Savage Love Read online

  The inquest also brought to light the embarrassing fact that Melusina and I had conducted a brief, tempestuous affair while we were undergraduates at the University of Toronto and Nedlinger was at Berkeley pursuing his earlier, less famous work on exhumation and reburial practices among the prehistoric Ontario Iroquois, a betrayal for which Nedlinger instantly forgave me at the time of the coroner’s inquest, well knowing, I assume, Melusina’s fatal charms, her insatiable lust, and the documented Canadian penchant for secretive, hypocritical, adulterous, compulsively polymorphous sex congress (one of the main reasons, Nedlinger thought, that the country never really got ahead of its puritanical neighbour to the south despite having all the geographical and historical advantages).

  This affair, as I say, was brief, amounting to practically nothing on the scale of such things. To be perfectly honest, I did once throw her over the hood of a silver Lexus IS in the Bedford Road Municipal Parking Lot down the block from the Royal Ontario Museum, tore the crotch out of her panties and rogered her like a Holstein-Friesian bull, tears of happiness pouring from my eyes, her orgasmic shrieks filling my ears; in her frenzy she ripped the windshield wipers off the car and employed them to belabour my innocent shoulders. I do not know if my lust was driven by fondness or the universal human desire to hammer the lover of a more successful friend. I do not know if she used me or I used her or whether or not there was ever a glimmer of love between us. At the time I had no idea what love was, believing only that Nedlinger knew, and I envied him for it, envied him with a blind hatred that expressed itself as lust for his inamorata, the fair Melusina.

  As I say, this affair was trivial in nature, barely worth mentioning, a minor blot on Melusina’s prismatically loyal adoration of the famous one, although, as was admitted at the coroner’s inquest, she and I did relapse once or twice, a handful of times at most, not, as Nedlinger’s regrettable lawyer insisted, “obscenely fucking nearly continuously in front of my client’s nose for the last twenty years” but, yes, as in being compulsively if not to say violently drawn to one another in a wallow of resentment, hatred, lust, rage and envy such that to this day I think all those emotions are love, are beneficent, are, in fact, the only species of grace the Lord can vouchsafe the losers of the world. At the end our lovemaking degenerated into a perverse parody of passion: I would fondle her webbed toes then ejaculate, dribbling my thin sperm onto those fishy fans of translucent flesh while she watched, touching herself, squirming in an ecstasy of humiliation, self-disgust and hatred. (Both Melusina and I joined Sex Addicts Anonymous at various times; for me, it was a good place to meet new women.)

  I tell you this in the spirit of full disclosure, as they say these days, a phrase of hypocritical cant that discounts the existential impossibility of full disclosure, of knowing the true dimensions of the human heart, its capacity for pain, corruption, obsession, and deception. I tell you this so that you can understand my motive in going to visit Nedlinger some months after Melusina’s death, after fortifying myself with several shots of Alberta vodka. I wanted, yes, purely human things such as closure, intimacy, unconditional love and revenge. I wanted Nedlinger’s forgiveness and I wanted to torment him, favour him with lurid descriptions of the lustful spasms I shared with his wife (albeit in a compulsive nexus of bitterness, despair and jealousy), spasms that he himself had never been able to enjoy, wounded as he was (that tractor incident) and lost in the mysterious and ethereal world of his own researches at the very limits of forensic archaeology.

  He had been like a god to us, distant, incomprehensible and untouchable. In truth, the fame and money had never meant much to him, and that made his success all the more aggravating. Now events had brought him low, his trajectory declining into a more human orbit where disappointment, lost love and death shamble among the survivors. It was in the twin spirits of schadenfreude and ressentiment (the patron spirits of our desperate, dystopian age) that I ventured tipsily across the fields dotted with scaffoldings, mounds of earth and half-filled trenches — old diggings, long abandoned — to visit my friend Nedlinger. (And I thought, staggering past those gaping wounds, how in Nedlinger’s desire to uncover secret depths he had forever missed the surface of things.)

