The Indians did that, I tell them, pointing to an old tree bent when young into knees and elbows. Which, like most history, may or may not be true.
Real ones? they want to know.
Real, I say.
Were they alive? they ask.
We go forward, clambering up a hill, over boulders, past a fallen log ripped open by a bear in search of grubs. They have more orders: they are to keep their eyes open for mushrooms, and especially for puffballs, which even they like to eat. Around here there is no such thing as just a walk. I feel genetics stealing over me: in a minute I will be turning over stones for them, and in fact I am soon on my hands and knees, grubbing a gigantic toad out from under a fallen cedar so old it is almost earth, burnt orange. We discuss the fact that toads will not give you warts but will pee on you when frightened. The toad does this, proving my reliability. For its own good I put it into my pocket and the expedition moves forward.
At right angles there's a smaller trail, a recent one, marked not by blazes but by snapped branches and pieces of fluorescent pink tape tied to bushes. It leads to a yellow birch blown down by the wind - you can tell by the roots, topsoil and leaf-mould still matted on them - now neatly sawn and stacked, ready for splitting. Another earthwork.
On the way back we circle the burn-heap, the garden, going as quietly as we can. The trick, I whisper, is to see things before they see you. Not for the first time I feel that this place is haunted, by the ghosts of those not yet dead, my own included.
Nothing goes on forever. Sooner or later I will have to renounce my motionlessness, give up those habits of reverie, speculation, and lethargy by which I currently subsist. I will have to come to grips with the real world, which is composed, I know, not of words but of drainpipes, holes in the ground, furiously multiplying weeds, hunks of granite, stacks of more or less heavy matter which must be moved from one point to the other, usually uphill.
How will I handle it? Only time, which does not by any means tell everything, will tell.
This is another evening, later in the year. My parents have returned yet once again from the north. It is fall, the closing-down season. Like the sun my parents have their annual rhythms, which, come to think of it, are not unrelated to that simile. This is the time of the withering of the last bean plants, the faltering of the cabbages, when the final carrot must be prized from the earth, tough and whiskered and forked like a mandrake; when my parents make great altars of rubbish, old cardboard boxes, excess branches lopped from trees, egg cartons, who knows? - and ignite them to salute the fading sun.
But they have done all that and have made a safe journey. Now they have another revelation to make: something portentous, something momentous. Something has happened that does not happen every day.
"I was up on the roof, sweeping off the leaves -" says my mother.
"As she does every fall -" says my father.
It does not alarm me to picture my seventy-three-year-old mother clambering nimbly about on a roof, a roof with a pitch so steep that I myself would go gingerly, toes and fingers suctioned to the asphalt roofing like a tree-frog's, adrenalin hazing the sky, through which I can see myself hurtling earthward after a moment of forgetfulness, a mis-step, one of those countless slips of the mind and therefore of the body about which I ought to have known better. My mother does these things all the time. She has never fallen off. She will never fall.
"Otherwise trees would grow on it," says my mother.
"And guess what she found?" says my father.
I try to guess, but I cannot. What would my mother have found on the roof? Not a pine cone, not a fungus, not a dead bird. It would not be what anyone else would find there.
In fact it turns out to be a dropping. Now I have to guess what kind of dropping.
"Flying squirrel," I hazard lamely.
No, no. Nothing so ordinary.
"It was about this big," says my father, indicating the length and the circumference. It is not an owl then.
"Brown?" I say, stalling for time.
"Black," says my father. They both regard me, heads a little on one side, eyes shining with the glee of playing this ancient game, the game of riddles, scarcely able to contain the right answer.
"And it had hair in it," says my father, as if now light will break upon me, I must surely guess.
But I am at a loss.
"Too big for a marten," says my father, hinting, waiting. Then he lowers his voice a little. "Fisher," he says. "Really?" I say.
"Must be," says my father, and we all pause to savour the rarity of this event. There are not many fishers left, not many of those beautiful arboreal voracious predators, and we have never before found the signs of one in our area. For my father, this dropping is an interesting biological phenomenon. He has noted it and filed it, along with all the other scraps of fascinating data he notes and files.
For my mother however, this is something else. For her this dropping - this hand-long, two-fingers-thick, black, hairy dropping - not to put too fine a point on it, this deposit of animal shit - is a miraculous token, a sign of divine grace; as if their mundane, familiar, much-patched but at times still-leaking roof has been visited and made momentarily radiant by an unknown but by no means minor god.
Acknowledgements
Material in this collection has been previously published as follows:
"Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother" in Queen's Quarterly; "Betty" and "Bluebeard's Egg" in Chatelaine; "Loulou; or, The Domestic Life of the Language" in Saturday Night; "The Sin Eater" on the CBC Radio program Anthology and its printed anthology, Small Wonders; and "Unearthing Suite" in a limited edition by Grand Union Press.
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939, and grew up in northern Quebec and Ontario, and later in Toronto. She has lived in numerous cities in Canada, the U.S., and Europe.
She is the author of more than twenty-five books - novels, short stories, poetry, literary criticism, social history, and books for children.
Atwood's work is acclaimed internationally and has been published around the world. She has won many awards, including the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Book Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, and the Canadian Authors Association Award. Her most recent novel, Alias Grace, won the prestigious Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy. She is the recipient of numerous honours, such as The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in the U.K., the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature in the U.S., Le Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and, most recently, she became the first winner of the London Literary Prize. She has received honorary degrees from universities across Canada, and one from Oxford University in England.
Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson.
Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg
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