The Smell of Smoke

His parents occasionally questioned him, but they really had no idea how he spent his days, or what he thought about. There would be long spells with no questions whatsoever, then one morning his father would fire a volley across the breakfast table. “Are you going sailing today?”; “Did you read the editorial in the Star?”; “What do you think of the language law?”; “Who are your friends at the club?”

Green did not give out more information than was absolutely necessary. He tried to emulate Maggie’s laconic interchanges with her parents. The Harrisons’ Western Canadian accents were terse. Perhaps the brutal winds that came out of there —- the Alberta Clippers —- had taught them to shape words closely and slip them out between barely parted lips, afraid that if they opened wider the cold would penetrate their mouths, freeze their tongues, crack their teeth.

Maggie’s house and Green’s were three-quarters of a mile apart on the Bord-du-Lac road. Both houses were quiet almost all the time, but Green decided hers was quieter. From just inside the front door, he could hear the clock on the electric range ticking, though the kitchen was at the other end of the house. Perhaps the purity of the silence was also a Western thing.

Early one midsummer morning, Green was getting dressed in a kind of stupor. Pulling on his shorts very slowly, tying the laces of his sneakers; looking out over the lawn at the silver maples and watching cars go by on Bord-du-Lac Road. He heard the words inside his head, then repeated them aloud: “I am in love with you, Maggie Harrison.” He kept his voice low. He was an only child in a big house, so it wasn’t likely anyone overheard. The house was so solidly built that it ate sound.

“I love you, Maggie, and I want to marry you.”

Saying the words made him dizzy. He thought he must be leaving his childhood, shedding it like a carapace. And suddenly he felt so open, so soft and unprotected, that he had to sit down on the edge of his bed.

He never repeated the words to Maggie. He cannot remember many of their conversations —- but he knew he had not said this. He did not use the vocabulary of longing because there was nothing unrequited in their relationship. Nothing unconsummated. He had everything he wanted before he knew what that was.

She did once say, “Green, if you were twenty-one, I would marry you.”

She was peeing when she said it, in the pink bathroom attached to her bedroom, in the fur-trade house. Her parents were in Laguna Beach, California —- they flew everywhere for free. Maggie and Green had just had sex in the basement, and she had shown him the gun slits. Green pulled out handfuls of pink insulation fibre and peered through a narrow opening between the stones. It was dark, so he could not see the lake very well, but he could smell the water. He pressed his mouth and nose right up against the slit so that his cheekbones were touching cold, sharp rubble, and breathed in the darkness and moisture, the scent of Indians, muskets, and fur.

He could imagine himself inside her skin, feeling what she felt, and so he understood how to touch her. How roughly, how softly, with what rhythm, and for how long.