Late Nights on Air (38 page)

Harry had put his house up for sale. He sold it within a week, waterfront lots on Latham Island being highly prized. Then he began to organize the things he would take to England. He wanted to whittle his life down to its essentials, like Huck Finn, he thought to himself, and to that end he was confining himself to two suitcases. Everything else he was boxing up either for the church to give away, or for the dump.

One night, Eleanor and Gwen dropped by and found him surrounded by chaos. Help yourselves, he told them. Dig in. Take anything you can use. Then his tone changed, and he said he was looking for someone who might be able to use his canoe.

It was early September and the residue of the trip was gone from their faces and hands, even from their muscles – they had town faces, town thoughts, town dreams. The Barren Ground hadn’t followed them into their sleep. It worked on them differently, more consciously, perhaps. It was a short, atypical chapter in their lives. They couldn’t quite believe it had happened, even though afterwards nothing was the same.

“Are we ever going to see you again?” Gwen asked him.

“Ah, Gwen,” Harry said. And wrapped her in a hug. He was drinking again, the sobriety of the canoe trip already a distant memory. “You’re a sentimental soul.”

“Can I hide in one of your suitcases?” she asked. She was ready to run off with him now, she said, ready to stow aboard.

Harry just smiled the comment away. His flirtatious banter of the canoe trip was a thing of the past, and she couldn’t resurrect it, not even by telling him the radio station was unbearable without him. He’d moved on, it seemed to her. He’d already left.

She was right. Ralph’s death had worked a change in him, turning his thoughts to Eleanor and her welfare, then to his own future.

Gwen stood in the living room as Harry wrapped up his life in Yellowknife. In one of those paradoxes she found hard to grasp, she felt more isolated in town than when she’d been on the Barrens with miles of emptiness around her. Just three months ago in this very room, they’d organized their supplies, full of excitement about leaving. How was it possible to feel safer in the wilderness—as safe as she’d felt almost until the end—and how was it possible to feel lonelier now?

A week before he was to leave Yellowknife, Harry opened
News of the North
and read a brief article about an exhibit of photographs in Los Angeles that was causing quite a stir. A series documenting young Dene women, unposed, half-naked, and looking as if they were high on something. Canadian Press had picked up the story. The report said viewers had responded with outrage and concern about the lives depicted, but with admiration for the political message and the artistic daring of the photographer. “The disconcerting intimacy of
the pictures never feels exploitative,” one reviewer said, and Eddy Fitzgerald was quoted. “I can’t transform their lives, but I can show the truth of what’s happening.” He said he wanted to show the underside of life in a far northern town where whites were the majority, where they were racist, where they used and abused young native women. He wanted his pictures to be seen as a warning of what lay ahead if the pipeline went through. A book was in the works, he claimed, and all the proceeds would go to the Dene Nation. There was a small shot of Eddy, looking intense, unsmiling, and next to it one of his photographs: a young native girl sprawled on her side in what looked like a seedy motel room.

Harry realized with sudden and painful clarity that Eddy was going to make a name for himself, a thought that dismayed him almost as much as the pictures did. He couldn’t tell from the article if the photos were true to life, or if Eddy had staged them for his own purposes. He didn’t know if he should be impressed by what Eddy had done or appalled.

When he saw Teresa the next day in the Gold Range café, he asked if she’d seen the article.

“Jesus,” she said. “What planet does Eddy live on?”

Harry felt relieved, and grateful for her straightforward reaction. “But it’s all in a good cause, apparently,” he said. Wanting her to elaborate, to clarify his own thinking. “Art in the service of politics.”

“No,” she said. “It’s art and politics as a cover for - you know. His dick.”

A response so unequivocal it blasted away the confusion in his jealous mind.

Eleanor was the only one of their foursome, except for Ralph, who would never leave the North. In early October, Harry moved to England, and not long after that Gwen began to apply to radio stations in the south for work. Vancouver, Toronto, Winnipeg, Ottawa. She wanted more experience, she told Eleanor, she wanted to learn from people who really knew what they were doing, and that meant going “outside,” the northern term for anywhere south of the sixtieth parallel. By implication, the North, itself, was “inside.” A distinction that first struck Gwen as an existential riddle, since how could this vast out-of-doors ever be construed as an interior? But then she experienced her first winter.

Now winter closed in again with frigid winds, icy roads, longer nights, and, yes, she was inside a place gripped by the cold. Ironically, now that she’d made up her mind to leave Yellowknife, she felt more bound to the place, eager to absorb everything she could. She intended to be gone before the station took up its new quarters the following summer. Under the present manager, she was back on nights. She preferred it. She saw less of the man, who, unlike Harry, had no interest in opening up broadcasting to women. Teresa didn’t get on with him either. “But I’ve figured out how to handle him. He fires me, then I fire him,” she laughed. “I’ve outlived bad bosses before,” she added with a trace of bitterness.

They both kept tabs on Eleanor. She had made an arrangement with the owner of the stationery store to split the rent and devote her half of the space to books. One day Gwen
helped her go through Ralph’s photographs to select which ones to hang in the store. They discovered that he’d preceded his summer grasses with a series on grasses in winter that looked like Japanese calligraphy. The dry stalks were bent over like little sticks, pressed into shapes by weather, half buried under the snow. It was almost too much for Eleanor. Ralph had walked right back into their lives. She told Gwen then about the remarkable dream she’d had soon after he died, in which there was the sort of detail—sight, touch, smell—that an ordinary photograph doesn’t have and neither does memory. But these photographs of what he’d bent down to look at so closely that he was inches away gave her the sense that she was looking through his eyes. This intimacy with him—so physical, yet intangible—came to her in a rush and made her feel his absence all the more.

