her to go. They stood in the open doorway and he told her about skiing in Norway, about the tramcars with ski racks on top of them and the mountains at the edge of town.
She said that she had never been to Norway but she was sure she would like it.
She looked back on this moment as their real beginning. They both seemed uneasy and subdued, not reluctant so much as troubled, even sorry for each other. She asked him later if he had felt anything important at the time, and he said yes — he had realized that she was a person he could live with. She asked him if he couldn’t say wanted to live with, and he said yes, he could say that. He could say it, but he didn’t.
She had many jobs to learn which had to do with the upkeep of this place and also with the art and skill of taxidermy. She would learn, for instance, how to color lips and eyelids and the ends of noses with a clever mixture of oil paint and linseed and turpentine. Other things she had to learn concerned what he would say and wouldn’t say. It seemed that she had to be cured of all her froth and vanity and all her old notions of love.
She learned, she changed. Age was a help to her. Drink also.
And when he got used to her, or felt safe from her, his feelings took a turn for the better. He talked to her readily about what he was interested in and took a kinder comfort from her body.
On the night before the operation they lay side by side on the strange bed, with all available bare skin touching — legs, arms, haunches.
II
LIZA TOLD WARREN that a woman named Bea Doud had phoned from Toronto and asked if they — that is, Warren and Liza — could go out and check on the house in the country, where Bea and her husband lived. They wanted to make sure that the water had been turned off. Bea and Ladner (not actually her husband, said Liza) were in Toronto waiting for Ladner to have an operation. A heart bypass. “Because the pipes might burst,” said Liza. This was on a Sunday night in February during the worst of that winter’s storms.
“You know who they are,” said Liza. “Yes, you do. Remember that couple I introduced you to? One day last fall on the square outside of Radio Shack? He had a scar on his cheek and she had long hair, half black and half gray. I told you he was a taxidermist, and you said, ‘What’s that?’”
Now Warren remembered. An old — but not too old — couple in flannel shirts and baggy pants. His scar and English accent, her weird hair and rush of friendliness. A taxidermist stuffs dead animals. That is, animal skins. Also dead birds and fish.
He had asked Liza, “What happened to the guy’s face?” and she had said, “W.W. Two.”
“I know where the key is — that’s why she called me,” Liza said. “This is up in Stratton Township. Where I used to live.”
“Did they go to your same church or something?” Warren said.
“Bea and
“It was her gave me some money,” Liza continued, as if it was something he ought to know, “to go to college. I never asked her. She just phones up out of the blue and says she wants to. So I think, Okay, she’s got lots.”
WHEN SHE WAS little, Liza had lived in Stratton Township with her father and her brother Kenny, on a farm. Her father wasn’t a farmer. He just rented the house. He worked as a roofer. Her mother was already dead. By the time Liza was ready for high school — Kenny was a year younger and two grades behind her — her father had moved them to Carstairs. He met a woman there who owned a trailer home, and later on he married her. Later still, he moved with her to Chatham. Liza wasn’t sure where they were now — Chatham or Wallaceburg or Sarnia. By the time they moved, Kenny was dead — he had been killed when he was fifteen, in one of the big teenage car crashes that seemed to happen every spring, involving drunk, often unlicensed drivers, temporarily stolen cars, fresh gravel on the country roads, crazy speeds. Liza finished high school and went to college in Guelph for one year. She didn’t like college, didn’t like the people there. By that time she had become a Christian.
That was how Warren met her. His family belonged to the Fellowship of the Saviour Bible Chapel, in Walley. He had been going to the Bible Chapel all his life. Liza started going there after she moved to Walley and got a job in the government liquor store. She still worked there, though she worried about it and sometimes thought that she should quit. She never drank alcohol now, she never even ate sugar. She didn’t want Warren eating a Danish on his break, so she packed him oat muffins that she made at home. She did the laundry every Wednesday night and counted the strokes when she brushed her teeth and got up early in the morning to do knee bends and read Bible verses.
She thought she should quit, but they needed the money. The small-engines shop where Warren used to work had closed down, and he was retraining so that he could sell computers. They had been married a year.
IN THE MORNING, the weather was clear, and they set off on the snowmobile shortly before noon. Monday was Liza’s day off. The plows were working on the highway, but the back roads were still buried in snow. Snowmobiles had been roaring through the town streets since before dawn and had left their tracks across the inland fields and on the frozen river.
Liza told Warren to follow the river track as far as Highway 86, then head northeast across the fields so as to half-circle the swamp. All over the river there were animal tracks in straight lines and loops and circles. The only ones that Warren knew for sure were dog tracks. The river with its three feet of ice and level covering of snow made a wonderful road. The storm had come from the west, as storms usually did in that country, and the trees along the eastern bank were all plastered with snow, clotted with it, their branches spread out like wicker snow baskets. On the western bank, drifts curled like waves stopped, like huge lappings of cream. It was exciting to be out in this, with all the other snowmobiles carving the trails and assaulting the day with such roars and swirls of noise.
The swamp was black from a distance, a long smudge on the northern horizon. But close up, it too was choked with snow. Black trunks against the snow flashed by in a repetition that was faintly sickening. Liza directed Warren with light blows of her hand on his leg to a back road full as a bed, and finally hit him hard to stop him. The change of noise for silence and speed for stillness made it seem as if they had dropped out of streaming clouds into something solid. They were stuck in the solid middle of the winter day.
On one side of the road was a broken-down barn with old gray hay bulging out of it. “Where we used to live,” said Liza. “No, I’m kidding. Actually, there was a house. It’s gone now.”
On the other side of the road was a sign, “Lesser Dismal,” with trees behind it, and an extended A-frame house painted a light gray. Liza said that there was a swamp somewhere in the United States called Great Dismal Swamp, and that was what the name referred to. A joke.
“I never heard of it,” said Warren.
Other signs said “No Trespassing,” “No Hunting,” “No Snowmobiling,” “Keep Out.”
The key to the back door was in an odd place. It was in a plastic bag inside a hole in a tree. There were several old bent trees — fruit trees, probably — close to the back steps. The hole in the tree had tar around it — Liza said that was to keep out squirrels. There was tar around other holes in other trees, so the hole for the key didn’t in any way stand out. “How did you find it, then?” Liza pointed out a profile — easy to see, when you looked closely — emphasized by a knife following cracks in the bark. A long nose, a down-slanting eye and mouth, and a big drop — that was the tarred hole — right at the end of the nose.
“Pretty funny?” said Liza, stuffing the plastic bag in her pocket and turning the key in the back door. “Don’t stand there,” she said. “Come on in. Jeepers, it’s cold as the grave in here.” She was always very conscientious
