisite colours. Yet, never had he seen a poppy, living
or otherwise, at the centre of adoration. He was mortified now to see
imitation ones worn as a symbol of remembrance, John MacRae
notwithstanding. How could she symbolize the dead of Canadian wars when
he, Adua, was a native son? Why, if you wanted to get technical about
it, even his name contained reference to a lion and to his mind that
meant courage. He was perplexed to see how Britain, with all her
reliance on that beast, had not seen fit to incorporate his kind as the
founding race should have done into her coat of arms. The Scots had
their order of the garter and a thistle, of all things, was emblematic
to that northerly land. Why not a dandelion even if it were a bit of a
dandy all dressed in that, shudder, colour of cowardice, yellow'?
People were so emotional choosing a red flower simply because its
colour reminded them of shed blood.

Adua was hurt to the quick and could bring no comfort to himself either
in hope of future aerial flights or the prospect of his greens being
eaten next season as tasty helpings.

There was nothing to do but sport a brown coat, suggestive of the
treatment the world had seen to give him.



RIP

Rip, an inarticulate dog with a namesake derivative of more.

Rip arrives as a pup, large, abounding with energy though somewhat
clumsy in his gait. But Rip is no matter of fact bowser--the type that
woofs approvingly at your presence then is content to carry himself off
to a corner and deliver up his bulk with an unrelieved sigh.
Nevertheless, one does suspect his nose is wet (or as shiny) as a
washcloth but such familiarities are not extended to strange dogs.

Rip's progress in his new home is eventful. Early in his stay, he
gleefully corners a porcupine and gets a face full of quills for
violating that one inescapable fact accorded to all life on this
planet; introductions are always in order in untried situations. One
must proceed with due caution through proper channels or suspicion will
ensue. Rip nurses a bandaged nose, sees the inside of a vet's garage
(replete with a scourge of animals more reminiscent of a concentration
camp than an infirmary) is duly horrified, then droops off to a needle.
While recovering, a kitten perches on his upper abdomen and goes to
sleep. A thoughtful child covers Rip with an old rug. Rip's tongue
nearly flattens the mat as it lolls from his mouth. The edge of his jaw
is ringed with a black, tarry substance that grows more viscous the
longer Rip is under sedation. Rip's education proceeds apace.

By a queer turn of events, big Rip was to become associated with a
number of incontestable oddities, each sufficient to besmirch his name.
Firstly, Rip's very name popped up with annoying frequency. How, the
family queried, had the name "Rip," been chosen anyway? Of this, no one
seemed certain. The father remembered some vacation talk when
references were being made to a rip roaring time and that, perhaps, a
pup would soon be in the offing. Apart from this, Rip's name and how
they had deigned to associate that foppish hound with "Rip," remained a
mystery. The children in their homework, moreover, were increasingly
being made aware of the times "Rip," seemed to get in the semantics of
the language, English orthography and even the warp and woof of history
itself. Certainly, Rip or someone like him, had been outstanding.

Rip Van Winkle's first disclosure caused one such stir. One child
particularly pressed for explanations. Had this other Rip been
doggishly inclined? Did Rumpelstiltskin have a brother named Rip? No,
repeated the mother unless the child's inference was to Rip's great
doggish capacity for sleep or Rumpelstiltskin's spinning or spilling of
hair or food. A second child, not meaning to be overly precocious,
similarly unearthed a red herring. Rip Taylor, the comedian, had Rip's
name. Was he, too, er . . . like Rip? The mother smiled. Only in his
buffoonery, but she, again, was unsure why either Rip had been so named.

Some days later, the children heard one of the older boys in public
school boasting of being "ripped," the weekend before. The younger
child, wary of being ridiculed but curious as to this new utterance of
the family pet's name, pressed for some explanation. Utter derision.
The child shame-facedly brought the problem home. The mother, not
trained in the lore of schoolyard vernacular, thought the boy in
question had escaped a whipping for tearing something and was boasting
of his prowess in side-stepping authority. The father thought not. He
gently told the child that the wine the parents were enjoying could be,
well, "abused." One child immediately thought abused was a reference to
abusing one's body through self-exploration or playing doctor but the
father clarified that matter. A touchy exchange followed over how
something pleasurable caused harm. The mother retreated into a
homily--"all things in moderation," and told the children they would
understand as they grew older. The elder son persisted, however, in
questioning how something bad, if included under the "all," as stated,
could be either moderate or good depending on the circumstances. He
further demanded what reception the schoolyard braggart would have
given such sagacious counsel.

Events were kept on slow boil over the following week. It began to
appear as if the issue was becoming only remotely curious. Rip still
dozed before the fire and wagged a buffoonish tail in servile
recognition. Then one day, on researching a project, the son happened
upon the term rip-tide. Further inquiries followed. The hound, of
course, had not the remotest connection with ocean currents. Yet the
origin of his nickname was as puzzling as ever. Ripcords and ripoffs
deepened the controversy. The rippling effects of wind on sand, too,
had to be dismissed out of hand as a key to Rip's misnomer. Strange,
too, that no one thought to question the nickname Sandy as a touchstone
for unraveling Rip's dilemma.

Perplexity next turned to one Rin Tin Tin. He, too, had a nonsensical
name but his sanity and reputation escaped unscathed, perhaps for no
other reason than the sonorous incantation of his vowels. To be called
Rip, it seemed, was nakedly plebian--a type of proletarian churl of the
canine underworld. Besides, substituting Rip for Rin seemed too openly
imitative and it didn't begin to solve what prompted the naming of the
family pet. It began to look as if all coupling of objects and titles
was, by its nature, inexplicable.

The father then proceeded to bring a certain sophistication to the
broadening quandary. People, he ascertained, grew towards their names.
Positive, intriguing names were an asset. Awkward, embarrassing ones,
moreover, were definite obstacles to progression in life. Did not Jack
the Ripper have infamy forever etched within his name? Maybe none ever
took Doctor Cream (alias the Ripper) seriously. And whose idea was it
to substitute R.I.P. on tombstones? But then a certain Ripley made a
name for himself by documenting the unusual so Rip wasn't the only one
that lived in a dog eat dog world. However, the evidence was not in as
to whether a dog could labour under a name's handicap.

Then one afternoon, while engaging in the bravado of chasing cars and
attempting to bite their hubcaps, Rip miscued and ran headlong under
the wheels. Rip's entire frame rippled with the impact of the
collision. Thereafter, Rip indeed became an oddity for more reasons
than his name. Some say he became psychotic, if indeed dogs are capable
of such things. Barking at imaginary postmen, baying like a banshee at
cars, baring his teeth at passersby, word travelled about this
insufferable dog. The father, skilled in avoiding unpleasantness, had
Rip put to sleep. The children seemed to understand.

And of Rip? He went to his end as uncomprehendingly as he had sat
through the entire deliberation on his title and existence.



REVIEW

THE LAND OF LOOK BEHIND represents a third volume of work written by
Paul Cameron Browne. His two previous books, Whispers and Eyeshine have
been reviewed in Malahat Review, Quarry and The Canadian Author and
Bookman:

"An exquisite revelation of detail."

"Excellent control and imagery.

"Original observations."







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