As Gwen studied the snowy light in the black-and-white photographs, she was taken back to a winter’s day seven years ago when she’d driven with her mother to Toronto to see an old friend, a painter named Marta, who’d rented an apartment in a high-rise overlooking Lake Ontario. There was just a bedroom, living room, small kitchen, not unlike my own apartment here, thought Gwen, except for one thing. Marta had a view. Large windows overlooked the lake below and winter sun poured in, such white, parched, unsparing sunshine that everything seemed charged with unusual life. All the way home, driving with her mother through the bare countryside under the white winter sky, she’d felt Marta’s aspirations working like sap running through her, and it wasn’t the sap of spring, but the latent sap of winter. She hadn’t ever forgotten, but neither had she known how to put
the feeling into action. Now it occurred to her to use her kitchen table as a work space and try her hand drawing and sketching the things she remembered from her winter walks around town, like the hooded faces obscured by plumes of icy breath, and the makeshift log cabins and wood piles wrapped in ice fog, the skiers coming across the frozen lake, and the occasional dog team that surged over the snow, pulling a toboggan behind them like a snow boat, the dogs reaching to the side to swipe mouthfuls of snow.

At Christmas they received cards from Harry, who told them he was remarkably well for a man in his condition. He’d found a job at the BBC producing radio dramas.

That’s
my
job, Gwen wrote to him. Eleanor replied too; she would be a faithful correspondent. Gwen wrote again in January when she was offered a job for the following July as a summer replacement at the
CBC
in Ottawa. Harry sent his congratulations, she wrote to him yet again, and when he didn’t reply, she let it go.

In February, a hundred miles northeast of Inuvik, a young man working on an oil rig in the Mackenzie Delta was killed by a polar bear. His co-worker said that he’d left him alone, but only briefly, to warm up in a nearby trailer, and when he came out several minutes later, his partner was gone. He searched around and found a boot, a sock, and a polar bear paw print. The story ran on the news and inspired Gwen to write a radio reminiscence about her own encounter, and the little body of sound, her bag full of tapes, that lay on the slope above Hornby’s quiet cabin. In response she heard from a retired Barren Lands trapper, Gus Daoust, who gave her his droll and terse assessment of the weather in that part of the world.
“Every wind is a headwind,” he said. He also observed that around Yellowknife there were two periods in the year when everything seems to stop still. January and June. May, he said, was the month of sounds of all kinds.

Appropriate, then, that Berger released his final report in early May, since it generated so much talk. The report was more hard-hitting than anyone had expected. “No pipeline now,” he recommended, “and no pipeline across the northern Yukon ever.” He called for a moratorium of at least ten years on the Mackenzie Valley pipeline to allow for the settlement of native land claims. He recommended that measures be taken to protect critical wildlife habitat. He highlighted the need to preserve native culture and to foster the development of an economy based on renewable resources. “Ten Year Delay,” trumpeted the headlines.

Copies of the report were flown to every settlement and waved in the air in triumph. Teresa personally delivered a copy to her grandmother in Fort Rae. Her grandmother couldn’t read it, but that hardly mattered. There were many pictures, including one of herself smoking a pipe, her hair white, her eyes trained on the distance. She could turn the pages of photographs of the land and of the animals, and she did, repeatedly, until the binding gave way.

By the end of the summer it would be clear to everyone that a huge political shift had taken place. The inquiry and the report that followed had effectively stopped the pipeline. If it was resurrected, native peoples, empowered by their land claims settlements, would have a central voice in the process.
On her last night in Yellowknife, Gwen did her late show a final time. It was June, one of those brief nights we call long because the twilight is so extended. She was in the announce booth, in its very particular light, never more aware of the rest of the world than when she was so completely shut away from it. She opened her little sound-effects door wide for Sleepy John Estes, the blues guitarist, who used to recognize everyone’s step, she said, so acutely did he absorb the sounds around him.

Shortly after one in the morning, Eleanor picked her up at the station and they drove to Old Town. The street lights were on and store signs were lit, but it wasn’t dark. They rolled down their windows and the air smelled of the big lake. Harry’s canoe was tied to a rack on the roof of the car. They were planning a long paddle on Yellowknife Bay.

They parked near the causeway to Latham Island. When they slid the canoe into the water, there was a slight breeze, but the air was so warm they only needed sweaters under their life vests. The last of the ice had been gone from the bay for just over a week.

They stayed close to shore. It was almost a year to the day since they’d set off for the Thelon River, and they hadn’t been on the water since Ralph died. As they paddled, they passed Willow Flats on their right, Jolliffe Island on their left. They passed School Draw, and the shoreline turned wilder. Soon they made out the tower of Con Mine and more islands. Gwen assumed she would never see these things again and she wanted to say goodbye, to sign off, as it were.

After a while, they stopped and drifted. Eleanor in the stern, Gwen in the bow. The air had become perfectly still.

“I’ve been thinking you should have my fur coat,” Gwen said. Everything else she’d packed or sold or given away, including the car and trailer she’d driven to Yellowknife two years ago. “Would you take it and wear it?”

“You’ll need it in Ottawa,” Eleanor said. “It’s yours.”

“It’s not really mine at all. I’ve never thought of it as mine.”

“It is yours. Harry gave it to you.”

Gwen turned to look directly at her and saw that she was serious. “Why?” she asked. “Why did he do such a thing?” In her mind, besides the surprise, were the arresting words
from a secret admirer
.

“He said it wasn’t being used and you needed a warm coat. It used to be his grandmother’s, that’s what he said.” Eleanor smiled. “He wanted you to have a warm coat.”