In the Skin of a Lion (20 page)

Most of the regatta crowd will be guests at either Bigwin Inn or the Muskoka Hotel. Patrick watches the scenery as the boat passes the thick-treed islands. Now and then there is a clearing of lawn imposed on the landscape. The setting seems strangely spartan to attract so many wealthy people, to be the playground of the rich. He finds a deck-chair and sleeps, and even in sleep his hand clutches the suitcase. He wakes to every hoot of the whistle as the boat winds its way through North Portage. When they pass Bigwin Island, they are greeted by the Anglo-Canadian Band playing on the rock promontory – tubas, trumpets, violins, and various other instruments. Patrick waves along with the others. He will not be coming back this way. He might as well wave now.

In the Garden of the Blind, on Page Island, a stone cherub holds out a hand from which water leaps up into the air. A tree full of birds spreads itself high over the southern area of the lawn. There is a falling of sounds – bird-calls like drops of water – onto the blind woman sitting there. Seeds float down onto the gravel borders, a sound path for those walking without sight. On one of the benches, under the tree, Patrick sits reading the newspaper.

If he closes his eyes, these noises will overpower him, in the way he imagines the cherub accepts that water which leaps from his palm into air and then falls back onto his face. He watches a bird dart. The woman on his right hears the rustle of his newspaper and realizes he is alien here.

He is one island over from last night’s fire, hiding now in this garden, unseen among the blind, till nightfall.

He had loosened the cap on the paraffin can and enclosed it gurgling within his black cardboard suitcase. Then he began his walk along the mezzanine of the empty Muskoka Hotel. He had waited until the guests and staff were outside on the lawns, busy with the regatta dinner. He leaned over the banister to look at the stuffed animal-heads below him, the liquid leaking down, then walked on, the suitcase innocent in his right hand, down the stairs to the lobby. The smell was evident now.
Fire!
he yelled. He lit a match, dropped it, and the fire ran upstairs and round and round the circular mezzanine. His arm was on fire. He plunged the sleeve of his jacket into an aquarium. The suitcase at the foot of the stairs exploded. He moved alone through the lobby of the Muskoka Hotel, the deerheads above him on fire.

He walked from the fire towards the water. As he made his way to the rowboat, he checked the explosive hidden under the dock. Everyone on the blue evening lawn looked at the flames, dumbfounded. Some men saw him unhook the boat and pointed. Patrick stood in the boat and waved. They waved back uncertainly then started to run towards the dock casually, in case Patrick turned out to be a friend, then jumped onto the dock and began running towards him.

He lit the fuse which raced towards the two men and started to row away from the dock. The fuse, like a nervy kid, buzzed and ran under the men’s feet. They stopped and turned. Now they realized what it was. The older man leaped into the water and the other, his hands on his hips, paused as the blue fizzing ran into the small explosion that separated the dock from the shore.

What he begins to witness now, in the Garden of the Blind, is not sound but smell – the plants chosen with care so visitors can move from fragrance to fragrance with precise antennae. To his left he can smell mock orange. He leans over the raised bed – three feet higher than the path – and sniffs deeply.

Patrick hears footsteps and a hand touches his back. The blind woman who heard the rustle of newspapers now attaches herself to him.

She smiles.

Her name is Elizabeth, and she offers to show him the garden. She mentions that her sister is better at identifying flowers and herbs because she does not drink. “I drink like a porpoise but only from the afternoon on. Tragic love affair in my thirties.” They walk together and Patrick watches how her relaxed body drifts in this world, moving surely towards the basil and broadleaf sorrel. She lowers her hand in passing to brush the soft silk of the foliage called Rabbit’s Grass. Her garden is a ballroom and she introduces him to the intimacies of dill and caraway, those shy sisters; she advises him to bend down and bruise certain leaves which are too subtle for him to appreciate when untouched.

“To focus your nasal powers you must forget about sounds. The bird sounds here are lovely but sometimes I come here drunk or with a hangover and the noise is awful. Then I want to pour medicinal fluids into my handkerchief, climb into the branches, and chloroform them.” In the centre of the garden just north of the water-splashed cherub is another tree where there are no birds. “You must be looking at the camphor … birds recognize death better than us. Plants have complex genealogies. To a bird a succulent fruit must first be judged by its bloodlines. You may like cashew nuts or mango, or find sumac beautiful, but a bird knows that these are all, strangely, part of the poison-ivy family.”

She leads him towards the imported exotics – fruitless persimmon, and the
pimpernella
, which is anise. She is curious about him but he will not say very much though he is courteous
and he likes her. He will have to stay here till night and then try to swim from the island out to a boat. Along the beds on the east side of the garden there is tarragon and lavender and cardamom. She puts her hands up bluntly to his face and searches him. She finds a welt by his ear.

She laughs.

They are a frieze, a statue in this garden, a woman with her soft palms covering a tall man’s face, blinding him.

When she moves her hands away from his eyes she feels the gasp on his face which is not shock or disgust but something else.

Her green eye echoes somewhere within him.
Aetias Luna –
and its Canadian name,
papillon lune
. Lunar moth. Moon moth. Her other eye is simply not there, the old loose flesh of the eyelid covering nothing. But this eye is forest green, moth green, darting all over as if to catch his gaze, moving with delight over his shoulders, alighting on his ear, his nose. He had loved the lunar moth, its flare of the lower wing like a signature, a papyrus textured object whose small furred body he used to see pulsing on a branch or rock within his lantern light. The woman shifts the watery green mirror of her eye attempting to reflect everything around her.