  As usual, when I found him, he did not notice me at first, the eternal afterthought, the toady, the hanger-on, which only enraged me even more. (I was never a man of large spirit, I admit; I am the son of my parents, a shallow, envious, unachieved southwestern Ontario farm boy incidentally touched by greatness, an experience from which I have yet to recover.) I ripped Nedlinger’s headphones off with a sweep of my hand. His eyes blinked open in surprise, then clouded with confusion and disappointment. I tried to speak, but words failed me as they always had. I began to weep. He placed his paternal hand on my forehead, a kind of benediction, and said, “Lennart —” (My name is Lennart Wolven, not that you need to remember it.) He said, “Lennart, I have terrible news for you” — words that made no sense since, prior to coming to visit Nedlinger, I had spent hours and days priming myself to deliver terrible news to him, confessional revelations of illicit sex congress with his now-dead but revered Melusina, and yet here he was consoling me for some hitherto-unlooked-for apocalypse.

  He gazed at me sympathetically and, swinging his legs off the bed, sat upright so that our knees touched, took my wrists in his hands, made a curious tsk, tsk sound with his tongue, and said, “I was wrong, Lennart. All along I was wrong. Here —,” he said, handing me a crumpled printout. “Read it yourself.”

  His resemblance to the actor Nick Nolte in this moment was extraordinary, and of course he knew I would be unable to read the statistical gobbledygook, the drone work, albeit the very foundation of forensic archaeology that had always escaped me — genomic sequencing, radiocarbon dating, counting the rat bones in a garbage dump. Even now this was his way of putting me in my place.

  “It’s the DNA analysis for the Royal Child,” Nedlinger said. “It’s finally come through. It took years because the samples were infinitely small and, after the first results, deemed corrupt. But we ran the tests again and again, always with the same outcome, until, over time, we came to believe them.” He sighed, his chest heaving convulsively. “Besides, the procedures have improved. Read it. It was not the Sun Lord’s —” He broke off, clearly in the throes of some deep inner struggle, the truth, it seemed, being too much for him to speak aloud. “It was much more recent, not prehistoric, not even Native.”

  “Jesus,” I said, gasping. Ever the master of dramatic situations, he had me in thrall. The implications were obvious: the whole of Nedlinger’s research, his fame, his personal fortune, had been founded in error. This was far more important than Melusina’s sorry demise; I felt a white-hot nub of triumph in my gut, the heat slicked through my veins like a drug. “I’m sorry,” I said, meaning not a word.

  But Nedlinger continued, gripping my wrists in his huge, spatulate hands. “There can’t be any doubt now,” he said. “It was your mother’s child, a fetus, born near term, abandoned and buried in a field. Your brother, perhaps. It happened to be buried at the edge of the ossuary, bits and pieces of artifact got mixed up in the grave. I should have recognized this, but I was blind with ambition. You know how it is, I think.”

  I don’t know what I looked like, a staring wreck, in trousers forever too short and a cardigan sweater stained with coffee, a bow tie askew at my throat. I heard the words with uncanny clarity and thought, Of course, he’s right. I thought, I knew it all along. I grew up in the House of Atreus, where children were consumed like canapés. I had a brother, but my envious mother slaughtered him, an epic act of negation to blight my life. No happiness for little Lennart, that was the rule. Betrayal, meanness and horror everywhere. My triumph evaporated. I had toppled Armand Nedlinger’s world, shattered his version of reality, and now he had returned the favour. I was tranquil in the cosmic justice of it all.

  But then I wasn’t tranquil. It should have been me, I th
ought, dead in the furrows, forever innocent and pure, while, in life, I had done everything wrong, followed a dark star, fallen in love with the wrong woman, failed, failed, failed. What kind of story was this? I asked myself. Some malign, entropic, broken-mirror version of the Round Table knights, Lancelot and Guinevere, Lennart and Melusina, destined to ruin everything they touched and foul the dreams of greater men. Or was it just a piece of sordid Canadian Gothic, dead babies under the hedgerows, shadowy adulterous unions in cornfields, thin-lipped murderous mothers forever drinking their Alberta vodka tea and kneeling in the front pew at the Iona Station United Church, whispering “Amen” and quivering in ecstasies of puny triumph?

  “My father —” I began.

  “I don’t think he knew, Lennart,” said Nedlinger. “His archaeological enthusiasm, though amateurish, was never faked. He always thought it was an Indian child.”

