The Iconoclast's Journal Read online

  At around four in the morning she began to stir, for by then she had begun to realize that not only was she still alive, but she was hungry. Voracious, in fact. It would seem that on her singular and astonishing wedding night she had developed a new and demanding appetite. She blinked a couple of times, as if waking from a strange dream, and looked about. Her eye fell upon a small dark shape crawling in the bedclothes, a spider that was struggling over the mountainous cloth waves. She reached down, plucked it out of the folds, and stared at the poor creature as it wriggled desperately between her thumb and forefinger. Her sister Cecile, who was terrified of spiders and yet maintained that killing one was bad luck, would certainly not have touched the thing, and would have leapt out of bed screaming. Avice smiled. Formerly, and sympathetically, she would have flicked it onto the floor so that it might continue its tiny pilgrim’s progress. But tonight, without the slightest regret or remorse, she popped the spider into her mouth and ate it.

  2

  PASSING THROUGH

  Awoman can confide in a book, hold it up to her face, rub it against her cheek, whisper into its leaves. A daybook can absorb her secrets like a sponge. Her book might be the only one she tells about that man she saw walking through the river, through the black braided water, blossoms from the Nelders’ cherry tree riding soft in his hair, on his shoulders. The secret here is not really the man she sees so much as the heat in her breath, her tongue slipping into the crack of the book, the virginal taste of paper uncontaminated by confession.

  The particularity of this woman’s life is rich; she could fill her diary like a bucket overflowing with detail. The larger sweep of it, however, can be summed up in a few words: spinster, elderly parents, walls of the house, fields, river. What she wants to write in her book is what she cannot see, what lies beyond in the dreaming distance, the places where the river flows. That man travelling it like a road, striding through the current, petals in his hair—was he even real? She half suspected that he had originated in her own reading, the hero of some romantic novel liberated by her yearning. (“‘My Prince!’ she cried.”) How else could he walk with such certainty on what he could not see, the river bottom roiled and rocky? And surely such perfection loosed would come to grief in this hard country. Illusion or not, he was someone to capture, to press between the pages of her diary and keep forever. She might do that—snatch a bit of him, hair or skin, fuel to keep her desires banked. She knows he will haunt her anyway, his brief passing will harden into an enduring presence, the river-walking man, the stranger who always appears with a lover’s persistence and loyalty, but who passes directly through her, through her life, as if she were the one who was the stranger, this woman whose days are as empty as her book.

  Fuelled by impulse and premonition, Grif headed north, taking the coward’s route between the lines (banks, back roads, fences), keeping out of people’s way, avoiding even himself. He couldn’t be caught, he reasoned (weakly), if he remained nameless, and while no one called him anything but drifter or tramp, his progress did not always go undocumented. This was an age of journal-keeping, and there were any number of diarists, not all romantically afflicted, who were scribbling away, revealing to their silent friends what they would never tell their mother or their sister. Journals know what they know, and don’t gossip; they keep to themselves, unless of course one’s mother or sister pries open the locked wardrobe door with a poker and reads:

  21 May, 1898. After tea, slipped out back. Left Mother playing nap with Charles, Clara’s intended. He is desperately smitten. Though not with Clara, rather with a certain someone who does not reciprocate. Saw Ann Danger, the new cook, sneak a flask into her apron pocket. Pretended not to notice. She wont last. Walked down to the lake, against orders. All the tramps, Mother says, five today at the back door looking for a meal. A lovely evening, warm, saw a red-winged blackbird. Wished I had brought my sketchbook. Then did see a man, bathing. Quite startled me. Should have run back to the house. Stood watching instead. So absorbed was he in his ablutions, didnt even notice. Would Charles look so? Would he reach into the water as this man did, clutching at its very roots, pouring handfuls of it over his naked body like black silk? I think not.

  There were other sightings of this not so rare creature, man on the run. A twelve-year-old boy in Blyth wrote:

  Auntie went out at five this morning to fetch some barley to boil for the chickens. What did she get ahold of in the barn but a man’s leg. Gave her a sore fright, and the man too he run away. Limping some. Auntie’s got a fearsome strong grip.

