He got to his feet with a groan.
The girl stared at him. What. You too? Are you kidding?
I'm not going back there, he said.
But to his surprise he stepped out into the square anyways. He stepped out and then he was swaying unsteadily and the ruined buildings were swaying too and all at once someone was shouting and the shouting seemed to be coming from under his feet.
He looked out. The sky pitched to one side. And then he understood.
It was another one. A second tremor, swimming up from under.
In the rubble across the square the diggers stood suddenly with their tools held wide for balance, the metal winking in the sunlight. Their raw hands outstretched red in the dust. The girl at the curb was crying, Oh god god it's another one, and then the old man was shouting foolishly, No it isn't, it isn't, and then the salvagers across the street were running, shovel and pick and pail and axe all pitched aside as they fled skidding downward, some leaping from block to block and others with arms flailing and others yet sliding on hands and haunches and hard boot soles down. And then just as suddenly the low thunder had rolled on outward under the ground to the east and was gone.
The square in its sudden stillness righting itself. The trees shirring greenly over them.
The old man stood breathless. He lifted his head, he opened his eyes. In the sunlight he listened to a quiet rasping around him, like rusted scissors hasping through cardboard, like insects chewing through grass.
The boy held tightly to his mother's wrist. He could no longer feel his right arm and pebbles of glass crunched as he shifted, turned a small shoulder.
Mom? he whispered. Mom who are you talking to?
He kicked a dislodged pipe and it rolled clanking at his feet. Now his mother coughed into her arm, her body very still. As if having talked herself out, as if awaiting some word. The blood flooded back and he shook his right hand out and pumped it open and closed. He dragged the towel to his chest and twisted his face to one side. His hand went dead again almost at once.
Are you hungry? his mother murmured. Her voice dry, strained.
He wriggled closer.
Stop it, she muttered. Sit still, it's starting. You don't want to miss it, do you?
He parted her fingers, the web of skin between each. Mom? he said.
She did not seem to hear. If you're hungry you can get a popcorn. Use the five dollars I gave you. But no butter, mister. Kapeesh?
He lay in the dark beside her their hands touching and she gabbled on under her breath.
Mom, he said and now he was crying. Don't be sick Mom. Please.
If you're interested in the light, you study the shadows. My grandfather
used to say when he was hearing a case, he'd watch the people sitting in
the row just behind the defence. When someone was talking, he'd watch
their eyes. When they were staring him down, he'd watch their mouths.
He told me that what you want to be seeing is never what you end up
looking at.
I don't know if the same kind of lessons still get passed on. Seeing how
things are these days, I'd guess not. But maybe we're not so different
from how we were. I don't know. My grandfather took me out to see the
whale when I was five years old. It's just about my earliest memory of
him now. It was winter, near the gravel pits in Colwood. You could stare
across the water and see the low roofline of the city. I remember the carcass
was huge, though when I think about it now I suppose it probably
wasn't more than a young calf. Caught inshore during a storm, beached
up. It happens now and then. There were lots of people standing around,
huddled in the chill, like they were waiting for something to begin. It
was my first encounter with the ineffable. My grandfather poked a stick
at the hide, then gave it to me to try. It was like pushing into waterlogged
wood. And the grey sand sticking to its flanks, the swarm of sand-flies.
I was looking for its eyeball but the head just seemed featureless,
except for a slash of baleen half-buried in the sand. I don't know what I
felt. I guess it was astonishment. This creature whose element was darkness
and cold. I asked about its parents and my grandfather gestured out
at the flat grey waters. They're out there, he said, they're watching.
I could see a bed of kelp drifting in the dark current. I shivered.
I peered a long time but I never did see anything. I wonder now if that
was his point.
Callie always thought he sounded like a hard man. He wasn't.
Certainly no harder than the world. My parents were killed in a streetcar
accident in Vancouver shortly after I turned four. That was in
1936
.