  “He brought it into the house,” I said. “She never said a word. Her own dead child on the dining room table all those years,” I said, “until she couldn’t stand it any longer.” The horror seeped into my heart gradually, drop by drop, like acid, like truth. And then I thought, This explains everything: my childhood pleasure in torturing small furry animals, my homoerotic yearnings, my masturbatory fantasies about the Jesuit martyrs, my inability to form friendships, play team sports and date nice girls from Sunday school. I felt a grim satisfaction — I was sure things couldn’t get worse.

  But then Nedlinger said, “There’s more.” He said, “That’s not all I have to tell you, Lennart.”

  His words came in gentle whispers, words scarcely breathed into the silence that stretched between us. I barely heard him, and what I heard found no lodging in my brain, though a chill went through me.

  “What did you say?” I asked, blinking back the tears, ripping the stifling bow tie from my neck and throwing it amongst the tools and potsherds strewn on the floor. I thought, No, no, not worse, not more —

  “There’s more,” he gasped, his face working inhumanly, as if there were tiny animals, rodents, scurrying beneath the skin. His lips curled malignantly.

  “More?” I breathed hoarsely. The air in the room seemed to scorch my lungs, the walls bulged inwards, my ears screamed with the pressure.

  “Melusina —,” whispered Nedlinger, the word barely audible. “My wife was pregnant when she died. I kept it out of the inquest. It cost money. But all these Ontario coroners are corrupt. I’ve never met one who wasn’t —”

  “Whose baby was it?” I cried, my heart awash with dread.

  “You didn’t always come on her toes, Lennart,” he sneered. “You two thought you were untouchable in your scorn. Hatred was your form of grace. It made you irresponsible.”

  I clapped my hands over my ears and began to hum Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” music from my youth, or perhaps my father’s youth. It was as if a vast trap door had opened at my feet; beneath me was nothing but sky, the constellations oddly reversed as in a mirror; I felt myself dropping through. I felt more pain than I thought was possible for a human to bear, and suddenly I realized the truth of the Immaculate Buddha’s teaching that all life is suffering. Human beings were made for suffering; that was our purpose on earth. We were superbly designed suffering machines built to withstand all manner of guilt, loss, failure and betrayal. I even felt a twinge of pride at our incontestable capacity for self-inflicted catastrophe. At least we are good at something, I thought.

  And then I ceased to think. No doubt the circuits were overloaded. Even my purely human talent for suffering was deficient. Just to stop Nedlinger from talking, I picked up the nearest object from the floor.

  “What’s this?” I asked. “Where did you find it?”

  Nedlinger’s face softened then fused with clarity. He patted the bedclothes for his reading glasses then peered at the object in my palm. “That’s a freshwater clam half-shell, Elliptio dilatata. The Neutral used them to smooth the insides of clay pots. See how the side is flattened, almost worn through.”

  “And this?” I demanded.

  “Side-notched projectile point,” said Nedlinger, seeming to find pleasure in the terse scientific descriptions. “Carved from opaque chalcedony, Early Woodland period. It’s very beautiful, beautiful and functional, and almost eternal.”

  But I was relentless. I shook a polished axe head before his face. “This?” I breathed. “Tell me about this one?”

  “They were a beautiful people,” Nedlinger said, dreamily, all at once ignoring me. “They painted themselves with yellow and red ochre, colours of the sun, their bodies made of light. They thought they were descended from the sun. They tattooed themselves from head to foot with charcoal pricked into the flesh, figures of myth came to life as they moved in the firelight. The warriors shaved their heads except for topknots braided with shells and porcupine quills that flashed like horses’ tails when they danced. The world was a holy place to them and they themselves were holy beings, full of drama and prayer. Their lives were prayers.”

  Nedlinger turned to me, his expression a mask of doubt and resignation. “Lennart,” he said, “all that’s left for us is to try to remember them. Was I wrong to devote myself to that?”

  I shook my head numbly. I held a shoebox full of tagged items. I knew what they were; I didn’t need to ask. Like Nedlinger, I had been digging them up and studying them for years. Polished bear eye-teeth with holes drilled into them for stringing, fragments of slate gorgets, stone net sinkers, bone needles, awls, bifacial chert blades, decorated potsherds. The minds that had made them long gone to dust, along with the noble Sun Lord, my innocent brother, my sad parents and the fair, web-toed Melusina, object of lust, never known for her true self.

