In the Skin of a Lion Read online

  Copyright © 1987 Michael Ondaatje

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law.

  McClelland and Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Ondaatje, Michael, 1943 –

  In the skin of a lion

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-542-7

  I. Title.

  PS8529.N3816 1987 C813′.54 C87-093668-9

  PR9199.3.05416 1987

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint previously published song lyrics from “Up Jumped You with Love” © C.R. Publishing Company and “I Can’t Get Started” © Chappell Music Company. The lines from The Epic of Gilgamesh are from the N.K. Sandars translation (Penguin, 1960). Two sentences on the photographs of Lewis Hine are by Judith Mara Gutman from her essay “Lewis Hine and the American Social Conscience” (1969). Two sentences have been used from the journals of Anne Wilkinson. Lines from Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese are from the 1925 McClelland and Stewart edition.

  v3.1

  This book is in memory of Michel Lambeth,

  Sharon Stevenson, and Bill and Michal Acres

  And for Linda, and Sarah Sheard and David Young

  I’d like to express my gratitude to The John Simon

  Guggenheim Foundation who gave me a grant

  during the writing of this book. Also to the Ontario

  Arts Council, the El Basha Restaurant, the

  Multicultural History Society of Ontario, and

  Glendon College, York University.

  I would also like to thank Andrea Kristof, Margo Teasdale,

  George and Ruth Grant, Donya Peroff, Rick Haldenby,

  Paul Thompson, and Lillian Petroff. Also Ian Redforth

  for his work on Finnish lumber-camp workers.

  A special thank you to Ellen Seligman.

  This is a work of fiction and certain liberties have

  at times been taken with some dates and locales.

  The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when

  you have gone to the earth I will let my hair

  grow long for your sake, I will wander through

  the wilderness in the skin of a lion.

  THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH

  Never again will a single story be told

  as though it were the only one.

  JOHN BERGER

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  BOOK ONE

  Little Seeds

  The Bridge

  The Searcher

  BOOK TWO

  Palace of Purification

  Remorse

  BOOK THREE

  Caravaggio

  Maritime Theatre

  About the Author

  This is a story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of the morning. She listens and asks questions as the vehicle travels through darkness. Outside, the countryside is unbetrayed. The man who is driving could say, “In that field is a castle,” and it would be possible for her to believe him.

  She listens to the man as he picks up and brings together various corners of the story, attempting to carry it all in his arms. And he is tired, sometimes as elliptical as his concentration on the road, at times overexcited – “Do you see?” He turns to her in the faint light of the speedometer.

  Driving the four hours to Marmora under six stars and a moon.

  She stays awake to keep him company.

  1

  LITTLE SEEDS

  IF HE IS AWAKE early enough the boy sees the men walk past the farmhouse down First Lake Road. Then he stands at the bedroom window and watches: he can see two or three lanterns between the soft maple and the walnut tree. He hears their boots on gravel. Thirty loggers, wrapped up dark, carrying axes and small packages of food which hang from their belts. The boy walks downstairs and moves to a window in the kitchen where he can look down the driveway. They move from right to left. Already they seem exhausted, before the energy of the sun.

  Sometimes, he knows, this collection of strangers will meet the cows being brought in from a pasture barn for milking and there will be a hushed politeness as they stand to the side of the road holding up the lanterns (one step back and they will be in a knee-high snowdrift), to let the cows lazily pass them on the narrow road. Sometimes the men put their hands on the warm flanks of these animals and receive their heat as they pass. They put their thin-gloved hands on these black and white creatures, who are barely discernible in the last of the night’s darkness. They must do this gently, without any sense of attack or right. They do not own this land as the owner of the cows does.

  The holsteins pass the silent gauntlet of men. The farmer who follows the cows nods. He passes this strange community most mornings during the winter months, the companionship a silent comfort to him in the dark of five A.M. – for he has been rounding up cattle for over an hour to take them to the milking barns.

  The boy who witnesses this procession, and who even dreams about it, has also watched the men working a mile away in the grey trees. He has heard their barks, heard their axes banging into the cold wood as if into metal, has seen a fire beside the creek where water is molecular and grey under the thin ice.

  The sweat moves between their hard bodies and the cold clothes. Some die of pneumonia or from the sulphur in their lungs from the mills they work in during other seasons. They sleep in the shacks behind the Bellrock Hotel and have little connection with the town.

  Neither the boy nor his father have ever been into those dark rooms, into a warmth which is the odour of men. A raw table, four bunks, a window the size of a torso. These are built each December and dismantled the following spring. No one in the town of Bellrock really knows where the men have come from. It takes someone else, much later, to tell the boy that. The only connection the loggers have with the town is when they emerge to skate along the line of river, on homemade skates, the blades made of old knives.

  For the boy the end of winter means a blue river, means the disappearance of these men.

  He longs for the summer nights, for the moment when he turns out the lights, turns out even the small cream funnel in the hall near the room where his father sleeps. Then the house is in darkness except for the bright light in the kitchen. He sits down at the long table and looks into his school geography book with the maps of the world, the white sweep of currents, testing the names to himself, mouthing out the exotic. Caspian. Nepal. Durango. He closes the book and brushes it with his palms, feeling the texture of the pebbled cover and its coloured dyes which create a map of Canada.