My father had white hair, even as a young man. That's what I remember
of him. My mother smelled of raspberries. Well. I don't know. My
grandfather was the only parent I ever knew and he never once made
me feel unloved.
I was ten years old when I found the bodies in East Sooke. This would
be in the spring of
1943
. I remember how the light in the cedars along the
roadway fell on my cousin. He was riding on the handlebars because
we had only the one bicycle. I remember the crunch of the tires in the
gravel. A smell of dust and rain in the air. We found the three bodies
in a small depression behind a log. Their wet clothes were in strips and
sunken with mud and their bones had been pulled apart as if something
had been into them. I'm sure something had. My cousin poked a stick
through an eye socket, lifted one of the skulls. It turned out they were
Japs who'd feared the rounding up of the internment camps, fled to
the woods. Poisoned themselves. The newspapers called it cowardly,
called them spies. I was proud of what I'd found and wanted my picture
in the paper. My grandfather belted me for that. It was the only time he
ever did.
I don't know why that comes to me now. Callie used to say a person
never speaks except to conceal what he means. She was probably right.
Talking about a thing never helped. I've been muttering to myself fifty
years now at least and it's never helped me.
The first cadaver was exhumed in the hour before noon. Dragged smokily up out of the splintered bricks and dust feet-first and stinking, a blonde woman her lungs crushed, her soft limbs swollen. A yellow dirt was stuck in a film to her eyes and to her flaxen hair and her torn jaw slapped loosely as she came up. Her throat was opened and had dried to a black pudding.
The old man regarded her squinting as if to see her very clearly and not forget her and then he turned away. Someone had salvaged bedsheets and as the body was drawn out from its hole a white shroud billowed and draped across its features. A brown stain was seeping into the sheets. The figures bearing that soft thing in their gloved fingers moved stiffly along that weird sunlit cliff and then a sudden quiet fell, the dark onlookers clasping their shovels and buckets. The old man wiped angrily at his mouth with his shirt cuff, his plastic shovel blade clicking in the rubble. The air was cold. He felt ferociously, luminously, tired.
He thought:
Arthur Lear you could have died in this and you
would not have minded it.
His eyes were sore and he rubbed at them. Then he straightened, a lean grizzled figure with his shirtsleeves rolled and his wiry forearms bloodied.
The sun was burning a high white cylinder through the dust. Something had been going out in him more and more often now, and he'd find himself stooped, unmoving, like a clock that had wound down. And then his elbows would bend, his head would lift, he'd begin again.
There were not many of them. Some he saw for a time and then did not see. They worked carving out tunnels by pick and blade deep into the ruins and as they laboured others shored up the narrow openings with salvaged timbers and pumps rummaged from a hardware store two miles distant. The sun was savage in its whiteness. Buckets of dirt and broken masonry were lugged by hand out of the buildings. Some few were willing to crawl in to listen for voices or stirrings of any human kind. But only a few. Two men had already been crushed by collapsed tunnels.
The old man was one such willing. Squeezing in to peer about in the dusty blackness with a wet rag tied to his mouth and the lamp on his helmet shining whitely. He had found only bodies so far. It took some time to dig free the dead and what emerged was greeted always with silence. Several hours after the first corpse a severed leg was unearthed and he watched a woman carry it streetwards. She bore it wound in a sheet which hung and trailed underfoot, the thing in her arms like a swaddled child.
Out of that conflagration none objected to his going in. There seemed no order and the salvagers did what work they chose. He did not know what drew him below. It was not goodness, he understood. A kind of exhaustion, a kind of fear, rivering under his skin, leaving him scoured and trembling and numb. He thought at first none objected because they did not want to go in themselves. Then he thought perhaps they did not realize his age. Somehow he had been mistaken for a doctor and what he had supposed was trepidation was in truth a kind of deference. But then he understood it did not matter. To be willing was enough.
The hours passed. Under a bathroom door frame, the bodies of two emaciated women were found. Kneeling in each other's arms, heads bowed in the manner of the penitent or the condemned and their mouths plugged, their eyes sealed fast with plaster.
