21
GRANDSHIRE WAS NOT, for Nate Feldman, the Paradise Found it had first seemed, but rather a Paradise Lost, for the leach of unseen heavy metal contaminants from the mining of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most notably trace elements of zinc, cadmium, lead, manganese, nickel, and arsenic, released into stream-fed aquifers by abandoned tailing pool toxins and acid rock discharge, in the overgrowth of reclaimed operations deep in the wilderness.
The details were contained in government reports — soil analysis, evidence of contamination sources as best could be identified. For the victims, the effects were slow to manifest, but pernicious, cumulative and irreversible, leading to organ failure. Medically and legally, it was a complicated matter. At issue was the absolute causality of the associated illnesses. Lawyers and experts were lined up on both sides of the argument so it was apparent there would be no justice for the immediate victims, and little, if any, for the surviving family members.
In the interim, the witnesses were simply to put a face to a story of human tragedy. This was Ursula’s opinion. Cynicism, she said, was a white disease, and now they were going to add this injury to all that had come before. She would not allow it.
Ursula spoke of a mushroom grown in the fetid dark that allowed one to speak with their ancestors. They should know and be ready for her arrival. Death should be nothing hidden in the palliative care of a hospice on Toronto’s outskirts.
What had befallen her was better understood by the tribal leaders of old and more recently by men like Frank Grey Eyes. A disruption in the land always registered in the depletion of fish stock or the bitter taste of game when a sickness could imperceptibly slow an animal, and if caught in too great a number then the species should be left to recover.
This was generationally observed, these signaling events, and told in any number of stories of how, in ancient times, the lakes and streams and rivers sometimes churned in the turbidity of waters in a choke-out by non-indigenous grass or weed, seeds carried on the wind so a balance was upset, the soil silted so it was hard for the salmon to find their way and lay their eggs in what had been the clear pooling of once undisturbed waters. What they attributed to the Gods was not a naïve understanding of nature, but a keen observation of nature, a balance where their own temperament, their own actions connected to a cosmic harmony. Nativism was not aligned with ignorance, but a willful submission to direct observation.
Ursula spoke of it. It was preserved in the oral history, the demise of the great Chinook spawn along the Saint Lawrence, a lifecycle disturbed by the presence of outsiders. It was carried with the natives, the memory of fish, in song and story.
What you had to do, in your most solemn appeal, was pray to the wolf, the bear and the eagle, seek alternatives, abstain and let a species recover. In so doing, you nourished the inner spirit, humanity following nature, and not the other way around, for it was not mankind who first uncovered the ice bridges and the vast new interiors, but the vast herds. The tribes simply followed. This was a great lesson forgotten.
Ursula talked of the First Nations people who bore witness along the Saint Lawrence, in the aftermath of the demise of the salmon, to the arrival of a great spawn of a new human misery, the portal, wide-eyed coffin ships, unloading a grim discharge of Europe’s flotsam. The Irish, most notably, those awful, pale-faced, skeletal wretches, ragged in the embattled way salmon rushed headlong against the current in a death run for the spawning grounds to seed the next generation.
The deplorable famine ships, still remembered in legend, blighted with cholera and typhus, all stopped short of Quebec, at the outpost quarantine of Grosse-Île, so it was wondered among the First Nations people what this Europe of Kings and Queens was like that undertakings so perilous were embarked upon. It was thus understood that all things migrated along a route, a life meridian, first the fish and then the people, sharing a same history, or so Ursula believed.
*
In their time, toward the end, as Ursula faded, Nate added remote and distant histories. He ordered a history book of Canada, traveled to town for a brief reprieve. He stood in the cold vestibule of the post office. The books arrived wrapped in a crinkle of brown paper.
Ursula was taken by the story of the Basque whalers — the Basque, who throughout the sixteenth century had sailed along the Americas, fishermen more intent on concealing their hunting territory than claiming land.
In between the facts of the nautical coordinates, in the margins of the book was a sketch and tale of a fisherman who hauled up a three-foot-long cod, common enough at the time. What was astonishing, the cod spoke an unknown language. It spoke Basque.
Ursula drowsed and woke again, Nate, mindful, covering a history again, in the way a bedtime story was told time and again for its cadence as much as its details, where all strands led to the liminal depths of sleep, where there was no differentiation between fact and fiction, and all was a sound.
Nate read the account slowly, this history of exploration, surreptitiously and only recently uncovered in the archives of legal documents in a Lisbon library, when it had been there all along. There were, he told her, doctoral candidates, modern scribes who earned little, but who set themselves apart from ordinary concerns. In this instance, a doctoral candidate had uncovered legal documents concerning reparation for a ship lost some five centuries past in a place that was deciphered, from scant and purposefully hidden details, to be along the Labrador coast. Upon investigating these old parchments, a whaling galleon was discovered submerged in Red Bay, in a harbor deep enough that the inhabitants had sailed over the ruins for centuries, unaware of its presence or what had come before.
Ursula ran her fingers over the images and words, the Basques in the grey swell and kick-up of whitecaps, harpoons at the ready, and, a page later, the dead-eyed whale, pinioned and hoisted, belayed to the side of the whaler, in advance of the quiver and shudder of blubber flensed, the content of a belly let spill in a great effulgence of its precious oil.
This, Ursula, believed, was how you lived. She did not shudder from the hunt in the way the environmentalists would have. Their interests were divergent.
*
Ursula would not have made a very good witness in court, not when she held such opinions, and she might better have been embossed on the back of a coin with a papoose, and not set before the courts to topple the growing opinion of her resuscitated, noble people.
She was a contradiction, or the others made her into a contradiction, when life was more complicated. She was on the Organics logo. It defined her in a way neither she nor Nate understood it would. Nate could be charged with conjuring this innocence, capturing her so, but it was done out of genuine love, in a moment of apprehending her, a literal moment in time, so he could be forgiven. Ursula had forgiven him. She cherished what he saw in her. But it was also why the business had succeeded, because of her image, captured in the honesty in which Nate had come upon her so long ago. It was their shared truth, uncomplicated.
People corrupted it, tied it to all manner of opinions and ways of organizing a life. She was the essence of a Truth others sought, but did not fully understand, so she was a fraud, too, for knowing this, and letting it perpetuate, for letting her hair grow longer than it might, for being perhaps more native than she might have been.
She had become trapped in an idea of the idea of what she represented. She saw the image of herself as the image of one staring into a stream, and never seeing the actual self, when even that explanation was too native, too given to nativism and primitivism.