Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [80]
“That’s enough for tonight,” says my mother.
“I think he’s asleep,” I say.
“He never used to go to sleep,” says my mother. “Not with this story. Usually he’s busy making up his list.”
“His list?”
“His list of what he would take.”
While my father sleeps, I skip ahead in the story. The three men have finally made it inland from the bleak northeastern shore of Labrador, and have left their last jumping-off place, and are voyaging in earnest. It’s the middle of July, but the short summer will soon be over, and they have five hundred miles to go.
Their task is to navigate Grand Lake, which is long and thin; at its extreme end, or so they’ve been told, the Nascaupee flows into it. The only map they’ve seen, crudely drawn by an earlier white traveller some fifty years before, shows Grand Lake with only one river emptying into it. One is all the Indians have ever mentioned: the one that goes somewhere. Why talk about the others, because why would anyone want to know about them? There are many plants that have no names because they cannot be eaten or used.
But in fact there are four other rivers.
During this first morning they are exhilarated, or so Wallace records. Their hopes are high, adventure calls. The sky is deep blue, the air is crisp, the sun is bright, the treetops seem to beckon them on. They do not know enough to beware of beckoning treetops. For lunch they have flapjacks and syrup, and are filled with a sense of well-being. They know they’re going into danger, but they also know they are immortal. Such moods do occur, in the north. They take pictures with their camera: of their canoe, of their packsacks, of one another: moustached, be-sweatered, with puttee-shaped wrappings on their legs and things on their heads that look like bowler hats, leaning blithely on their paddles. Heartbreaking, but only when you know the end. As it is they’re having the time of their lives.
There’s another photo of my father, perhaps from the same trip as the one with the portage; or he’s wearing the same bandana. This time he’s grinning into the camera lens, pretending to shave himself with his axe. Two tall-tale points are being made: that his axe is as sharp as a razor, and that his bristles are so tough that only an axe could cut them. It’s highjinks, a canoe-trip joke. Although secretly of course he once believed both of these things.
On the second day the three men pass the mouth of the Nascaupee, which is hidden behind an island and looks like shoreline. They don’t even suspect it is there. They continue on to the end of the lake, and enter the river they find there. They’ve taken the wrong turn.
I don’t get back to Labrador for more than a week. When I return, it’s a Sunday night. The fire is blazing away and my father is sitting in front of it, waiting to see what will happen next. My mother is rustling up the baking-powder biscuits and the decaffeinated tea. I forage for cookies.
“How is everything?” I say.
“Fine,” she says. “But he doesn’t get enough exercise.” Everything means my father, as far as she is concerned.
“You should make him go for a walk,” I say.
“Make him,” she says.
“Well, suggest.”
“He doesn’t see the point of walking just to walk,” she says. “If you’re not going anywhere.”
“You could send him on errands,” I say. To this she does not bother even to reply.
“He says his feet hurt,” she says. I think of the array of almost-new boots and shoes in the closet; boots and shoes that have proliferated lately. He keeps buying other ones. If only he can find the right pair, he must think, whatever it is that’s causing his feet to hurt will go away.
I carry in the teacups, dole out the plates. “So, how are Hubbard and Wallace coming along?” I say. “Have you got to the place where they eat the owl?”
“Slim pickings,” he says. “They took the wrong river. Even if they’d found the right one, it was too late to start.”
Hubbard and Wallace and George toil upstream. The heat at midday is oppressive. Flies torment them, little flies like pinpricks,