Icefields (21 page)

The party went over Athabasca Pass and down the Columbia River to the Pacific coast. A message from the artist was sent back overland to Simpson. It despaired of

… the
problems of light…. I stare helplessly at the blank canvas … qualities I cannot render in paint….

He sat surrounded by the debris of his craft: paints, brushes, rags, jars. Staring out the window at the grey sky. Waiting for the frozen river to flow.

The governor's reply, reaching Streit at his winter quarters in Victoria, was a single sentence.

You will render them in paint.

Streit, in desperation, fell back on European principles of the picturesque. He tore up his field sketches, used them as fuel to heat his damp, drafty room, and painted, from nostalgic memory, the Austrian Alps.

The watercolourist asks about Hal's poetry. Why hasn't he published another volume? There are those, Brooke, Sassoon, who have written of the war.

—War is not a subject now, Hal answers. It's a

form.

—I suppose I'm committing the same error as Streit, the artist says, but somehow I feel that this
landscape is very English. Nothing like our green fields and hedgerows, I know. But when I look at these mountains, these roaring rivers, I fancy I can see England as Blake saw it, with his visionary eye, and for some reason that thought makes my hair stand on end. What do you think, am I being ridiculous?

—I don't know, Hal says. I've heard there's a cave entrance somewhere at the base of Mount Arcturus. The National Geographic expedition found it a few years ago. If you go in far enough, they say, there are places where you can reach into crevices in the rock and touch glacial ice. You're actually
under
the icefield. A thousand feet of ice over your head.

The painter leans forward.

—And...?

Hal shrugs.

—And that's all it is. Ice.

5

Eight local men haul a Wing and Sons piano up a lower spur of Mount Arcturus, to the col known as the Stone Witch. Rawson is one of them. The avant-garde composer Michel Barnaud has arrived in Jasper in 1920 to give the one and only performance of his “Mountain Impromptu.” Barnaud's New York patrons have paid them well to ensure that both composer and
piano reach their destination intact. A reporter from the magazine
DisChord
is also on hand to record the event.

From the ridge there is a vertical drop of over seven hundred feet into Avernus chasm.

Barnaud wrote the piece without a definite ending. As he tells the reporter, it is finished when he decides it is finished. He plays for twenty-seven minutes, bent over the keys with his eyes closed as if in pain, then with the help of the carriers he pushes the piano over the lip of rock into the chasm.

There is a brief crescendo of torrential chords as the Wing and Sons tumbles end over end, followed by the splintering of wood and a swiftly diminishing rumble. The composer leans forward and watches without visible emotion as the shattered carcass of the piano slithers out of sight into the trees on the valley floor, trailing dust and tangled wire.

When informed that the site of his composition was also that of a recent climbing casualty, Barnaud is delighted. That night, townspeople with torches search the floor of the chasm, looking to salvage some of the valuable materials from the wreckage.

Ivory keys are found later in the summer by hikers, alongside the Avernus trail. Often they are mistaken for the teeth of mammoths.

6

As he does every year, Hal's father sends him a new book. This year it is a novel he unwraps from the brown parcel paper, The Age
of Innocence.

Before he reads it Hal tears out every second

page.

7

Elspeth finds him in the stable at dawn, brushing a grey gelding.

—This can't go on, Hal.

—I know.

—So what are you going to do?

Hal lifts a bridle from its peg on the door post. The horse lowers its head and he slips the bit into its mouth, pulls the headstall over its ears. The horse tosses its head and Hal strokes its neck.

—I'm going for a ride.

8

At Byrne's shelter he climbs from the saddle, drops the lead rope. The horse shifts its weight and leans its head down to sniff halfheartedly at the snow. Hal
looks at the horse's flank, dark with sweat, and turns away.

The door of the shelter is open, a half moon ridge of blown snow on the floor. He stumbles in from bright sunlight, his blind forward grope halted by the back wall. His blistered fingers find the curling edges of two photographs, tacked to the beam above the fireplace. Freya's portrait of Byrne, and the blurred shot of Mount Arcturus and the icefield.

