The Man Game (3 page)

A woman named Molly Erwagen. She arrived in Vancouver on June 13, 1886. Travelling in a donkey-drawn carriage underneath a deerhide cabriolet and huddled up together beside a hay-spiked Hudson's Bay wool blanket. She lay half-asleep next to her husband. She thought she heard pellets of rain. It was so hot and dry today, though. It was in fact ash flicking against the deerhide above them. She and her husband Samuel Erwagen rode towards Vancouver towed by an Indian and his donkey down the New Westminster road. Their heads toggled back and forth as the wagon staggered over rutted and dried mud. They lay together, husband and wife, Samuel wanting nothing more than to sleep, a virtually impossible task.

The air smelled of salmon. The wind that day gusted over a hundred miles per hour. As they approached Vancouver the gargantuan trees on either side of the road made an uncommon sound as they twisted in the gales. Sammy and Molly and the Indian were shielded from the wind's full force by the enormity
of this forest of spruces, firs, cypresses, innumerable blues and greens, a massively dense coastal forest tolerating immense winds, creaking and cracking for tortuous stretches, groaning, bellyaching as wind passed through their uppermost canopy.

She faced him so that her lips were right beside his cheek. He lay there on his back, immobilized, feeling her breathe.

The fire was many miles away but even so ash dropped on occasion to the forest floor nearby. The vibration of the wagon wheels over the road was like a riddle, and Sammy let it rattle around in his head. He tried to ignore all the bumps and stalls. This was a logging road (they all were at the time) and meant hell on the radials. Luckily the Indian carried a fifth cedar wheel on the back; they'd probably have to use it.

The two had been travelling for so long and were exhausted beyond belief. Molly made clucking sounds. Something she did when she was near a dream. It would wake Sammy, this palatal clucking—it often did—but he wouldn't do anything about it. Little brief oneiric utterances, he called them.

How are you? she asked in a yawn. She petted his face and kindly wiped the sleep from the corners of his eyes. Are you doing okay, are you hurting, in pain?

He awoke. I'm wonderful, he said with a dry smile.

Oh shush, you liar. She laid her head on his lap. Damn you, she said, and he looked up at the tarp and he didn't raise a hand to her head to run his fingers through her hair.

You'd never leave me would you? he asked. He'd asked her the same thing before, probably too many times; one of these times she was going to give the wrong answer.

I'll never leave you, she said and flipped her head over on his unfeeling lap to look him in the eyes. You sweet fool, she said.

New friend, may I ask what's your name? Molly called out to the Indian astride the feeble ass. This sorry pair was supposed to take them on a three-hour trip due north, though Sammy doubted greatly the mule's strength to live out the next four steps.

Toronto, was the Indian's answer.

How peculiar, Sammy said, that's our old home.

Whitemans name me Toronto.

What an awful tag, thought Sammy.

No good in Vancouver come from Toronto, so say Salish peoples, said Toronto.

I see, said Sammy unhappily. His wife sopped his sweaty hair with a kerchief.

They stood about three feet apart, taking and blocking with only the hands' heels, palms flat and the heel of each hand used to bat and thwart. Ken kept advancing. Silas was constantly on the back up. Their elbows swung out and down, over and in. Silas had to manoeuvre such that he didn't get trapped into a corner.

Rook Takes Pawn
{see
fig. 1.2
}
, a spectator shouted out, and I assumed correctly that it was the name of a move. The cry sparked a moment of applause. The force of their attacks, so stern and unsympathetic, was too quick to fake. Ken, with the stronger arms, connected, and Silas's head whiplashed back. Was it a point for Ken? Was it even a game of points? I couldn't tell. The audience went silent. Someone was going to get tripped or hit on the head or both at once. The players were mustardy smelling in sweat. The furious beat and rhythm of their hands had them in a lather.

FIGURE 1.2
Rook Takes Pawn

Calabi's commentary: A great dance of angled slaps, pivots, slaps, twists, and slaps, and no matter how violent the attacks, the players remain in step to a common rhythm.

Sun glowered off their bodies.

In the background I noticed for the first time something not unlike music, sound but without true music in it. A rev. A revving noise going on underneath the sounds of the guys' palms and wrists colliding in swift, jabbing thrusts, parries, and psychs. Now and then Ken's left palm would connect: swivel up and clap.

What Sammy Erwagen needed was a safe home and an end to this miserable journey.

Should we have stayed where we were? he said to his wife. Have I made a grave mistake bringing you out west? Look at me. I'm a wretch, a burden, a cripple.

Shh, said Molly. Don't worry, it'll be so wonderful once we're settled.

Their Indian guide Toronto made a sound, an atonal sound, a mutter under his breath while the donkey clopped unsteadily and made his own defeated noises, sad snorfling equine noises. And the air made its own moan through the forest in such a chorus—a tenor for every tree.

To no one in particular Toronto said: Pretty loud for wind.

