Celia's Song Read online

  Some intelligence is being born here. I can’t help smiling.

  “And a completely open mind is also dangerous,” Thomas says. “We could spend years investigating old wives’ tales. To what end?”

  This would not be wasted time.

  “As scientists, we recognize our beliefs constitute a ball and chain,” Frederick says. “Moving to test the mythology before we test the film is an unnecessary attachment to belief, just as refusing to test the myth once we have tested the film is an obsessive attachment to disbelief.”

  Frederick is one of the hopeless who now inhabit Turtle Island.

  Sam nods. He can live with that.

  III

  BEFORE THE STORM, THE serpent decorating the house front hung by a thread. Both its heads watched the land for what seemed an eternity; day by day, one head grew hungry and anxious. The quiet about the house suited the restless head, because it was both death-filled and promising. The serpent could apprehend pending movement and the restless head grew excited as his sense of duty to those whom he had once protected diminished. The smell of the building was an affront to him. Even more, he was offended that the people had neglected to feed and honour him.

  I came back to the hill to watch the serpent. I listen to the heads talking to each other.

  “How long in human time have we been here? When will we know that the original contract is sufficiently broken to warrant our sliding out from this house front and slithering back to the sea?” Restless asks Loyal.

  Something is wrong here.

  “Time was not specified, only intentions,” Loyal answers. “Intentions counted then, more than time …”

  Restless sighs and keeps moving in the direction he had set the conversation.

  “The intentions of the humans were to honour us,” Restless reminds Loyal. Loyal thinks his other head sounds pouty and this worries him.

  “They will. Our obligation is to protect the house from miscreant behaviour and from doubt consuming human will.”

  “Protection in exchange for honour. It has been two centuries since anyone lived in the house.”

  “I am responsible only for holding up my obligations.” Loyal think Restless sounds more pompous than pouty.

  “The humans have not acted upon their intentions for so long.”

  Loyal concedes. This does not sound so pompous.

  “A deal is a deal. Intentions must be executed or all bets are off,” Restless ventures. “We are not responsible for their conduct; their intentions must be executed of their own free will.” He bobs in the direction of his twin.

  “That sounds childish. They behave appropriately. We should too. Next you’ll say ‘They started it.’”

  “They did. Neglect is a kind of crime.”

  Creep face. But I do sympathize with Restless: neglect is a kind of crime. Perfection is so pompous.

  The two heads argue and as the day wears on the argument heats up until both heads are shouting and twisting to emphasize their points of view. The shared body writhes against the constraint of the house front it occupies. Shingles and siding crack and the beams holding the house front shift dangerously.

  They are both right. I back into the wetlands that surround the house almost in the way moats encircled the castles of the newcomers in their old countries. The conversation is headed for trouble, the same trouble as with other arguments I have witnessed when neither party is wrong but only have different points of view. I think arguments about right and wrong are funny creatures anyway, like whitecaps: they are visible, noisy, and so unlike their origins. The caps arise from the sea waves, but are not waves, current, or tide. Likewise, the heads articulate belief, but the argument is not about belief, not even close, and rightness and wrongness become irrelevant because each is emotionally attached to their point of view. Hunger gnaws at Restless, and Loyal is obsessed by his commitment to protect. As I listen to them, I decide the argument has started to sound more like a war strategy: both beings are bent on assuming executive power over the other’s conduct. But conduct is a variable. Beliefs are the only constants and they cannot be proven, they can only be surrendered, upheld, or altered by the being carrying them. Emotions have no brains, so they cannot be won by way of reason or argument. If the heads crawl off the house front, the future will change and it may not be for the better. My hind legs quiver.

  The sun drops from the skyline and the dark folds uneasily over the longhouse and its house front. The house is fragile and the serpent is strong.

  No good can come of this. I shake as each head snaps and pulls against the direction of the other.