  Later, he walks through the dark living room, his hand stretched out in front of him, and returns the book to a shelf. He stands in darkness, rubbing his arms to bring energy back into his body. He is forcing himself to stay awake, take his time. It is still hot and he is naked to the waist. He walks back into the bright kitchen and moves from window to window to search out the moths pinioned against the screens, clinging to brightness. From across the fields they will have seen this one lighted room and travelled towards it. A summer night’s inquiry.

  Bugs, plant hoppers, grasshoppers, rust-dark moths. Patrick gazes on these things which have navigated the warm air above the surface of the earth and attached themselves to the mesh with a muted thunk. He’d heard them as he read, his senses tuned to su
ch noises. Years later at the Riverdale Library he will learn how the shining leaf-chafers destroy shrubbery, how the flower beetles feed on the juice of decaying wood or young corn. There will suddenly be order and shape to these nights. Having given them fictional names he will learn their formal titles as if perusing the guest list for a ball – the Spur-throated Grasshopper! The Archbishop of Canterbury!

  Even the real names are beautiful. Amber-winged skimmer. Bush cricket. Throughout the summer he records their visits and sketches the repeaters. Is it the same creature? He crayons the orange wings of the geometer into his notebook, the lunar moth, the soft brown – as if rabbit fur – of the tussock moth. He will not open the screen and capture their pollened bodies. He did this once and the terrified thrash of the moth – a brown-pink creature who released coloured dust on his fingers – scared them both.

  Up close they are prehistoric. The insect jaws munch. Are they eating something minute or is it subliminal – the way his father chews his tongue when in the fields. The kitchen light radiates through their porous wings; even those that are squat, like the peach-green aphid, appear to be constructed of powder.

  Patrick pulls a double-ocarina from his pocket. Outside he will not waken his father, the noise will simply drift up into the arms of soft maple. Perhaps he can haunt these creatures. Perhaps they are not mute at all, it is just a lack of range in his hearing. (When he was nine his father discovered him lying on the ground, his ear against the hard shell of cow shit inside which he could hear several bugs flapping and knocking.) He knows the robust calls from the small bodies of cicadas, but he wants conversation – the language of damsel flies who need something to translate their breath the way he uses the ocarina to give himself a voice, something to leap with over the wall of this place.

  Do they return nightly to show him something? Or does he haunt them? In the way he steps from the dark house and at the doorway of the glowing kitchen says to the empty fields, I am here. Come and visit me.

  He was born into a region which did not appear on a map until 1910, though his family had worked there for twenty years and the land had been homesteaded since 1816.

  In the school atlas the place is pale green and nameless. The river slips out of an unnamed lake and is a simple blue line until it becomes the Napanee twenty-five miles to the south, and, only because of logging, will eventually be called Depot Creek. “Deep Eau.”

  His father works for two or three farms, cutting wood, haying, herding cattle. The cows cross the river twice a day – in the morning they wander to the land south of the creek and in the afternoon they are rounded up for milking. In winter the animals are taken down the road to a pasture barn, though once a cow headed towards the river longing for back pasture.

  They do not miss it for two hours and then his father guesses where it has gone. He runs towards the river yelling to the boy Patrick to follow with the field horses. Patrick is bareback on a horse leading the other by the rope, urging them on through the deep snow. He sees his father through the bare trees as he rides down the slope towards the swimming hole.

  In mid-river, half-submerged in the ice, is the neighbouring farmer’s holstein. There is no colour. The dry stalks of dead mulleins, grey trees, and the swamp now clean and white. His father with a rope around his shoulders creeps on his hands and knees across the ice towards the black and white shape. The cow heaves, splitting more ice, and cold water seeps up. Hazen Lewis pauses, calming the animal, then creeps on. He must get the rope under the body twice. Patrick moves forward slowly till he kneels on the other side of the cow. His father puts his left hand on the neck of the animal and plunges his right arm into the freezing water as low as he can go beneath the body. On the other side Patrick puts an arm in and waves it back and forth trying to come in contact with the rope. They cannot reach each other. Patrick lies on the ice so his arm and shoulder can go deeper, his wrist already starting to numb, and he thinks that soon he will not be able to feel the rope even if it brushes against him.

  The cow shifts and water soaks into the boy’s coat, through to his chest. His father pulls back and the two of them kneel on either side of the cow and swing their wet arms, beating them against their chests. They don’t speak. They must work as quickly as possible. His father puts his ungloved hand against the cow’s ear to collect the animal’s heat. He lies down sideways on the ice and plunges his arm down again, the water inches from his face. Patrick, in a mirror image, swirls his hand underwater but again there is nothing to touch. “I’m going under now. You’ve got to get it fast,” his father says, and Patrick sees his father’s trunk twitch and his head go into the icy water. Patrick’s hand clutches his father’s other arm on top of the cow, holding it tightly.