Hal searches the room, finds an empty tin water pail and takes it outside with him. He climbs up above the shelter, onto the nunatak, and fills the pail at a place where a thin rivulet of water spills over a shelf of rock. He carries the pail down to the horse and then goes back inside the shelter.

He crouches in front of the fireplace, digs in the ashes and builds a pyre of half-burnt sticks. He searches the shelf for matches, then the table, where he finds one of Byrne's notebooks. He drops into the chair, claws through the pages of the notebook with numb fingers, and stops when a word catches his eye.
Freya.

The entry is dated the day after her death. A matter-of-fact description of the events of the night before. Only one phrase cracks the smooth clinical surface of the prose:
poor Rawson.. ..

Underneath the entry, a paragraph in quotation

marks:

“The growth of an individual like is always attended with the following sequence: generation of heat; a rhythm in time which establishes an equilibrium of vary- ing duration; an end which pro- duces a glacial cold. I do not think that I am reaching conclusions that the facts will not support, by a conjecture that with the cycles of life on earth things happened in the same manner.”

Louis Agassiz, 1837

Hal thumbs back through several pages. Nature observations, temperature measurements. The dates run backwards to the beginning of summer, apparently without any other mention of her. Hal sets the book back on the table, gets up from the chair and crouches again in front of the fireplace, rubbing his arms.

Byrne enters, bangs against the door in his haste. Hal stands up.

—Doctor. I was hoping you'd be here.

Byrne stabs a finger out the doorway.

—Your horse. Its hooves are down to the quick.

He sees something in Hal's eyes, looks away.

—I followed the blood on the ice.

Hal rubs a hand across his face.

—I've probably ruined the poor beast.

—That's very likely.

—There's ice like crushed glass up there. Wearing boots you don't realize it.

—Up there?

—Yes. I took the horse across the icefield. The guides have been saying somebody should try it, for years, but no one did. Perhaps they were too much in awe of the place.

Byrne rubs a hand through his hair, down the back of his neck.

—You were up on the névé, with the horse?

Hal nods.

—A partial traverse. From the Saskatchewan glacier to the Arcturus. About fourteen miles.

—Then you must have . . . you came down the

icefall.

Rawson lifts a fluttering hand.

—On the winged steed of inspiration.

When he lowers his hand it is still shaking.

Byrne breathes out slowly, pulls the chair out from the table.

—Please, have a seat. Or lie down on the bed. You should rest. Then I'll help you get the horse back to the chalet.

Hal sits down again on the floor, draws his knees up and rubs his legs.

—I prefer this, thanks.

—You should've started a fire, Byrne says with forced lightness. Made yourself some tea.

—I couldn't find any matches.

Byrne turns to him, feels his coat pockets.

—I forgot. That's my fault. I hid them. Otherwise the climbers that stop here use them up and I go without heat all night.

—That wouldn't do.

—No.

Byrne rubs his hands together.

—I'll boil some water.

Hal watches Byrne's movements sleepily.

—I see I'm not the only intruder on your glacier these days.

—Oh, you mean Trask's machines. The road's not finished. They haven't actually been on the ice yet. I'm hoping I can keep it that way.

—I doubt you'll have much success butting heads with Frank.

—We'll see.

Byrne glances over his shoulder. Hal is staring at the floor.

—The icefield, Byrne says. Tell me why you did it.

Hal shakes his head.

—I'm not sure. A lot of reasons came to mind. Then I thought I should talk to you instead.

—Why?

Hal shrugs as if the answer is obvious.

—Freya.

Byrne freezes in the act of striking a match.

—She came to see you, Hal says. Before we left for the Arcturus climb, while the club was gathered by the creek. I went to talk to her once at dawn. And she wasn't in her tent. I didn't know why, then. The perfect English gentleman had me fooled for the longest time. Good show, old boy. But the answer came to me, just the other night. I was camped below Jonah Shoulder, under a billion stars, and I had a vision.

