Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [92]
The man in the boat is my father. He’s been chopping wood, and after that – having bailed out the boat, which has a slow leak – he’s had a short, sharp wrestle with the motor, which is started by pulling on a greasy piece of rope. He has a two-day beard; tree sap and oil darken his broad hands and splotch his clothing. He cuts the motor, leaps onto the dock, hitches up the boat in one motion, then strides toward the Indian, grimy hand outstretched.
The Indian man stands paralyzed: it’s a crisis of manners. Surely he cannot be expected to shake the hand of this manual labourer, who is now welcoming him, and heaving his valise into the filthy boat, and manhandling his tennis racquet, and inviting him to dinner, and promising him a fish. A fish? What does he mean by a fish? Now my father is saying he’s sure the boys will make him comfortable in their tent – a tent? What sort of tent? Who are these boys? What is happening?
I sometimes think about that Indian man and his northern ordeal. He must have gone back to India. Surely he would have high-tailed it for home as soon as he could get decently free. He would have had a story or two to tell, about the blackflies and the log-cabin Lab, and the two young barbarians with their bare feet sticking out of their tent.
I give the parts of the barbarians to Cam and Ray because I want them to have more of a story – more of a story than I know, and more than they probably had. I give them the task of jollying along the deracinated but educated Indian, slapping him on the back perhaps, telling him it will be okay, it will be fine. They’ll take him fishing, give him some fly dope, tell him a few bear stories. Maybe they’ll fix up a sleeping place for him inside the Lab itself, so he won’t be so jittery: the first sound of a loon at night can be a shock. They’ll show him their pipes; then they’ll show him their bicycles as well, making a point of their own foolishness in having brought such next-to-useless vehicles into the forest so he himself won’t feel like an idiot about the tennis racquet.
All of that will give them something to do. I want them to step forward, out of the ranks of the extras. I want them to have speaking parts. I want them to shine.
There they are now, set in motion. The two of them are bounding downhill to the dock at the Lab; they greet the Indian man, they take his hand and help him out of the boat. The sun is low, the clouds in the west are orangey pink: tomorrow will be a fine day, though possibly – says my father, heaving the leather valise out of the boat, then clambering onto the dock and squinting at the sky – there will be some wind.
Cam picks up the valise; Ray is lighting his pipe. Someone has made a joke. What about? I can’t hear. Now all three of them – Cam, and Ray, and the elegant Indian – are walking along the dock. My father follows behind, carrying – for some reason – a red metal gas can. The red stands out brilliantly against the dark green of the forest.
The Indian man looks back over his shoulder: he alone can sense me watching. But he doesn’t know it’s me: because he’s nervous, because he’s in a strange place, he thinks it’s the forest, or the lake itself. Then they all climb the hill, up toward the Lab, and vanish among the trees.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to all who helped with this book, including early readers of some of the stories, Jess Atwood Gibson and Graeme Gibson; to my agents, Phoebe Larmore, Vivienne Schuster, and Diana MacKay; to my editors, Nan Talese of Doubleday U.S.A., Liz Calder of Bloomsbury U.K., and Ellen Seligman of McClelland & Stewart, Canada; to Heather Sangster, tireless copy editor; to Lucia Cino and Laura Stenberg of O.W. Toad; to Penny Kavanaugh; to Sarah Cooper and Michael Bradley; to Coleen Quinn, to John Notarianni and Scott Silke, to Gene Goldberg, and to Joel Rubinovich and Sheldon Shoib; to Alice Lima; and, again, to Eileen Allen and Melinda Dabaay.
I would also like to thank Ruth, Harold, and Lenore; Matthew and Graeme the Younger; Max, Bonnie, and