  Each snap jogs the frail house. First a board cracks, then a house post loses its moorings. The heads twist their beliefs in a knot of conflict. War dominates the two heads as belief lies dying between them. The dry rot underneath the house crumbles and the mouldy beams fragment as the house loses a foundation timber, which drops the entire structure closer to the ground. Shingles split and tumble after the foundation timber drops. The molded midsection sinks to mush. Finally, the house front falls forward to touch the earth, but not before the serpent slithers out from under it.

  Oh, crap!

  Restless slithers onto the foreground triumphant. Loyal shrieks and fights to remain. Loyal hates change.

  When two heads from the same body go to war, no one wins. I shake my head in disbelief. Earlier I was dying to leave, but this fight has ignited my curiosity and held my feet still. Between duty and curiosity, I am bound to witness. I want Celia to resume her watch, but she doesn’t. Why am I the only witness? I clasp my paws together and watch as the two heads thrash away from each other, forcing their one body to tumble toward the sea.

  The house behind them has separated from its roof and exposed the bones.

  They are not going to like this.

  Face down in the earth the house front is tragic. The art is shattered, the rotted wood lays bare the dead. What little that was left of the house implodes and the scent of death punctures the morning air. Neglected, unburied, and decayed, the bones wail. There is no excuse for their not having been properly interred, even if they did all die at once.

  The dead are not responsible for their burial, another house is supposed to take care of that. The people had no business neglecting them this way.

  The bones shuffle and click and ready themselves for the chaos to come. Northern lights several thousand miles away begin to sing. As the lights whirl about the skyline, like humans circling the night horizon, they sway and dance to the music of their own creation. The wind screams. The mood in the air shifts; even the earth seems angry.

  Terrified, I scamper up the hill until I feel safe. Breathless, I feel shame creeping up on me. Fear has sparked it. Listless, I pace back and forth on the hill. I consider going to Celia’s. She is the only seer I know. All the rest are dead. I scamper down the hill and head for the eastern side of the island. It is a long run to the ferry, but I like the ride. Stowing away on a big boat is always an exciting way to travel.

  Carrion crows from Vancouver smell the rot, fly toward the house, but the bones have already lost their flesh. There is not enough meat to warrant staying to pick at them; disappointed, the crows squawk and leave. The smell of rotted flesh is a dirty trick; the birds beat their wings in outrage as they fly away. In Vancouver, they hook up with other crows, complain, and determine to gather together to form the biggest murder of crows the world has ever known.

  CELIA TAKES A BREAK from her bills when she catches a glimpse of mink as he scurries across her yard. She has not seen a mink in this village ever; her hands tremble at what he is doing here.

  What the hell is going on? Something is very wrong.

  For a moment Celia looks into the dark, but nothing more shows itself. She returns to her bills. This is the best part, the bill paying; always do the grown-up stuff first. She takes a long p
ull on her coffee and reaches for her chequebook.

  THE BONES LISTEN TO the serpent argue, feel it depart, and sigh with a strange and cruel joy mingled with relief. The serpent will teach the people respect. In the dark folds of the night an old woman appears at the top of the mountain, just above the longhouse. From this perch, she sees the whole of the territory. The old lady wants to see how the argument will unfold and end. The rain rips around her. Her dress rustles and flares to the rhythm of wind and rain as it pierces her scant clothing. I am dead; so lighten up, you can’t fling me about.

  IN THE MIDST OF writing a cheque for her phone bill, Celia stops; again she thinks she hears screams. She looks toward the window. The curtain moves without provocation. The screams gain volume. A soft impression of comforting voices, soft and muted, follow the screams; their softness seduces her to lean into her listening. I can hear better when I see, so Celia snuffs out the candle on the table and lumbers toward the sound. She pushes back a tattered curtain to peer into the black night. Her hand pokes through one of the holes in the curtain. She never replaced her gramma’s curtains. I have to fix these damn things sometime, she thinks. The moon is just a sliver hanging by a thread from the sky. The poplars edging her yard thrash as though in pain. Between the thrashes she sees a shape twisting and fighting to move in her direction. I don’t think I want to know this. She draws back. Her hands shake, but her curiosity gains strength and she overcomes her fear as she peers past the curtain into the dark. She thinks she catches sight of the doubleheaded sea serpent.