He laughs.

—A damsel with a doctor in a vision once I saw. And I realized you were a human being after all. She got to you.

Byrne patiently nurses the fire into life. He turns to glance at Hal's shadowed face.

—So what do you want from me now?

—More of her. 1 want to know how she looked to you, what she said, everything you can remember.

—I didn't get to know her very well.

—It was just cold and quick, then. Like with the women we both made use of during the war.

—It was a long time ago, Hal.

—And now she's Our Lady of the Ice.

—What does that mean?

Hal stands up. He sways in the centre of the

room.

—I thought she would be my muse. But I couldn't write about her. I tried, but nothing came close. I didn't have a language for something I'd never encountered before. Those carvings out there on the rocks would do a better job of describing her than I could. Battles, dreams, arrows. The sound of her voice, how could words follow the shape of that?

Hal closes his eyes. He takes a step forward and his knees buckle. Byrne catches him in his arms, eases him onto the bed.

—Tired.

Byrne holds him for a long time, until his shivering stops and he realizes Hal has fallen asleep.

9

Dusk has fallen when Byrne comes back in from examining the horse. Rawson's eyes are watching him from the corner of the darkening shelter. Byrne tells him to stay the night.

—I'll take the horse down myself and return in the morning.

Hal shakes his head.

—I've got to go back. Alone.

He has to finish this day the way it began. Outside he takes the reins and leads the horse. Byrne walks with him for a short distance without speaking.
When he is about to go on alone, Hal turns towards Byrne.

—I'd like to talk to you again. I didn't say . . . what I wanted to say.

—About Freya?

—No. The war. I need to talk about it.

—Tomorrow, in town. Come and see me tomorrow.

10

Hal descends along the edge of the lateral moraine, where the surface is more stable, leading the mute and spiritless horse. When he reaches the mounds and sinkholes of the till plain, the immense weight of stillness descends around him. He remembers an evening just like this, on the edge of a Belgian village.

The long battle for the ridge was finally over, and for a brief time the guns went still.

His ammunition column was given the order to move. They packed up and led forward the mules that carried the shells. The road they followed, jammed at first with columns of grey soldiers returning from the front, was soon empty, and then disappeared altogether as if swallowed by a mudslide. The only way forward to the new position was through the muck and debris of no man's land, along the edge of the ruined village. As
they struggled forward, he realized that beneath their feet there had once been a cultivated field. Now it was a ghost landscape of churned muck, metallic wreckage, dark red pools. White bodies half-submerged. The men rubbed their chilled hands over anything, burst shells or crackling, unidentifiable debris, that still radiated heat.

Smoke drifted silently. Above a shattered concrete pillbox, taken from the enemy and used now as a dressing station, the red cross flag snapped, as homely a sound as laundry on a line. The distant cries of the wounded had become so familiar and unanswerable, like the chirping of birds in a city, that only later did he recall them. The world was Sunday quiet, peaceful. A peace he stepped across in terror, waiting for it to explode.

11

A week after Hal's ride across the icefield, Elspeth sends for Byrne, a message to hurry to Trask's office at the chalet. Rawson is there, looking scrubbed, rejuvenated. As if camp smoke and saddle leather have never touched him.

He surrenders himself to the doctor's care. On the way to the new hospital in Jasper he lifts his head and laughs at a sudden revelation.

—My God. The poetry I'll be able to write.

He was missing for the whole week. Byrne waited for him and he did not appear. Then he was seen walking up the road to the chalet, out of nowhere. He stepped into Trask's office, dressed in the suit he wore the day he first arrived in Jasper.

Good heavens, son,
Trask said.
Are you getting married?

Rawson stood stiffly by the door, as if afraid to cross the threshold.

I
won't be able to continue in your employ, Mr. Trask. The reason, to be perfectly honest, is that I'm cracking up.