Douglas firs towered on all sides, some of them seventy feet around at the base, their enormous roots knuckling out of the topsoil, gripped to the earth, their trunks extending into the white vapour of space, swaying in the breeze. The trees cracked and wheezed without end, tossing back and forth at their peaks while down below the air merely fanned by to keep the heat from feeling unbearable.

Curly bits of char floated through the heat, carrying a few embers towards them, not enough to startle Molly and Sammy, but enough to make them curious. At first they thought it was rain—it
sounded
like rain—until one peck landed on their cover and didn't seem moist. It didn't dissolve. What it did was singe straight through the deerskin and land on Sammy's hand.

He didn't notice
where
it fell, but Molly leaned over. She too had seen it fall, and bent forward to identify. There it was on his hand, this little red ember making a welt in his palm. He felt nothing, no sensation of it cooking there. Before she had a chance to flick it off, the welt in his hand engorged and blistered open and finally she said: Oh, dear, your hand, something ash burned it. He saw the leaking furuncle pooled with blood and the modest rag of coal there to the side where she'd knocked it away, cooling to a delicate white. Sammy suggested she find something to staunch the blood. She proceeded to remove finger by finger one of her kid gloves.

That's a perfectly good glove, said Sammy.

That's a perfectly good hand, said she.

No, said Sammy, unable to conceal the despair in his voice, no, it's not.

Please shush up, said she. Then another piece of hot cinder burned a cigar cherry hole in the hide and landed on her dress and ignited a middling fire there on the frilly edge. She swatted it out with an envelope found next to her. What's this? Molly said. Another two or three pellets bounced off the tarp and left behind smoke.

You worried? he asked.

Yes, but only for you.

That didn't make him feel better. The wagon stopped. They heard Toronto drop from the donkey's back and crunch his way down the path to meet them.

There's a fire, he said.

Where?

Up ahead.

Where up ahead?

Everywhere up ahead.

I'll be nary a moment, she told Sammy and hopped out of the wagon.

I'm worried, he said.

Okay, just give me a moment, she said. He waited there flat on his back while she looked at the fire. She came back and confirmed there was a tremendous fire ahead of them. She hopped back into the wagon after she saw his pant leg asmoke and a bitty flame there.

Hold on, she said and smacked his thigh. There. She pushed a cooled ash off a singed hole in his slacks. You'll be fine, she said and kissed the little bit of newly exposed skin. He didn't feel it but he saw her do it. She smiled at him. Despite all the danger she seemed oddly pleased, flushed and glistening from the heat. Maybe for her the adventure had begun. For him the adventure was over before it even had time to start. Sammy, she said, it's not good out there.

What then? he said.

How strange he thought it was to see how much she glowed against the fire behind her, flickering in the black milk of her eyes. It seemed as though this scorched terror was a wondrous thing to her and, Sammy felt, that it touched some deep nostalgia within her, a sentiment she found disagreeable normally. He knew she'd seen many tragedies and dangers in her short lifetime. Her childhood had been spent in music halls, following her parents as they performed in Yiddish and in vaudeville, her extended family a motley rotation of nomads, midgets, clowns, and acrobats. Her mother and father, who sang, danced, told jokes, played tragedies, barked at carnivals and who could tell wild tales and do magic tricks. Her parents would perform on the shiny bartop at a saloon if it meant getting out from between the middle of two desperate situations. Admittedly, there were things about her he would never fully know. To know Molly was as much a calling
to a certain kind of man as reaching the horizon of the earth is to the wanderer, and was why Sammy felt so light-headed about her. Her life before they married was a thousand novels and his was brutally uneventful doggerel.

The younger of two brothers, Sammy was from a long line of accountants and managers. His father was a respected bookkeeper living out his final days in Toronto with his ailing wife Esme, Sammy's mother, who was sick from having too much substance, who'd treated Sammy like an infant his entire life, and who'd been deeply perplexed and distraught when he announced he planned to marry Molly. A loony decision, she said. To Mother Esme, this girl was no better than a gypsy beggar, and she treated the union as if her son, in a delirium, had wedded a passing cloud. Sammy's older brother, Dunbar, did not even attend his wedding, out of devotion to his sturdily dying mother, and also because he'd already moved to Wyoming where he ruled over a community of other anti-social farmers. Dunbar spent his nights writing angry letters home still demanding things of his younger brother even after all these years. Sammy did his best to ignore the letters, and began a lifelong tradition of burning all correspondence immediately after reading.

Now married and far from Toronto, Sammy considered himself free of his family once and for all. He had decided long before his accident in the train tunnel that caused his paralysis that he would cut off all ties with his family as soon as he arrived in Vancouver. Ever since the accident his resolve had wavered but, no, he was still sure he wouldn't speak to them again no matter what happened next. He was free, he must remember that. He was no longer the prisoner in a family of tyrants. He knew he was afraid, but could she tell, did she know how much and in how many ways he needed her? This was the woman he loved, seventeen years old, yet for one instant she looked all of nine and the next she could've been his mother.