In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [4]
In the house Hazen Lewis lights the naphtha lamp and builds a fire. The boy shivers during dinner and the father tells the boy he can sleep with him. In bed later on, they do not acknowledge each other apart from sharing the warmth under the blanket. His father lies so still Patrick doesn’t know if he is asleep or awake. The boy looks towards the kitchen and its dying fire.
He imagines himself through the winter until he is a white midsummer shadow beside his father. In summer his father drips gasoline onto the caterpillar tents and sets them on fire. Flof. The grey cobweb skins collapse into flame. Caterpillars drop onto grass, the acrid burn smell is in the roof of the boy’s mouth. Two of them meticulously search a field in the evening light. Patrick points to a nest his father has missed and they walk deeper into the pasture.
He is almost asleep. In the darkness another flame ignites then withers into nothing.
* * *
In the drive-shed Hazen Lewis outlined the boy’s body onto the plank walls with green chalk. Then he tacked wires back and forth across the outline as if realigning the veins in his son’s frame. Muscles of cordite and the spine a tributary of the black powder fuse. This is how the boy remembers his father, studying the outline which the boy has just stepped away from as the lit fuse smoulders up and blows out a section of plank where the head had been.
Hazen Lewis was an abashed man, withdrawn from the world around him, uninterested in the habits of civilization outside his own focus. He would step up to his horse and assume it, as if it were a train, as if flesh and blood did not exist.
In winter months Patrick carried meals into the acreage north of the creek where his father, solitary, cut timber all day, minute in those white halls. And then when Patrick was fifteen, his father made the one leap of his life. At some moment, chopping into hemlock, hearing only the axe and its pivoting echo, he must have imagined the trees and permafrost and maple syrup ovens erupting up in one heave, the snow shaken off every branch in the woods around him. He stopped in mid-afternoon, walked home, unlaced his bear paws, and put away the axe forever. He wrote away for books, travelled into Kingston for materials. The explosion he saw in the woods had been an idea as he tugged his axe out of the hemlock. He bought dynamite and blasting caps and fuses, drew diagrams on the walls of the drive-shed, then carried the explosives into the woods. He laid the charges against rock and ice and trees. The detonator cap spat a flame into the cartridge and his eyes watched the snow collapse out of branches from the shudder in the air. Whatever was dislodged became a graph showing him the radius of the tremor.
Before the spring breakup Hazen Lewis rode down to the Rathbun Timber Company headquarters. He demonstrated his talent, moving a log into precisely the location he said it would go, exploding a half-ton of shale, and was hired along with the river drivers. He had secured a role for himself in the industry that took place along the Depot Lakes and the Napanee River. When the company closed down some years later he moved over and worked as a dynamiter in the feldspar mine excavations around Verona and Godfrey, hired by the Richardson Mines. In all his life the longest speech was the one made to the Rathbun staff when he told them what he could do and that as far as he was concerned there were only two sensible jobs in logging – being a dynamiter and being a cook.
Along the chain of Depot Lakes – from First Depot to Fifth Depot – the loggers arrived in winter and disappeared into shanty camps, walking twenty miles into land they did not know. All February and March at the centre of the lakes the pyramids of logs grew, hauled there by sleds. Before