Peterson steps from his car and carefully closes the door. The wet brown lawn runs down to the road. A crescent-shaped garden with rocks. Spring is coming. Today. The snow has melted since this morning. Peterson admires these things. Nothing resists him. He traces the perimeter of the garden with his eyes. Across. Long. Down. Up. These are lengths and directions. Peterson feels agitated. Angry. His house has something that he doesn’t. He looks at the front door. White metal, with a bronze knocker and a black knob. He says, “door.” In the upper left window he sees his wife pass. He thinks her.
In this simple word, spoken, though not aloud, he slips another key carefully into a lock. He turns it, gently. Her. The lock clicks and he applies a light pressure. Her fault. Aloud: “Her fault.” He stands in the hallway at the base of the stairs, armed with his first complicated phrase of this long afternoon, and he removes his coat. Out of the corner of his eye he catches himself in the hallway mirror. He feels encouraged by the image — a man opening a closet door, a gun belt slung across his back — a complex person, integrated by his own actions into a complicated world. This appears even more obvious by the controlled way he removes the gun belt and hangs it on an ornate hook beside the closet door. He turns and looks at himself directly. He watches his mouth and thinks: Her fault. Closed mouth. Her coat — mouth open. Closed — fault. Open — fault.
Ellen Peterson lowers herself onto the couch in the TV room. The television is off and a macramé throw hangs in front of the screen. She sets a mug of coffee onto a table beside the couch.
Ellen Peterson is forty-two years old, tall, with handsome short grey hair. Her eyebrows are rigged to set off her expression with irony, and her mouth operates with the quick lips of a young person. Her hands are hinged with a loose agility, their gestures can accommodate the approximate and the exact. In short, Ellen’s anatomy is a perfect compliment to intelligence.
She raises the cup to her mouth but stops halfway. The gesture is not surprising, an index of intellectual life: her face twitches once to release the pause, and she brings the mug to her lips. She pushes the rim with her tongue, breaching the sipping seal, and coffee flows across her chin. It turns in a black braid down her neck and fans out through the fabric of her red T-shirt. Ellen Peterson is the reeve for Pontypool, Bewdley and Caesarea. She married Detective Peterson twelve years ago when he was just an OPP officer and she was a real estate agent. She managed to become successfully elected reeve because of her passion and familiarity with the rural life of the area. Ellen has never lived in a city, and her sophistication and intelligence are considered by her constituents to be the best of their own. She has pioneered a sensibility for rural Ontario that will carry it into the next millennium with as much wit and ability as her urban counterparts. And what’s more, she will bring the mystery of the backroads to sluggish minds in boardrooms. Ellen Peterson is also a member of a local sisterhood of Wicca, and the Bewdley Seers’ Festival is a project that she lovingly organizes, with some anonymity, at a careful distance from the office she holds. This past year of Ellen’s life, however, has been shot with a tragedy of devastating proportion.
On May 19, 1995, Ellen Peterson was attempting to intervene in what she perceived was a rash seizure of property by the game warden. The warden had stumbled on a family of four standing nearly waist deep in a small river-fed pond. The family were slapping the water with surveyor’s stakes as they ran back and forth, falling and squealing. As he got closer the game warden realized that they were playing a sort of British Bulldog with a school of carp. When the family saw the man they rushed back up to shore, more embarrassed and excited than aware that they were doing anything wrong. None of the carp was harmed, and in fact many of them left the game to mate upstream with renewed vigour.
Ellen didn’t see any harm in what they were doing, but the warden tried to describe the removal of surveyor’s stakes as vandalism, or at least as an illegal use of spears. He wanted to seize the family home and prosecute to the full extent of the law. Ellen recognized a man whose heart, unlike her husband’s, would beat faster if only the world were just a little more crooked than it already is.
As she looked for a phrase that would let the game warden and the family off the hook, a phrase that didn’t include the word eager, Ellen had a stroke. The stroke was the first of three that would hit her over the next year, each one dropping her deeper beneath the last, placing a baffling distance between her thought and the words that negotiate it. The second stroke caused the doctors to prematurely diagnose Pick’s disease, a gradual shrinking of the brain. This was suggested when a brain scan and several tests, involving draining her brain pan of fluid and inflating it with air, revealed a wider gap than a previous test. For days Ellen lay in the hospital, frightened by the fierce pain and the needle jolts of electricity in her head. Whenever she turned her head on the pillow her brain slid off its cushion of air and clunked, like a bumper car, into a corner of her skull.
After the third stroke and a third scan the doctors noticed that the affected area had changed appearance, shrinking from the size and shape of Sarnia to that of, say, Bewdley. Their prognosis this time was brighter. No organic damage. A part of her brain had been sealed off from the rest, and its contents needed to be coached out of the shadow they’d been cast in and reintroduced to the engines of their history: the physical context of their temporarily unavailable contents. The doctors thought that two years of therapy could bring her language back fully. When asked if she would be able to function as well as she had, however, they responded honestly: no.
Detective Peterson was given the impression that he had asked for too much and from then on he felt uneasy, like he was offending every doctor he consulted. Ellen kept her job as reeve and her secret position in the Wiccan religion. Detective Peterson knew this was the desire of the community — but only until the world replaced the role model that it had so wantonly destroyed. The sadness and, at times, the despair of the detective and the people of Pontypool were matched only by the millions of tiny tears shed by twenty-four thousand carp as they squeezed out their eggs and misted them with sperm. These tears lost their distinctive drop shape in the current of the river and were thus saved from appearing sentimental. They sank to the bottom and formed a rough fur of salted water over stones. Sediment.
The detective, on the other hand, took to sentimentalizing everything. He refused to treat Ellen differently, though she had become a different person, and he felt his own denial as a terrible sentence that he alone must unfairly endure. If her mood lightened, which it did sometimes in the afternoon, he felt a searing rage. And when, at night, fatigue caused her to repeat the words dead… dead over and over again, he felt a calmness fall over the house. At these times he also felt joy.
A walk through the kitchen for him contained enough signs of their other life together that he sometimes ate out for several days in a row to avoid being confronted by a past that, as the doctors had said, could be expected to return someday — changed, reduced, perverse. This was what frightened the detective the most. The return.