“Oh, just contemplating my next move, I suppose,” he always replies, or words to that effect. He has a sense of waiting for something. But what?
6
On a sunny morning in September, he’s out for a walk when he comes upon two indigenous women laughing on the beach. Sisters? Good friends? They speak in a rapid language unlike anything he’s ever heard, a language punctuated by sounds he can’t imagine being able to replicate, let alone render in the Roman alphabet. Their hair is long and dark, and when one of them turns her head, light glances off a pair of enormous shell earrings. The women are wrapped in blankets against a cold wind.
They fall silent and watch him as he approaches.
“Good morning,” he says, and touches the brim of his hat.
“Good morning,” one replies. Her accent has a beautiful lilt. Her earrings hold all the colors of the dawn sky. Her companion, whose face bears a scattering of smallpox scars, just looks at him and says nothing. This isn’t out of keeping with Edwin’s experience of Canada—if anything, he reflects, it would come as the shock of his life if after half a year in the New World he were to find himself suddenly able to charm the locals—but the flat uninterest of the women’s gaze is unnerving. This is a moment, he realizes, when he could express his views on colonization to people on the other side of the equation, so to speak, but he can’t think of anything to say that doesn’t sound absurd under the circumstances—if he tells them he believes colonization to be abhorrent, surely the logical next question will be Then what are you doing here?—so he says nothing further, and then they’re behind him and the moment has passed.
He keeps walking, and then at some distance, still feeling their eyes on his back and wishing to convey an impression of having some sort of important errand to attend to, he turns toward the wall of trees. He never goes into the forest, because he’s afraid of bears and cougars, but now it holds a strange appeal. He’ll step in a hundred paces, he decides, no more. Counting off a hundred paces might calm him—counting has always calmed him—and if he walks straight for the full hundred then surely he can’t get lost. Getting lost is death, he can see that. No, this whole place is death. No, that’s unfair—this place isn’t death, this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn’t care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn’t even noticed him. He feels somewhat deranged.
7
The gates of the forest. The phrase comes immediately to mind, but Edwin’s not sure where he picked it up. It sounds like something from a book he might have read as a boy. The trees here are old, and enormous. It’s like stepping into a cathedral, except the underbrush is so thick that he has to fight his way through. He stops a few paces in. He sees a maple tree just ahead, large enough that it’s created its own clearing, and that seems like a pleasant destination—he’ll walk to the maple tree, he decides, he’ll step out of the underbrush and linger a moment, then he’ll go back to the beach immediately and never enter the forest again. This is an adventure, he tells himself, but it doesn’t feel like an adventure. Mostly it feels like being slapped in the face with salal branches.
He fights his way through to the maple. It’s quiet here, and he has a sudden certainty that he’s being watched. He turns, and there—as incongruous as an apparition—is a priest, standing no more than a dozen yards away. He’s older than Edwin, perhaps in his early thirties, and has very short black hair.
“Good morning,” Edwin says.
“Good morning,” the priest says, “and forgive me, I didn’t mean to startle you. I like to walk here on occasion.” There’s something about his accent that eludes Edwin—it’s not quite British, but not quite anything else. He wonders if the man’s from Newfoundland, like his landlady back in Halifax.
“It does seem a peaceful destination,” Edwin says.
“Quite so. I won’t intrude on your contemplation, I was just on my way back to the church. Perhaps you’ll stop in later.”
“The church at Caiette? But you’re not the usual priest,” Edwin says.
“I’m Roberts. Filling in for Father Pike.”
“Edwin St. Andrew. Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise. Good day.”
The priest seems no more practiced at walking through underbrush than Edwin. He crashes away between the trees, and within minutes Edwin is alone again, gazing up at the branches. He steps forward—