Gail Bowen - Burying Ariel

Solange picked up the crust of her sandwich and threw it angrily towards the water. Mr. Birkbeck rose from his sleep, snapped the bread in mid-air and collapsed. Solange turned to me. “You have to play, too, Joanne. We all must take our turn. What’s your metaphor?”

Her fierce vulnerability caught me off balance. “I don’t know,” I said. I touched the midnight-blue cloth. “I guess I was like Ariel. I wanted it all – the sun, the moon, the stars, blossoms, buds, and fruit – everything. What I got was a marriage that was good most of the time, terrific kids, dogs, a house. Naama would say I was an unevolved woman, but it was enough.”

Solange had revealed too much to let me get away with less. “You compare yourself with Ariel, but she wanted more than a house with a picket fence. That’s your true metaphor, Joanne, and when your husband died the little fence came down and you had to go out into the big world and become a person in your own right.”

“I was always a person in my own right,” I said loudly, hoping Solange would mistake vehemence for the ring of truth.

She didn’t buy it. “I disagree,” she said flatly. “Perhaps I’m wrong. I didn’t know you then, but when you’re with your old friend Howard Dowhanuik, I see vestiges of the woman you were. You defer to him. You’re not the person I saw at Ariel’s vigil.”

I was at a loss; so was everyone else. There was no way the game could go forward. Three of us had revealed ourselves, three were left. But asking Molly or Drew Warren to come up with the metaphor that encapsulated their early dreams was beyond cruel, and Gert struck me as a woman who would rather gut a fish than float a flight of fancy.

Unwittingly, Solange gave us another focus. When she attempted to toss the rest of her sandwich to Mr. Birkbeck, her throw was clumsy. The crust hit the water, and after a lazy catcher’s dive, so did Mr. Birkbeck. The splash he made flushed out a bald eagle that struggled briefly then caught an updraft. Absorbed, we watched as the eagle soared, became an infinitesimal speck, then vanished in the cloudless sky.

“My daughter always said that if we saw an eagle the weekend we opened the cottage, it would be a great summer.”

An aching silence followed Drew’s words. Gentleman that he was, he recognized his gaffe and tried to put us at ease. He fingered the top button of his golf shirt, straightening the knot of the necktie that wasn’t there. “I don’t know if you remember back to the mid-sixties when there was such concern about the bald eagle becoming extinct,” he said. “They discovered that bald eagles that summered here in the north weren’t declining at the same rate as other eagles. It was because northern Saskatchewan wasn’t being sprayed with pesticides – DDT and the like – so the population of bald eagles remained constant.”

On the day of his daughter’s burial, Drew’s earnest drone about why the eagles of northern Saskatchewan had escaped extinction might have seemed bizarre, but it did the trick. Despite ourselves, we were diverted. My mind went into free fall, stopping at a memory from twenty years before. Mieka’s grade-two class had held a career morning. My daughter, always a foot-dragger when it came to school projects, had been too late to sign up for a visit to one of the glamour-job sites like the courtroom or the pizzeria. She and the rest of the stragglers had been stuck with visiting the offices of Drew Warren’s investment firm, and I had been the parent-volunteer. Drew had tried hard to engage the children. He asked them how much allowance they were given and pointed out that, by depositing even the smallest sum each week, they could make their money grow. He had shown them how to make images of their hands on his photocopier. He even brought out Monopoly money and some outdated stock certificates to let the kids build their own stock portfolios. Nothing worked. The children were eye-rollingly bored. Crestfallen, Drew walked us to the elevator. Then inspiration hit. He ran back into his office and returned with booty: two pencils and a stenographer’s notepad for each child.

Drew’s discourse upon eagles on the day of his daughter’s burial might have struck a stranger as insensitive, but it came from the same impulse as his last-minute gift of pencils and a notepad twenty years before. He was what my son Angus characterized as a pleaser – a person driven by an almost pathological need to avoid wounding others. “First, do no harm.” Apparently, the chromosome for stunning blond good looks hadn’t been the only inheritance passed from father to daughter.

Eager to put an end to another awkward silence, Gert jumped up and slapped her right hand against her thigh. “Come on. Let’s walk off those sandwiches. May’s a pretty time for the island. The new moss is soft as a baby’s bum. And who knows? We might see another eagle. They’re always on the lookout for easy fishing and a nice air current.” She leaned towards Molly and lowered her voice. “You’ll want to see the rock paintings today.”

Molly nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I’ll want to see the rock paintings today.” She pulled herself to her feet, bent and picked up the box that contained her daughter’s ashes. Quick as a recruit in an honour guard, Fraser retrieved the cloth, folded it the way flags are folded at military funerals, and handed it to Molly. She looked at him levelly. “I’m glad Ariel found you,” she said.

Drew led us single file along a trail that bore the marks of nature’s effort to reclaim it over the winter. The path was blocked by rocks and fallen tree branches, and melting snow had eroded the line separating trail and wilderness. New moss was everywhere. Idly, I wondered what Blake, who had seen “a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower,” would make of vegetation which, flowerless and rootless, still managed to carpet the harsh terrain of a northern island in a green of surpassing tenderness.

To see the paintings, we had to scramble down an embankment and walk back along the shoreline. The lake was high, so most of the beach was underwater. As I leaned back to look up at the rock face, I could feel the water seeping into my boots, but a soaker was a small price to pay for seeing the rock paintings.

There were three of them. One was of a thunderbird holding a bolt of lightning; one was a circle that appeared to hold clouds and an animal, perhaps a bear; the third was on a part of the rock that had been cleft. The circle that framed the picture inside was broken, the drawing inside beyond interpretation.

“How long have they been here?” I asked.

Gert adjusted her ball cap. “Nobody knows for sure – a thousand, maybe two thousand years.” She laughed. “Those old ones, they knew how to make paint.”

“What did they use?” Solange asked.

“Ochre,” Gert said, “mixed in with whatever oil they could find. It was before the days of Home Hardware.”

Fraser stepped out into the water to get a better look. “You can feel the power.”

Gert chuckled softly. “It depends on who’s doing the looking.”

No one spoke, but I sensed we all felt a link to the people who had mixed red ochre with the oils of animals and fish. Their paintings were evidence that, like us, they had grappled with the questions that came in the small hours: what does it all mean, and where do I fit in? Molly Warren was beside me. Cradling the pine box and midnight-blue cloth in her arms, she wore her grief like an amulet. As she stared up at the rock paintings, she seemed mesmerized.

Finally, Drew walked over and took his wife’s arm. “Time to leave,” he said. “Time to do what we came here to do.”

Molly shook him off and turned to address the rest of us. “Drew and I have decided on the place for Ariel – not here, although she loved this spot, but closer to our cabin in this clearing that looks out on the water.”