  A farmer in Grey County recorded his days with a strict verbal thrift, a taciturn economy:

  June 1898. 2nd. Weather hot. 5th. Sun. Dehorned cattle. 10th. Sowed Johnson’s field. 11th. High wind. 14th. Killed the heifer. 17th. Luella fine, but baby sickly. 18th. Started to dig new well. Rain. 22nd. Bad storm. Man come up the road. Stranger. 23rd. Baby died. Sold butter to Bert Winch 20c lb. 25th. Warm. 29th. Dog run off. Killed 2 chickens. 30th. Lost hand fixing thresher.

  Grif himself had begun to feel like an epic written by the road, and not the hero of the story but its suffering and stretched body. Or perhaps he was only its grammatical flaw, his life solely constituted of one long winding sentence that goes on and on. Middlesex, Perth, Huron, Bruce, Grey. For days and days, turning into weeks, he worked these counties up through the soles of his feet—his stolen shoes worn ragged as cabbages—until the full knowledge of them, every stone and stem, burst in his brain like a huge puffball punched open. Intimacy is not marriage, he thinks, it is walking. Walking, walking.

  Although he was unaware of it, Grif did have cause to be annoyed with the Reverend Bee, his unwitting benefactor. If the good man had been a more considerate and conventional thief, the pockets of his rank and sizable jacket might have contained something far more useful than what they did, something to spend, at least, to hock or to barter. If Grif, on first sliding his hand into the inside pocket, had discovered a wad of bills thick as a slice of ham, he would have been able to ride away on an animal more reliable than longing, or eaten a meal more substantial than dust (or sparrow filched from a cat), or slept on a bed kinder than rock or needling, bug-infested hay—and not been wakened by some shrieking harridan attempting to snap his leg off.

  Out of one pocket he had drawn a voluminous and snot­bejewelled handkerchief, about the size of a baby’s winding sheet. This he had hastily posted in a letter box before quitting London. In another, equally disgusting, he’d found a preserved plum still sticky and damp, which he had dropped instantly, for it felt like some kind of minute organ, a spare gland kept in reserve. Grif frisked himself like an arresting officer, raising an aura of lint and Bee scurf, but found nothing of value, only a book in the inside pocket that he took to be a breviary or missal. He didn’t even bother to open it, and almost offered it to the pig he met on the outskirts of Stratford, his travelling companion for a stretch. It was a most personable pig, too, civil and well-mannered, deserving of an inspired—and inspirational—snack. The creature courteously gave him its full attention when Grif finally found the nerve to deliver his wedding speech, and it tactfully refrained from grunting where his father-in-law most certainly would not have refrained.

  The pig had sharp, snappy eyes, like intelligent alleys stuck in its head, and an air of knowing what it was about. It had made good its escape from the Kingsleys’ farm outside of Stratford, running straight as a blade through the wheat field, parting it down the centre like a green wig, then directly under a gap in the fence. No one had to issue the pig a telegram to inform it that it was in trouble, for it had correctly intuited that it was to be the intended at Miss Belle Kingsley’s own wedding—intended for the banquet table. Not this pig, must have been its motivating sentiment. Grif found the animal to be a noble beast, clean and honest-smelling, warm to bank up against at night. He was sorry to part with it at Arthur, but the pig clearly had his own itinerary plotted, and headed east.
>
  A biographical footnote, a few words about this “lively piece of pork,” appears in Belle Kingsley’s own journal. This prettily bound book was available in the sitting room of the Kingsleys’ stately home for anyone to peruse, and in fact Belle had inscribed the words READ ME across the inside flyleaf. Such was the edge of Belle’s wit that she felt it would be selfish not to share it. Thus she describes in her journal the adventures of their “fugitive bacon supply” and their “porcine rebel,” who even as she writes is no doubt “advancing on Parliament to challenge the frog-faced knight of the realm.”

