“McNair lingered for two days in camp, his curiosity aroused by this man who claimed to be an American yet spoke with a Cockney accent, and who lived as a native, but was proficient in Latin and had a Bible with him. On the eve of the second day McNair witnessed an odd ceremony. Gor-ski emerged out of the entry tunnel of his snow house wearing a silk top hat and a fringed white shawl with vertical black stripes: and then the native women did disport themselves before him.
“McNair: ‘Eight of them exhibited some most curious dances and contortions, till at length their gestures became indecent and wanton in the highest degree, and we turned away from the display.’
“Of course McNair is a low, superficial creature, who lies more frequently than he speaks the truth and can take more than a glass of Grog. He fell into the habit of intemperance after he got into Disgrace in consequence of employing one of the Compy.’s Servants in cutting off the Ears of an Indian who had had an intrigue with his Woman, but which would not have been thought so much of had it been done by himself in the heat of passion or as a punishment for Horse Stealing. Quite possibly there is more bibulous fancy than truth to McNair’s tale.
“Had Jos. Arnold bled again tonight, but he continues to complain of dizziness and a general weakness of the limbs. He is a born malingerer.”
McNair’s tale and its possible connection with Sir John Franklin’s fate—not to mention the reward and glory waiting on the man who solved the riddle—must have worried McGibbon, for six weeks later he sent a party out to Pelly Bay to investigate. They found that the Esquimaux had long gone, and the white man with them, if he had ever existed. All that remained of their camp was seal bones, other animal scraps, a discarded ulu, a tent ring, and that celebrated soapstone carving that is still on display at Hudson’s Bay House in Winnipeg. Another northern enigma. For while small soapstone carvings of seals, walruses, whales, and other mammals indigenous to the Arctic are far from uncommon, “The McGibbon Artifact”, as it has become known, remains the only Eskimo carving of what was clearly meant to represent a kangaroo.
Eight
Beatrice had never cared for his cabin in the woods. His Gurskyiana mausoleum. The first time he had driven her out there, she said, “But I come from the backwoods, Moses, and couldn’t wait to get out. Why would you bring me here?”
1971 that was, shortly after he had been fired by NYU for “moral turpitude”. They were living together in Montreal, Moses idle, Beatrice working for an ad agency, hating it. After work she joined him in one downtown bar or another, usually finding him already sodden, his grin silly.
“Weekends,” he said, pouring himself a drink. “It’s not that long a drive.”
“I suppose.”
They separated for the first time the following summer and ten days later Moses was back in the clinic in New Hampshire. Discharged in the autumn, he first had to endure the traditional farewell meeting in the doctor’s office. “So tell me,” the doctor said, glancing at the fat file on his desk, “it’s 3:30 A.M., August 5, 1962. They break in and find Marilyn Monroe lying face down on the bed, bare shoulders exposed, the phone clutched in her right hand. Who was trying to reach her just before she died?”
“How would I know?”
“Clever clever. Now turn over your hands and let the nice doctor have a look.”
His fingernails had driven deep cuts into the palms.
“Be well, old friend. Please stay well this time.”
Moses immediately struck out for the 91. He drove through New Hampshire and Vermont to Quebec’s Eastern Townships, crossing the border at Highwater. Wet slippery leaves lay scattered everywhere on the Quebec side, the bare trees already black and brittle. BIENVENUE. Even if the border had been unmarked Moses would have known that he was back in the Townships. Penury advertised. Suddenly the road was rippled and cracked and he had to swerve to avoid potholes. Rusting pickup trucks, bashed and abandoned, cannibalized years ago, lay in the tall grass and goldenrod here and there. Sinking barns rotted in the fields. Small mills, which had once manufactured bobbins—employing eight of the locals—chewing their fingers—were shuttered. In lieu of elegant little signs directing you toward the ivy-covered Inn on Crotched Mountain or the Horse and Hound, originally built as a farmhouse in 1880, there were roadside CANTINES with tarpaper roofs, proclaimed by a stake banged into the dirt, OPEN/OUVERT, and offering Hygrade hotdogs and limp greasy pommes frites made of frozen potatoes. There were no impeccably appointed watering holes, where the aging bartender, once Clean for Gene, would offer you a copy of Mother Jones with your drink. However, you could pull in at “Mad Dog” Vachon’s and knock back a Molson, maybe stumbling on a three-week-old copy of ’Allo Police. Or the Venus di Milo, where scantily clad pulpy waitresses out of Chicoutimi or Sept-Iles stripped and then sank to a bare stage to simulate masturbation, protected against splinters by a filthy flannel sheet.
Before turning off on the old logger’s track to his cabin in the woods on the other side of Mansonville, Moses stopped at The Caboose, where he found Strawberry exactly as he had left him a month ago, brooding over a quart of Molson.
“It’s good to see you, Straw.”
“That’s not what my wife said the last time I seen her. She said would I be wanting some of the same when I’m eighty. Not from you I ain’t is what I told her. Besides I’m thinking of divorcing her for being so unsanitary. Every time I want to pee in the sink it’s fill of dirty dishes.” He guffawed and slapped his knee. “You look like I feel.”
“Have you been taking care of my cabin?”
“You only just got here, Mister Man, and you’re starting to put the pressure on. Nobody’s gonna break into your place because they know you got nothing there but all those damn books and maps and empty bottles and salmon flies that ain’t no good here. Whatever you’re drinking will be good enough for me.”
“I’m not.”
“Again?” Strawberry asked, amused.
If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasn’t to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and thousands of bars like it that knit the country together from Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, to the far side of Vancouver Island. Signs over the ancient cash register reading NO CREDIT or TIP-PING ISN’T A CITY IN CHINA. A jar of rubbery pickled eggs floating in a murky brine, bags of Humpty Dumpty potato chips hanging on a spike. A moose head or a buck’s antlers mounted on the wall, the tractor caps hanging from it advertising GULF or JOHN DEERE or O’KEEFE ALE. The rip in the felt of the pool table mended with black tape. Toilet doors labelled BRAVES and SQUAWS or POINTERS and SETTERS. A Hi-Lo Double-Up JOKER POKER machine in one corner, a juke box in another, and the greasy sign over the kitchen door behind the bar reading EMPLOYES ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.
The Caboose had a notice board.
SURPRISE DART COMPITITION
FRIDAY NIGHT
TROPHY’S
The board listed a cottage for sale on Trouser Lake, last month’s Slo-Ball League schedule and a HONDA MOTORCYCLE LIKE BRAN NEW FOR SALE.
The Caboose was a clapboard box mounted on cinder blocks, more flies inside than out. Tractors and dump trucks and pickups began to bounce into the parking lot around five P.M., uniformly rust-eaten, dented badly here, taped together there, often an old coat hanger twisted to hold a rattling or leaky muffler in place. Once the men settled in they began to mull over the day’s events. Who had been found out by the welfare office and who was the latest to be caught putting it to Sneaker’s wife, Suzy, and was it Hi-Test again who was stealing those big outboards on the lake. Whether the new barmaid at Chez Bobby was worth the cost of a dinner first or if she was only trying it on because she had graduated from high school in Ontario, she said. Where you could get the best deal across the border on used tires for a grader and at the bottom of which hill were the fucken provincial police lying in wait right now.