James and Pruina by Mitchell Toews

James put another piece of birch on the fire, the stove hinges creaking with hot dryness as he closed and latched the door. The papery bark crackled immediately to life, curling black and sending smoke and flame up the stovepipe. On days this cold, the single-paned glass in the old cottage windows looked triple thick owing to the rime coating the inner surfaces. He reached out to touch the slick, silvery skein, feeling his fingertips numbing and a rivulet of meltwater running down and then along the underside of his hand. The bottom panes were frost jacketed, those higher less so, the hot, rising air from the stove keeping them clear.

Outside, he could see the slow-motion drift of ice fog. A squirrel chewed busily on seeds in the birdfeeder, spewing wet shell splinters, each accompanied by a tiny wisp of vapour. It paused, motionless with ears perked, then darted along the deck railing, leaping at the end to land on a powdery spruce bough.

“Picea glauca, the white spruce, a hardy species native to the northern temperate and boreal forests,” James said in a flat Canadian Broadcasting Corporation tone. His cat looked away as if to say, “Big deal.”

At noon, he stabbed a fork at two wieners in the frypan, their intestine skins rupturing as they fretted on the cast iron. They sizzled and spat in reprisal for his casual cruelty before he smothered them in mustard and diced onions, chewed, and swallowed.

“Tasty,” he said. The grey cat, Pruina, blinked in reply knowing at least one wiener would be left in her dish. She twitched the very last bit of her relaxed tail in feline condescension.

James slept in his chair that afternoon, silently attended by cold sunbeams and floating dust motes. A worn book of poetry rested in his lap, pinned there by one of his faded, tattooed arms. A limb thin as a lead pipe and almost the same colour. The poem he had been reading rested there, along with Pruina, both patiently awaiting his awakening.

Supper was three bottles of Standard Lager, each one with its label ripped vertically and resembling the burst sausage skins at lunch. James’ thumbnail tore at the foil labels out of habit. He smiled at the old teenage tease that said only a virgin could peel a label cleanly from a beer bottle. Boys ripped their labels intentionally as a sign of virility. He still did it out of habit, bits of foil caught beneath his nail.

With supper over and dishes to do, his mind became busy with uninvited thoughts. To his rescue and inevitably, as the winter sky took on its late afternoon hue of grey-green-blue with shadows indistinct and the light failing fast, James focused instead on his nightly walk, coming soon.

He glanced at the book face down in his chair. Picking it up, he pulled on the reading glasses that hung by thin chain around his neck to read aloud.

“I had for my winter evening walk—

No one at all with whom to talk,
But I had the cottages in a row
Up to their shining eyes in snow . . .” 

Inspired, he quickly slung on his jacket—a swirl of plaid—followed by boots, toque, and mitts, leaving the book on the chair arm. He knew the poem by heart and wouldn’t need to bring it.

Pruina mewed, and James looked down at her, soft-eyed. “Too cold for you, Pru. I’ll be back soon.”

Outside in the gloaming, his breath hanging white in the stillness, he recited the first stanza again, as Miss Fontaine had taught in Grade Four for the annual Music & Poetry Festival. “Let them hear you in the back row!” she had coaxed. He spoke the verse, now in his adult voice as his footfalls kept time along the deserted street.

His old leather boots, mismatched but almost identical, were made by a company from Lac-Drolet, Quebec; a blue fleur-de-lis imprinted on their flopping kilties. The right toe had a steel cap that made his foot cold, while the toe of the left one was unprotected soft leather. There was a puckered, stitched-up scar on that boot toe. Witness to a careless moment years ago when an errant axe blade slipped precisely between James’ big toe and its neighbour. No harm, but a lesson learned. From that day on he took his foreman’s advice and paid extra for the steel-toed version, even if he sometimes had cold feet. He wore the old cut boot these days as a reminder and with some strange fondness.

“Have a big breakfast, as much as you can eat,” his boss back then also used to advise. “It keeps you warm, burning up that fuel. And slip plastic bread bags over your socks. You’ll be amazed at how much that helps!” This is what Gus always said on frigid days, a mouthful of sardine sandwich in view as he spoke. 

“It makes my feet sweat too much,” James replied back then. Makes my feet stink too, he’d think. So’s you can’t hardly wash the stench off. Margaret doesn’t like that, and nor do I, was what he always thought, but never said.

And there it was. The dark memory hollowing him out again—Margaret was gone fifteen years this spring. Cancer took her in May.  

Turning at the next street, he reset his quickened pace back down to the cadence of Frost’s verse. He recited it clearly into the night air.

“And I thought I had the folk within:

I had the sound of a violin;
I had a glimpse through curtain laces
Of youthful forms and youthful faces . . .” 