  Having gotten to know the animal, Grif would surely have been offended by such condescending whimsy, but then he had an evasive heart and tended to side with the shirkers and dodgers, while the young lady had been jilted by the centrepiece of her bridal dinner. Grif himself might have been a candidate for such a gustatory role, dredged as he was in dust and baking on the hot road. (An elderly woman in Listowel notes, “Last day I swear a ghost passed under our window. God help me, I felt my heart go cold in my chest.”) He could picture the scene, his naked body bound and glazed, mouth corked with a Mac, a sumptuous spectacle appearing in the very centre of the Drinkwaters’ groaning mahogany table. Like the other featured animals, he had been brought to his knees and bled white for this wedding. He thought of all those awkward flailing limbs, heads bludgeoned and lopped off, creatures stripped of their extremities and reconstituted as savoury dishes, a true domestication that rendered one plate- and tureen-shaped. The accommodating beasts: pressed chicken, pickled veal, jellied groom.

  A bride was more like pastry. Little kisses made of meringue, ladyfingers, coconut cake smothered with a boiled and whipped white icing. (The bride’s sisters, stiff yeasty buns.) Was it guilt or hunger that made him imagine so? Avice had worn a white muslin dress trimmed with oriental lace, orange blossoms in her dark hair, no veil, white kid gloves, white lisle thread stockings and white satin slippers. All this bridal whiteness, this purity, did not represent a consumable virginity, it seemed, so much as a death, an identity erased, the blankness of a new page. Avice must have worn her costume mockingly. So self-possessed was she that it was obvious—but only now, at this distance—that she had married herself years ago. He had been nothing more to her than a convenient device, a lever of some sort, used to free herself from the constraining fit of her family. In the last sight he had of her in the hotel, she had whirled away from him like a waterspout into the other room, laughing, sharing a joke, but not with him. Amazing how that aisle he had walked down had turned into this long long road, and up ahead, the bride in her vaporous froth of white was nothing more disturbing than that cloud on the horizon dispersing.

  If he had had the materials, and the ease, and a mind to, Grif might have kept his own record, a travel diary. A character would definitely form in it, a shape emerge, there would be a stepping forth. It wouldn’t be him, though. He would write himself out of his own observations, as he had written himself out of his life in London, the clerk behind the counter of Kingsmill’s who had caught Avice Drinkwater’s bold eye.

  Crawling slowly up the face of the province like a fly, he could easily have captured the telling details, the features, that would compose a portrait of the place and its residents. An odd one, too, not what you might expect. Certainly not what he expected from the staid and dull Ontario that he knew, patriotic to its bootstraps—to England, that is. Although, as he passed like a shadow by farmhouses, through villages and towns, he instinctively avoided the homes that were virtuous-seeming and prayer-locked, and he gave a wide berth to those with oak boughs decorating their front doors in commemoration of King Charles’s restoration to the throne, only two and a half centuries ago. He was drawn instead to the wavering lamplight that spilled at night out of houses filled with music and chatter and a sprawling, unkempt merriment. He stood at windows, munching handfuls of spinach or lettuce from the inhabitants’ own gardens, observing those within playing cards, or getting boisterously drunk, or inventively amorous—on the kitchen table, no less. Once, entranced, he watched a whole line of men and women, crouched down and hopping along the floor like ducks, hands linked to waists, legs flying, faces hot and burnished as though buttered with pure joy. Laughing, dancing, shouting—it was heartbreaking, the lives that some people are given.