  Then Patrick puts his head into the water and reaches out. He touches his father’s wrist under the cow. He dares not let go and moves his hand carefully until he grips the thick braided rope. He pulls at it but it won’t move. He realizes his father in going down deeper has somehow got his body over the rope, that he’s lying on it. Patrick will not let go, though he is running out of air. His father gasps out of the water, lies on his back on the ice, and breathes hard past the ache in his eyes, then is suddenly aware of what he is lying on and rolls away, freeing the rope. Patrick pulls, using his foot now to jerk himself up out of the water, and he slithers over the ice away from the cow.

  He sits up and sees his father and puts his arms up in a victory gesture. His father is frantically trying to get water out of his ears and off his eyes before it freezes in the air and Patrick uses his dry sleeve and does the same, shrinking his hand back into the jacket, prodding the cloth into his ears. He can feel the ice on his chin and neck already forming but he doesn’t worry about that. His father scuttles back to shore and returns with a second rope. This one he attaches to the first rope, and Patrick hauls it towards himself under the cow, so both ropes are now circled around the animal.

  Patrick looks up – at the grey rock of the swimming hole, the oak towering over the dirty brush that spikes out of the snow. There is a clear blue sky. The boy feels as if he has not seen these things in years. Till this moment there was just his father, the black and white shape of the cow, and that terrible black water which cut into his eyes when he opened them down there.

  His father attaches the ropes to the horses. The face of the half-submerged cow, a giant eye lolling, seems unconcerned. Patrick expects it to start chewing in complete boredom. He lifts its lip and puts his cold fingers against the gums to steal heat. Then he crawls to the bank.

  Holding each of the horses by the halter he and his father yell encouragement to them. The horses do not even hesitate at the weight they are pulling. From the bank he sees the cow’s tongue slide out, its complacent look for the first time replaced by concern as it is dragged towards the shoreline, breaking ice as it cuts a path. About ten feet from the bank where the ice is thicker the body tightens against the ropes. The horses stop. He and his father switch them, and they break into a trot. Then the whole cow magically emerges out of the ice and is dragged on its side, its four legs straight and hard in the air, dragged uncompromisingly onto the shore over the brown mulleins.

  They let the horses go. He and his father try to untie the ropes on the cow but it is too difficult and his father brings out a knife and cuts the ropes away. The animal lies there snorting its steam into the cold air, then stumbles up and stands watching them. More than anything Patrick is surprised at his father who is obsessed with not wasting things. He has lectured the boy several times on saving rope. Always unknot. Never cut! Bringing out his knife and slicing the rope to pieces is an outrageous, luxurious act.

  They begin to run back home, looking behind them to see if the cow is following. The boy gasps, “If she goes into the ice again I’m not doing a thing.” “Neither am I,” yells his father, laughing. By the time they reach their back kitchen, it is almost dark and they have pains in their stomachs.

  In the house Hazen Lewis lights the n
aphtha lamp and builds a fire. The boy shivers during dinner and the father tells the boy he can sleep with him. In bed later on, they do not acknowledge each other apart from sharing the warmth under the blanket. His father lies so still Patrick doesn’t know if he is asleep or awake. The boy looks towards the kitchen and its dying fire.

  He imagines himself through the winter until he is a white midsummer shadow beside his father. In summer his father drips gasoline onto the caterpillar tents and sets them on fire. Flof. The grey cobweb skins collapse into flame. Caterpillars drop onto grass, the acrid burn smell is in the roof of the boy’s mouth. Two of them meticulously search a field in the evening light. Patrick points to a nest his father has missed and they walk deeper into the pasture.

  He is almost asleep. In the darkness another flame ignites then withers into nothing.

  In the drive-shed Hazen Lewis outlined the boy’s body onto the plank walls with green chalk. Then he tacked wires back and forth across the outline as if realigning the veins in his son’s frame. Muscles of cordite and the spine a tributary of the black powder fuse. This is how the boy remembers his father, studying the outline which the boy has just stepped away from as the lit fuse smoulders up and blows out a section of plank where the head had been.

  Hazen Lewis was an abashed man, withdrawn from the world around him, uninterested in the habits of civilization outside his own focus. He would step up to his horse and assume it, as if it were a train, as if flesh and blood did not exist.

  In winter months Patrick carried meals into the acreage north of the creek where his father, solitary, cut timber all day, minute in those white halls. And then when Patrick was fifteen, his father made the one leap of his life. At some moment, chopping into hemlock, hearing only the axe and its pivoting echo, he must have imagined the trees and permafrost and maple syrup ovens erupting up in one heave, the snow shaken off every branch in the woods around him. He stopped in mid-afternoon, walked home, unlaced his bear paws, and put away the axe forever. He wrote away for books, travelled into Kingston for materials. The explosion he saw in the woods had been an idea as he tugged his axe out of the hemlock. He bought dynamite and blasting caps and fuses, drew diagrams on the walls of the drive-shed, then carried the explosives into the woods. He laid the charges against rock and ice and trees. The detonator cap spat a flame into the cartridge and his eyes watched the snow collapse out of branches from the shudder in the air. Whatever was dislodged became a graph showing him the radius of the tremor.