And now his memory circled slowly like a gull high over the water, searching with keening eyes for a fish belly, white. A luckless victim struck by an outboard propeller. James thought of sunlit days on the water, with the lake’s many shining eyes reflecting back his gaze. He thought of his young boys, Luke and Harold, squinty-eyed in the brightness, fishing side by side in the bow. He thought of their so-serious children’s faces, foreheads lined, brown eyes intent on threaded rod tips.

He heard again the shackled racket of a lone pickerel on the stringer, its never-ending belief that with just the right tug, it could once more be free and search again for food, and shelter, and a mate. “Just one more tug,” he thought. “What faith!”

He patted his arms below the shoulder, one side marked for Luke and the tattoo there. The other hand reached for Harold’s likeness, on the other arm. But reach for them as he might, both boys were gone—long gone now—one to a good job way out west, the other forever more. Gone to heaven above, higher still than gliding gulls and motionless clouds.

Harold, the oldest, took his own life. That’s not supposed to happen. But it does and it did. And what now? Time? Time’s passage lessens the hurt, but it’s slow. Slow as spring thaw. Slow as the hours from midnight to dawn.

“Nothing lasts forever,” he said to the stardust and the stillness. “Even loss.”

After Harold was gone, James couldn’t stand his own image—reminding him as it did of his solitude. And, of his look-alike son, Harold. “He’s a dead ringer,” his mother had said once long ago and said it again now in James’ thoughts; an unwanted aural tic, stuck on repeat. So he had taken down all the mirrors in the house. Refused to peer over the side of the boat or into the wash basin. No need. He knew how he looked and didn’t want to be scorned by it; reminded of his dead son.

He sucked cold air in, filling hungry lungs, chest heaving before he recited:

“I had such company outward bound.

I went till there were no cottages found.
I turned and repented, but coming back
I saw no window but that was black . . .” 

James’ days and nights spent themselves in sinking silence after Harold’s passing. He thought of his most recent companion, Pruina, who came along ten years ago, as if on cue, and made it not so lonely. “But,” he thought, “the old cat’s days are numbered, and maybe so are mine.”

“Days numbered,” he repeated in a murmur to the dark street. “Numbered in paws licked clean, and dead mice gifted, and all the times my leg was circled and entwined by Pru’s corkscrew tail. Nice as that was and is—and despite all of my woodland pleasures as well, I still miss the people that meant so much to me. Those who, for whatever reasons, have left me here alone with my cat. Here alone in the land of sticks and cottonwood yellow and cartwheeling stars in the night sky.”

James’ breath hitched when he admitted his loneliness. He settled himself, then recited.

“Over the snow my creaking feet

Disturbed the slumbering village street . . .”

With the good old poem nearly finished now, he trudged on in silence. Ahead, the faint glow of the village’s only streetlight hummed a reedy electric melody to the icebound trees along the creek.  

“Maybe,”James thought, as he listened to his footsteps echo in the night. “Maybe, I should put the mirrors back up.” He stopped short with the force of the idea. “The bathroom, the bedroom and the one by the front door where Margaret used to primp before an evening in town. Has my sentence finally been served? Am I ready to face myself again, literally, now that I no longer resemble the young Harold I always saw in the glass? Am I done with the guilt? Was I broken? If so, have I made myself whole again? Isn’t it the definition of humanity to be broken—but to still endure?”

Leaving the questions there, unanswered, he moved on and turned the last corner before home. He laid his head back and exhaled a downy plume towards Orion; towards another night traveller who walks the good hours each night.

He walks on. Past the frozen creek and its honour guard of upraised branches. “It’s a fact, isn’t it, that every tree that ever lived has died, or will die. All. Why should people be any different?”

He stomped his boots before going inside to the fire and the cat. He looked a last time to the wend of the creek, then let his eyes wander to rest on his reflection in the mullioned glass of the sidelight by the door. Yes, he would put the mirrors up again. Tonight.

“Maybe Pru and I can carry on for a while,” he thought. The two of them and the spruce boughs spiked with bristled frost; the photo albums filled with smiling faces, ever so; the memory of Harold’s eyes, Luke’s distant smile and what his voice might be like on the telephone — all condensed in the cold night air beneath Orion’s steady gaze. He turned the door handle. The pale sweetness of the birch fire reached him as he, at last, finished the poem.

“Like profanation, by your leave,
At ten o’clock of a winter eve.” 

The poem quoted in this story, “Good Hours” was published in “North of Boston” (Henry Holt and Company, 1914) by Robert Frost, and is in the Public Domain.

Mitchell Toews

Image: A golden fishing lure laying on the wet pebbels. From Pixbay.com