  Flying limbs and soaring spirits—this was news to Grif. He thought of his own home: the altar-heavy and unplayed organ in the parlour, the confessional hush that rose out of the furniture, the prohibitive sheen of the oiled floor disallowing any frivolity that the feet might want to engage in, the plain black cross on the wall, the deity’s illiterate signature sealing a grim contract on the souls contained within. One thing he had learned on his travels was that eccentric behaviour was not only widespread, but invisible to those engaged in it. In one farmhouse he had watched a woman perform her chores, pouring tallow into moulds, baking bread, her family going about their business; all the while she wore a fish around her neck, a trout it was, the red ribbon strung through its mouth and gills tied in a neat bow. In another he saw a man eating a newspaper, strip by strip, column by column, while blood ticked out of his nose into a basin balanced on his lap. If he were to stand outside the window of his childhood home gazing in, he wondered if he would see something that he had missed, something obvious to an objective onlooker. He might catch his parents smiling at one another, if only faintly, or exchanging a word or two, some banality at least symbolic of conversation. More likely his mother would be seated as usual in the most uncomfortable chair, sewing, lips compressed, the fine lines around her mouth like stitching sealing it shut. His father would be seated opposite, hands fisted but empty, quarrying the silence with his fierce stare. Grif had told Avice that his parents were both dead, and it had not been such a great lie as all that. Hearts have to beat, don’t they? Some warmth has to be generated in the blood.

  Was that what he was looking for: the fleeting, mysterious thing that licks like a flame through a room—or a journal—otherwise so stiff and still? He had caught sight of it here and there, but had no idea how to attract it. How was he to be inscribed by it, how endorsed? So seldom was he acknowledged by the man ploughing the field or the woman hanging out the wash, or only with disdain and aversion (even the dogs kept their distance, sensing disloyalty), that he began to take his own non-existence for granted. He must have walked clear of himself somewhere along the line without even noticing, a man who had slipped out of his skin as well as his marriage. But like a spirit still attracted to the living, he couldn’t resist the heated spectacle of a gathering, the persistence of humankind, whether in church or at a boat race, in conjuring up that death-defying element that slipped like liquid, ungraspable, through his own fingers.

  Near Tara, he was spying on a picnic in progress, a cyclists’ club, some twenty or thirty people stopped by a lake to rest under the pines and refresh themselves with lemonade and potted meat sandwiches. He had encountered the abandoned machinery first, bicycles propped against tree trunks and scattered over the ground, a poignantly modern sight, like the scene of a benign accident, humans wholly tossed out of the picture. Since what he sought was not to be found there, glinting off handlebars and spokes, he crept down a path to the lake, pulled by murmuring voices so light they lifted easily and naturally into laughter. Gaiety was hard to resist, and why should he? He crept closer, concealing himself behind a screen of chokecherry bushes as the cyclists came into view. And there it was, quickening through the party like a nosy truffle-hunting breeze, the element he couldn’t possibly define, bouncing off a china plate, off the tine of a fork, into a mouth silvered and full. It streaked among the visual clamour, the scattered dishes and bottles, then idled momentarily like something intentionally packed and toted along. It blessed a blade of grass, the crook of a cup’s handle, a cuff, a swirl of hair, a peek of exposed bloomer, a moistened lip, a fingernail. It held all the discrete components of the day in an altered coherence.
It was a game the partying cyclists played simply by being. He saw a packed and animate canvas (a Dejeuner sur l’herbe, buttoned to the neck), a work of art and life, both excluding him. So he decided to sneak back along the path and steal one of the bicycles.

  That evening he sat by a campfire drying his socks, holding them out on sticks like flayed skins before the flames. Luckily, he had lifted the matches after, and not before, exploring the bottom of the lake on that infernal two-wheeled machine. How was he to know there was a trick to operating the damn thing? As it turned out, he had crashed that cyclists’ party, literally, smashing plates and exploding a sponge cake on his wild lake-bound trajectory. He could still see the laughing faces of his rescuers, and hear the mock concern in their voices as they tried to catch him in a net of words. Are you all right? Thought you’d try it out, eh, old boy? Who are you, anyway? What’s your name? Yes, your name.

  He had made a dumb show of it, miming and gesticulating, shrugging, nodding, stretching his face in mute cheer. He pretended to be a foreigner, the sort given to intemperate acts, and indicated that he couldn’t speak the language. Nor could he, not their language of palsy fun and heartiness. He escaped with his name (plus a box of lucifers and a lemon tart) intact, his soaked clerical jacket clamped around his body like an unbroken bud.