Seeing them the old man began to shake. He sat on a broken slab and stared out at the city around him and the fires burning there and he shook. He did not know why these bodies over any others should affect him.
He shut his eyes, he opened his eyes, he ran a sleeve across his face. It was still afternoon when he stood. He passed lumped and beggared diggers in their dusty clothes and one raised her seamy hand and he nodded and the light off the wimpled steel in the ruins dappled across her face and flared in her turning shovel like sunlight on the bed of a shallow stream. He looked at her and he wondered what she would look like dead.
He turned away. Stumbled painfully down the far slope. There was something wrong in his stomach and he looked to be sure that he was alone and then ducked under a pinioned block of concrete, fumbled with his belt, hauled down his trousers. Still shaking. He squatted and voided himself painfully into the rubble. The air was cool and the sharp bricks pressing into his thighs felt cool and he could hear the faint murmur of voices on the other side, the distant scrape and clatter of masonry. And slowly, as if emerging out of a mist, he could hear something else, a thrum under all of that. He leaned forward. The sound disentangled and wavered and sharpened.
It was a child's voice. Singing in the earth.
It was there and then it was not there. The old man listened, very still. Then crawled with his face low to the crushed bricks and dust. He did not hear the child again and he thought he must be imagining things. Fussing with trousers still unbuckled and one long ropy arm holding him upright. And then he heard it again, unmistakably. A boy, singing.
He began to shout. Shouted down into the earth. Hello! Son! Are you in there, where are you? Son!
Crawling and shouting like a madman.
Then he got to his feet and staggered grimly back up the incline and called to a man dragging free a television. The man clambered across.
I've got one, he said, breathing hard. It's a boy. He's alive.
He led the digger down to the outcropping, waved him to his knees. The digger looked at the mess from the old man's bowels in its murky puddle and he glanced away ashamed but the digger just kicked a broken sink over top of it and then kneeled. They listened.
I don't hear anything, the digger said at last. You mean that?
Not that. Listen.
You sure he was here?
Just listen.
And then, very faint, the boy's voice reached them. Garbled and strange, like an aria from some other world.
Jesus, the digger said. Jesus he's in there deep. How're we going to get to him that deep?
I can't tell if he is. Voices carry strangely down there.
Well he's sure as hell not close.
You can't tell.
No. He sounds pretty deep in though.
The old man was peering back up at the crest of the rubble. He got achingly to his feet, one knee at a time. Where do we go in? he asked.
Listen, the digger was shouting, hey, kid. We're going to get you out. Just hang on.
He can't hear you.
The digger shrugged. Pike will know where to dig, he said.
Pike?
Pike. The engineer. Hey, you alright?
He was not alright. His throat was hawsing and rattling and his breath was coming thin and flecked with spittle and he leaned over and shook his head. I'm fine, he said.
The digger was watching him. I know who you are, he said quietly. I saw you pull out that dead woman.
The old man squeezed his eyes shut, said nothing.
Why don't you take a rest. They're giving out sandwiches in the street and we won't be ready here for a while. Take a minute. I got to get this started. Poor damn kid.
He cleared his throat and spat. I'm alright.
The digger pressed a dusty hand to his shoulder and a quiet sift of dirt dislodged and trickled from out of the seams there. We'll need you soon enough. Go on.
You'll be alright?
We'll be alright.
Come get me when you're ready.
The digger was already moving away. Get a sandwich, he called.
The old man nodded. He felt so tired. The shadows were lengthening and he could make out in the grey street below the slinking shapes of dogs or what he took for dogs at the edges of the sunlit buildings, their orange tongues slack, spines bristling. He understood that very little of what he had outlived mattered. He could see the swaddled corpses laid out in the street below and the mourners like spectres themselves wending past seeking their dead and he thought numbly that they should not be in the sun. The afternoon sky beyond hung like a drapery of flesh flensed and shuddering. The old man saw all this and realized that whatever his life might have been before, it would not be allowed to be again.