Each morning he would find his daughter sitting cross-legged at the edge of the lawn and gazing down the fjord. She was a small huddled form dwarfed by a forest of fern and cedar. A black hooded cloak hid the helmet of red hair. It also occluded the skullface.
Bernice. More spirit than woman.
Fog began to drift in. It ached him to see her shrouded by the elements, communing with herself, drifting further from his realm.
Only once did he dissent: "It's poor for your health. Out in the wet."
She tried to chuckle. It came out as a cackle.
By now a mist had wafted from her sward of emerald grass and spread a mantle upon the water: visible in clear spots like pools of cobalt oil. Beside a skeletal hand were a Schaeffer pen and a Big Chief tablet. From the glass litter strewn about the magic carpet, he deduced that she had consumed three of six bottles of Granville Island lager.
Dawn arrived. She stood up in her Birkenstocks and touched the solar mirage in silent praise.
*
When she came in he was cooking a vegetarian breakfast.
"Hello, Da."
"Bern--"
He had lit a low fire. Warming herself, she read over what she had written.
When the huge omelet was ready she got up and they ate.
Suddenly: "Da, I'd like you to read it."
"Any good?"
"Oh, you know it is." She managed a tiny giggle. Then a terrible paroxysm of cough.
Her death's head terrified him. She was a specter of his own mortality. He averted his eyes. Part of his mind found refuge in the orange and white checkerboard oilcloth covering the table.
Surfaces, he thought. Everything consists of surfaces. Nothing has depth.
*
As his anxiety passed he read from her tablet. She interrupted: "I may have to explain it."
"All right. But let me finish."
Her handwriting was carefully done, almost a calligraphy. What he used to call Schoolgirl Script.
Bernice hoisted her weightless self and nearly swooned. Her soul departed from her body for a moment. There was a fading of vision, and then she felt the comfort of her rump solidly seated in her chair.
"You OK?"
"Right as rain. I just got up too fast."
"All right. Just take it easy."
He resumed reading. She had quoted Chief Seattle: "There is no death, only a change in worlds."
*
Bernice took a swig of her coffee. "Uhh, I let it grow cold."
"Here, let me refill you."
"Nah. S'OK. Tastes different. Not Starbucks."
"Some kind of Fair Trade stuff your mama brought on her last visit."
"Second thought. Gimmee a warm-up."
As he moved away, she thought of her mama. Maxine. A Joe Hill Red from the 60s.
*
Bernice took the mug with her to the sideboard library. There she found old friends. Most of them Modern Library editions. Other titles were from the Yogi Publication Society. A shaft of golden sunlight fell upon a certain book, The Science Of Psychic Healing by Ramacharaka. She remembered it well, and touched it gingerly, as if it were ET's fingertip.
*
A storage room on the ground floor had been converted into a place for her CDs, vinyl recordings, books and art. Medicines ranged from homeopathic cures to AZT. She had heard rumors of an experimental wonderdrug able to bring forth a type of remission called the Lazarus Syndrome by bright boys in the media and pharmaceutical flacks. Nevertheless, she was certain that there would be a day when she could not in human form embrace the rosy-fingered dawn.
*
Hale and hearty at fifty-three, her Da relished his daily hike through the woods. One day upon his return he mentioned to her that he averaged only one mile to the hour because he took care in placing each step. Oh, but she had seen him fleet and nimble and as sure-footed as a faun amid his spruce and fir.
"So where did your elementals lead you today?"
Neither wan nor flushed, his face seemed aglow with vitality. The aura about his baldness and bearded mien radiated like the sun's butter. "Oh, I swung by the firewatch to chat with Ranger Joe."
"You two are on good terms?"
"Sure--"
"Isn't he the one who busted you last year?"
"Yeah. I was tree-sitting. Guilty as hell."
*
Checkered flannel shirts, blue denim, and laced hightop boots, broken-in and scuffed, gave him the look of an archetypal woodsman. His idea of dressing for town was to don a multipocket khaki vest and a Tilley hat. He maintained a thirty-two inch waistline by hiking three miles a day and laying off all that wonderful beer. He consumed herbs for body, mind and spirit. Gone were the days when he burned his candle at both ends, snorting coke and fucking every faceless cunt he could get a hand into, on a mad careen, trying to forget Maxine's infidelity.
Folks on the island called him Greendozer. Friends knew him as Hank. Bernice loved him as Da.
*
Hank closed the tablet with remorse. Bernice's miniature essays on life had set forth the importance of choices, purposes, and sealing wax. He often wondered why, being so close to death, she persisted in writing. Then it struck him. She was Sisyphus and this was her diurnal stone. Each day she began arranging her thoughts anew. Her goal was a final distillation. She would sum up the hours of her life into one statement, finding closure before journey's end. This tragic labor defined her existence and gave her meaning.
He found her in the alcove that best received the southern sun.
She was reading from Kenneth Rexroth's "One Hundred Poems From The Chinese." Hank had nothing to say to her that could equal Su Tung Po.
On a bleak afternoon in autumn she found him in the antler room stoking logs in the fireplace. Each year he suffered a kind of depression known throughout the north. The sky grew heavy and descended to the rooftop. It weighed upon him until he could hardly think. In times past he had relied upon drugs from the Orient. He had now taken to whiskey in the family tradition. The dram became the pint and the pint became the quart. Single malt became the fine blend. His grizzled beard reeked of Scotch. From his unclean mouth blew the wind of corruption.
"Da?" She called from the door.
"Oh, please, Honey. Leave me to myself."
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