  “My God,” she whispers, but continues to stare. “What is he doing here?” Her voice sounds distraught, it deepens her fear. The ocean shore looms at the edges of her yard. “What the?” The poplars have disappeared. Celia goes back to writing cheques, stuffing them in envelopes, addressing and stamping them. When finished, she turns in to bed.

  The serpent splashes in the water, tail dipping into the sea, his body swollen with the weight he has gained. As Restless lunges for deeper water, Loyal rears back to stop him; the tail snaps, uprooting and clearing what was left of the trees around the longhouse. Restless tries to bite the head of Loyal off. Loyal leans away and lurches inland, while Restless takes advantage of this defensive move and dives for deeper water. Loyal catches on and rears up, managing to drag the body out of the sea. Restless digs in and squirms to free himself from Loyal’s grip. This makes the body carve a trough into the shore leading to the sea. Water fills it. The body grows.

  Loyal cannot hang on much longer, but he dares not let go. Restless thrusts forward whenever Loyal relaxes or tires. An old lady appears and sits in front of the remains of the longhouse; she stares at them. She hurries away just as the one head tries to bite the other off. From the angle she was watching, it looked as though Restless was successful. As she recedes down the hill, the body surges forward and back, trying to remain attached to both heads. Finally, Loyal lets go and the serpent is free to swim to the ocean.

  The devastation is complete. The serpent has torn the last line of cedars from their moorings and dragged them into the sea. Debris is everywhere: sand, shell, seaweed, and bits of cedars lie helter-skelter on the shore.

  In the ocean, the serpent sinks. The heads don’t need oxygen. “Why are we not drowning?” one head asks the other during a moment of respite between battles. The other head does not answer. He isn’t interested. His hunger is for mischief and he can’t get up to mischief without appeasing the other head or beguiling it, so he is busy making plans.

  Waves rise from the depths of the sea, massive and dangerous. Not far away, a boat capsizes and the bodies manning it drown without knowing what tipped them. It was a sailing ship, which neither head had seen before; while Loyal wonders about it, Restless takes advantage of his distracted musing and swallows the men in it. The serpent is huge now.

  The argument takes them deeper into the sea. They plunge and, on the way down, they collide with sharks and barracuda. The sharks attack, but the heads swallow them; the sharks explode inside the serpent and fill its hungry form; the sharks are now part of the serpent’s personality. A barracuda passes and the heads fight over it; each manages to swallow half of it. The smiling stealth of barracuda mingles with the shark’s seductive joy at seeing blood. The desire for blood, for killing, marks the serpent.

  The body spirals to the ocean floor and thrashes and crashes there. The massive tail cracks the earth and an earthquake erupts.

  The story of the sea serpent has begun. After nearly drowning watching the serpent’s heads fight, I shift and make ready for the earthquake I feel coming.

  A brief ominous silence precedes the quake, and then both Celia and I hear a rumble like a freight truck driving straight for her house. Her fridge and stove dance as her bathroom light goes out and all but one of her candles flicker and die. She leaps for the cord in the shadowy light of the fat candle and pulls the plugs of both appliances from their sockets. She waits on the floor until her house stops quivering.

  Celia can see the serpent under the sea as she rides out the earthquake. I head for shore. I cannot afford to drown.

  The sea froths. Outraged, it whirls around the serpent. The sea considers swallowing it, but changes her mind. Instead, she negotiates a truce — but it is a shark’s truce. Each head is to take turns satisfying its particular brand of hunger and quenching its individual desire. The sea’s only condition: No killing humans. Restless smiles; the sea has said nothing of the heart, mind, or spirit of the humans; Restless only cannot kill his prey. “Spirit food is what I need most anyway,” he thinks. He isn’t too far off. Spirit food is what the original humans promised to feed him through their songs and ceremony. He plans to consume the spirit of humans.