  All the passion, self-torture and emotional drama suddenly dropped away like flesh itself, leaving me nothing but the adamant, insistent fragments of memory that now seemed true and full of mystery. I remembered a sunny June day, the three of us digging beneath an awning inside the Southwold Earthworks, wriggling along on our bellies, sweaty and filthy, using trowels, dental picks and watercolour brushes to dislodge the tiny immaculate remnants of the past, carefully cleaning, cataloguing and photographing each precious discovery. Were we ever happier? I asked myself.

  True, Melusina and I were flirting outrageously, but Nedlinger, already famous and beginning to resemble Nick Nolte, was cheerfully oblivious, or even acquiescent. And the misidentified Royal Child still grinned unbearably in its glass case on the cherry table in the Wolven dining room. But the camaraderie of the work flowed through us like an electric current, lost as we were, I see now, in curiosity and wonder instead of our own grubby needs.

  “No,” I said to my friend Nedlinger, “you weren’t wrong.” And then, “About that, I mean. But doesn’t it bother you that you were wrong about the Royal Child? That you’ll be a laughingstock? Nothing but celebrity gossip and innuendo? A week’s worth of jokes on the nightly talk shows? Then a nonentity, zip, zero?”

  “Something to look forward to, isn’t it?” he said. “We could just get on with the digging.” He sighed and heaved himself up from the bed and reached for the old canvas rucksack he had always carried to excavation sites packed with plastic specimen bags, notebooks, extra batteries for his camera, a dental kit for fine excavation, a magnifying glass, a Swiss Army compass and a pocket GPS unit, twine for pegging out site grids, and sandwiches wrapped in foil.

  He said, “Lennart, there’s still light. We can walk the fields the way we used to with Melusina. There are places we haven’t looked.”

  I delayed momentarily, stunned by the sudden turn of events, the reversal of all my judgments, and the mysterious vectors of grace.

  I said, “Wait a minute.” Inured to my own darkness, I wanted to resist, object, find fault (just like my mother and father).

  I remembered one luminous moment: Melusina chirping happily in triumph, holding up between her thumb and fore
finger a fragment of clay pipe with two faces incised around the bowl, sombre, thoughtful faces, intricately lined with tattoos, her own face smudged with sand and ash from the pit she was excavating, her blouse charmingly misbuttoned and soiled, her eyes bright with excitement.

  In the distance, I seemed to hear the earthy thud of hide drums.

  Then I heard the slap of the outer door as Nedlinger burst through.

  Suddenly stirring, I called out, “Yes, yes, Armand, I’m coming.”

  Through the bedroom window, I could see sunlight shimmering on the pocked fields.

  I shouted, “Wait for me.”

  A Flame, a Burst

  of Light

  Of the reasons for our lengthy and fatal sojourn inthe swamps of Sandusky, there are several theories. 1) The Americans wished to exact vengeance for atrocities committed by Capt. Crawford’s Indios on the Raisin River. 2) The Americans wished to prevent the men from rejoining their regiments before the close of the summer campaigns. 3) To supply the want of souls in the afterlife.

  We were seven hundred dreamers starving and shivering to death in this gateway to the City of Dis.

  Of the reasons for our deaths, there are no theories. Ague, fever (quartan, intermittent and acute), and the bloody flux carried us away. Old wounds, opened from damp and lack of common nutriment; pneumonia, dropsy, phthisis, galloping consumption, gangrene and suicide accounted for the rest. An alarming number of walking corpses attended the fallen like Swiss automatons in a magic show, then tottered off to expire face down in the bulrushes.

  In the swamps of Sandusky, there were more corpses than souls. We had a surfeit of bodies. They were difficult to bury in the washing ooze.

  Kingsland and Thompson, wraiths and daredevils, murderous on the day with Springfields we borrowed from the Americans at Detroit, mounted amateur theatricals though much bothered at delivering their lines on a stage of sucking mud. Sgt. Collins, of Limerick and the 41st, took the female roles, warbling a sweet falsetto. I mind he scalped Kentuckians with his razor at the Battle of the Raisin, along with Tenskwatawa’s unspeakable Shawnee.