Patrick allows her to guide him back to the bench. They sit and she grips his hand, not letting go of him. He feels she receives all of his qualities, in this still garden, raucous with noise. The blue veins are narrow and clear in the tight skin of her hands. He is unable to talk, even if all he said would be hidden within her blindness. Alice Gull, he could say, who once pushed her hands up against the slope of a ceiling and spoke of a grand cause, who leapt like a live puppet into his arms, who died later on a bloody pavement, ruined in his arms.

No one else enters the garden as they sit there. Beside the wooden seat is mint pepper, rosemary. In the flower-bed to the right of where they sit is
artemesia advacumculas
, whose human name she says she doesn’t know. The muscles in her hand finally loosen and he turns to look at her face. She is now resting, leaning back, gently asleep. He moves his hand from her grip and leaves her.

Now he is part of the evening water, the reflection of dock lights rolling off him. Six stars and a moon. The news of the fire has left the Muskokas in an uproar and Patrick struggles to get free of the current off Page Island in order to swim towards that boat. It has crept across the blackness of the lake at a snail’s pace and is now about 500 yards off shore. A night cruise with dancing – he can hear music as he swims, voices and tambourine falling like muffled glass into the water. A half-moon, a few stars, a loop of dock lights.

Somewhere in his past he has dreamed such a moment: a criminal swimming in darkness to a lighted ship. He feels
removed from any context of the world, wanting to sleep at this moment, wanting to swim back into the current he has just escaped, return to the Garden of the Blind, and sleep. But he is magnetized to the nameless steamer.

A deadhead touches him in the ribs, comes up under him, and Patrick hears himself shout out in the shriek of an animal. The dreams he had of swimming to a ship involved tropic winds and crocodiles. He splashes out to discover what touched him, but it is gone. “It was a deadhead,” he says to himself, talking out loud now, determined, the fear suddenly an energy in him. Brushed by this deadhead he is fully alive, feral, exhilarated. He remembers his departure from the world, stepping out onto the
porte-cochère
of the Muskoka Hotel, flames behind him. Now he will be a member of the night. He sees his visage never emerging out of shadows. Unhistorical.

He swims on, smelling traces of hickory smoke from the campfires on the island. He is delirious with hunger. Music from the boat.
“Beware of frozen ponds, peroxide blondes, stocks and bonds.…”
the singer’s voice over the muffle of orchestra. And what will they do as they see him climb up a rope into their company, lake weed draped over his shoulder, the blood from the log’s glance on his ribs?

He is alongside the boat, in the shadow of the moon, looking up.
The Cherokee
. The panel windows from the stateroom and lounge throw out light that falls on the water. Higher up is the open deck, the dancing couples, the band. He pulls himself up on the vertical strips of rubber that protect the sides of the steamer when it docks. He smells food on deck, climbs fast, and goes headfirst through a window and lands on a table. He is in the kitchens.

A cook turns at the crash to see Patrick on his back surrounded by double-diamond glass. Patrick puts a finger to his
lips, keeping it there till the man nods and moves to close the door. Patrick gets down off the table, glass all around him. On deck the pause in conversation is replaced by louder laughter, cheers for the dropped tray or whatever they thought caused the noise. The cook walks over with a broom and sweeps while Patrick stands there removing his wet clothes. There is a cut near his ribs and on his thigh. Then the cook mimes going to sleep and is gone like a ghost out of the room. Patrick walks to the switch and dims out the kitchen light.

It must be around midnight. The noise on deck is ceaseless with the orchestra weaving its way through suspicious love, tentative love. The frail music filters down into this large kitchen which he seems to own. He knows he will be caught, probably imprisoned, but for now he thrills to this brief freedom.

He squeezes out the clothes, turns on the large ovens, spreads his shirt and trousers flat, and slides them in with a baker’s paddle. Then he looks for food. There are some cooked potatoes. He pulls out a slab of raw meat from the fridge and crouches behind the counter. He eats only the potato demurely. He cuts the meat into strips with a sharp knife and eats it, licking the juice that dribbles down his arm. Now and then he gets up to drink from the taps and to keep an eye on his clothes cooking at low heat in the oven.

CARAVAGGIO

T
HERE WAS A
blue tin jail roof. They were painting the Kingston Penitentiary roof blue up to the sky so that after a while the three men working on it became uncertain of clear boundaries. As if they could climb up further, beyond the tin, into that ocean above the roof.

By noon, after four hours, they felt they could walk on the blue air. The prisoners Buck and Lewis and Caravaggio knew this was a trick, a humiliation of the senses. Why an intentional blue roof? They could not move without thinking twice where a surface stopped. There were times when Patrick Lewis, government paintbrush in hand, froze. Taking a seemingly innocent step he would fall through the air and die. They were fifty yards from the ground. The paint pails were joined by rope – one on each slope – so two men could move across the long roof symmetrically. They sat on the crest of the roof during their breaks eating sandwiches, not coming down all day. They leaned the heels of their hands into the wet paint as they worked. They would scratch their noses and realize they became partly invisible. If they painted long enough they would be eradicated, blue birds in a blue sky. Patrick Lewis understood this, painting a bug that would not move away alive onto the blue metal.