  The bones in the broken longhouse giggle; their neglect will be avenged. Deep inside the mountain, another set of bones rattles. They want to know what the hell is going on. Why do they hear the serpent talking to itself? They wriggle and fight to get to the surface, but it is a slow and difficult process, this business of climbing through layers of rock and dirt. These bones are older. They died long before the newcomers came. They sense the anger of the younger bones; it surprises them. Getting to the younger bones is urgent, but there is no hurrying the journey to the top. This is not going to end well.

  I rest on the shore for a bit as the story continues to unfold.

  The sea hears the head; she knows Restless is up to no good, that the truce isn’t any good. But she also knows that the humans have the answer to their discord with the serpent. The sea is confident that some human among them will come forward to resolve the dilemma. She settles back and the storm quiets down. Celia stops watching.

  Not much of a rest for me, but it’s something. I leave and stumble upon a logging crew on its way to the coast.

  IV

  A YELLOW MACBLO CREW cab trundles along, bouncing up an old logging road. Logging roads are utilitarian; they have no pavement as few cars drive them. They are not well maintained; rutted and dusty, they service the logging trucks with only minor use by the residents of isolated reserves. The dust creeps through the cab windows even when they are shut. The driver does his best to avoid the worst ruts; but, no matter what he does, the six men bounce mercilessly as he navigates his way around the ribbon of ruts and un-repaired potholes on this mountain edge road. The dust is cloying; it is dry and tastes of calcium, organic waste, and just a little iron.

  Steve hates the taste. He wants to spit, but his mouth has been sucked dry by the dust. He is against logging; his conscience nags him. He has been kept awake nights, trying to think of other ways to earn his tuition. In place of dreaming he argues with himself, like the serpent, but in the end he invariably decides that this is the only way for him to pay for university.

  Clearcutting is wrong.

  Steve hates this feeling of guilt and helpless acquiescence. “Forget it,” he tells himself. “This is my last year of unive
rsity; it will all be over soon.” When he opens the window to spit out the dust in his mouth, more flies in.

  Steve’s incessant arguing with himself is annoying. I would like to sympathize with these people, but they are so hard to like. I shut my ears to his thoughts for a time and just lie in the back of the truck, enjoying the ride.

  “Shut the fuckin’ window,” Amos barks from the back seat. Amos sits in the back seat not caring about the dust, his conscience, or anything except working a little, getting paid, going to Vancouver, drinking a lot, and harassing Steve, the only white man in the crew. “You’re letting all the dust in.” Steve shuts his window. He hates Amos, but he is right. No sense spitting until the truck stops.

  I am no fan of Amos, either, but I get his anger. I don’t get Steve’s quandary — if clearcutting is wrong, then you stop.

  The truck pulls to a stop at the foot of a nameless mountain that has been primed for clearcutting. The men spill out and head up the incline as soon as the truck stops. This is Steve’s sixth season. He is a choker man for Amos, a faller. The spacers have already been through, cutting everything down that isn’t going to be logged; others loaded the refuse, hauled it out, and consigned it to a funeral pyre some twenty miles south. The forest is thin now; only big trees dot the hill.

  Steve chokes off a tree, George tops it and marks it for Amos. Amos jerks the rope on his chainsaw. The saw’s whine and whir sound decisive, mean, and tough. Amos likes the meanness of the saw’s sound.

  To tell the truth, I like the toughness of the whine of a chainsaw too, even though I don’t like what it’s for.

  The first cut slows the whine to a groan and the tree leans into it like she wants to be harvested. Even through the earmuffs the husky whine hurts Steve’s ears. The air is now full of the crackling and snapping of branches as the tree lunges to the ground. Branches pop and fly as she hits the dirt, two hundred feet of building timber crashed to the hill floor. The men stand still, watching for spikes flying in their direction.