Strum Page 8
He now held out his hands so she could see the lines on his palms. Surprised to see that they were nearly as pale as the back of her arms, although his face and body were a sun-burnt reddish brown, she peered eagerly into his hands and then dropped hers to her sides. Looking up at him again, she was abashedly aware that he was now looking intently at her, searching out her eyes as if they were newly discovered gems imbedded in a rock. To satisfy his obvious curiosity, she opened them wide and moved them sideways and back like a barn owl would. Again he laughed and she decided that his was one of the best laughs she’d encountered anywhere; it was so natural, but also so full of an animal’s cunning and innocence at the same time. He lifted one arm toward the sky and she followed it with her eyes and thought she saw his jaw drop as he caught the glint of the sun in the brilliant emerald starbursts of her squinting eyes.
For a moment his heart lurched and his head seemed to spin; he was afraid he would drop to the ground, felled by such an astonishing pair of eyes. Looking away and focusing momentarily on the close bark of the cedar where she had been seated helped him find his equilibrium. He had seen fish scales this color and a bird feather that mimicked the forest and gleamed brilliantly in the sunlight, but to see it in this human creature was almost overwhelming. Why were these people to be avoided, he wondered? Eyes this brilliant must mean something good or close to the hidden parts of nature that we could benefit or learn from. In nature, bright colors and shiny reflective features were assets, or at the very least a protective measure, like the poisonous red berries, or the snake whose lethal venom often matched the brilliance of its patterning.
These thoughts raced through his mind and there seemed no rational explanation for putting a distance between them. A smile was certainly mutual to all good humans and he showed his readily as he took one of her hands in his and led her back to the tree where she was previously seated. To show his intentions, he sat down first into a cross-legged position and motioned for her to sit as well. Gathering her skirts around her she returned to her sitting position against the tree, but this time copying the crossed-legged posture and watching him carefully to see if there was something else he expected of her.
The position felt decidedly good she thought; strangely it had never occurred to her to sit in this way before. It wasn’t natural, but it was certainly a way to feel steadier on the ground and it gave her a sense of communicating friendship, of giving herself freely as less a stranger and more a friend. Sitting this way also had a calming effect; although she was not panicked in any way, there was a certain tension she felt which had never entered her before. It was exciting and abashing at the same time, as if her body felt wholly alive but her mind was trying to shut down this joy with a yoke of confusion.
If he felt the same mix of joy and unease, he did not express it. There was no awkwardness now as he sat before her. Earlier he experienced the strange weakness of the knees and a palpitation of the heart that threatened to floor him, but now he only felt a strange joy. Reaching across to the notebook she had abandoned on the ground, he lifted it with a question in his eyes and a broad smile across his sharply chiseled face.
This face becomes more handsome with each new smile, she thought to herself.
He held up the thin layer of paper which held her pencil rendering and placed his other hand over his chest and said in his own tongue, “I love your drawing.”
Although they understood not a word of each other’s language, there was enough perception in their earnest gestures to suggest they had a kindred spirit. Isabelle felt she had found her first new friend in this new country. The procession of pictures she drew for him was generally admired, bar one of a sailing ship, which he understood but seemed to dislike. In return he drew a few awkward pictures for her as well, including a long patchwork tepee and a jumping horse. Time seemed to stand still for them until the sun abruptly dropped below the line of trees and Isabelle gasped with the realization that she had a two-hour return walk ahead. If she did not make it back before the darkness set in, she would be doomed.
The boy looked at her with concern and put both hands on his chest to say, “I will not hurt you.”
Isabelle understood his gesture and smiled at him, making a quick walking motion with two creeping fingers in the air and pointing at the sun, then moving her finger down and down past the horizon and into the ground. This he understood well and quickly stood up. He looked about for a moment as she gathered her notebook and the basket and then he bent forward to help her to her feet. The delicate feel of her arm through her thin cotton sleeve caused a new flutter in his stomach and he wished he was still sitting cross-legged on the ground.
In her mind, the strength of his helping hand on her arm was exhilarating. Intuitively she knew to follow him when he turned and headed through the trees on a path that he saw clearly like a track in fresh snow, but to her was just a brown and green pine needle–strewn forest floor where every step seemed identical to the next.
Moving in the opposite direction from where he had come, he led her along the river toward the camp as if he already knew her destination. Isabelle instinctively trusted him and followed closely behind. At one point at a bend in the creek, he continued straight ahead instead of following the curve of the waterway. Isabelle gestured the other direction, finally recognizing the few landmarks in the forest that she knew, but Walk-Tall simply nodded and walked resolutely through another clearing in the trees, following the footpath that only he knew.
When they neared the final clearing, Isabelle caught up to the scout to see the camp lanterns beginning to light. The gratitude in her heart felt like a warm drink on a frigid day; she could feel the relief wash down into her stomach as she walked toward the lanterns, the last rays of sunset burnishing the echoes of hammers that sounded steadily near the edge of the forest. As if on a visual cue they all came to a halt. At that precise moment the sound of crickets seemed to come into the cauldron of air and shadows of the camp, and Isabelle turned to say goodbye to her guide. But once he had seen the lights he had turned back and was long gone before she knew it.
3
Bernard (St.-Gérard), 1932–1959
“We don’t bite the hand that feeds. Do you understand what that means, young man?”
Every month of every year, as the loggers cut deeper into the virgin forests, the young boy watched with horror from a distance as the familiar chain-line of cedar trees disappeared one link at a time.
“Bernie’s heart is too big,” Ellen Tenderfield would interject quietly, defending the boy’s inconsolable tears at every tree-felling season. “He’s a sensitive lad. Remember what he has already experienced … ” Her voice trailed off as she remembered the horrid carnage of the mill accident not five years ago.
“This boy is going to learn a tough lesson. Nobody cries for trees … ” replied her husband Col, examining the boy’s stricken face from a distance through furrowed brows and shaking head. “He’s got a hell of a lot of pain coming his way.”
In that bitter cold winter of 1932 when Bernard was born, St.-Gérard held no special place amongst the hundreds of mill towns across the Eastern Townships of Canada — old villages whose primary purpose was to supply trapped fur to ready buyers in Europe, and timber to the burgeoning ship-building industry in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Québec. Over a short century these towns had become home to thousands of enterprising French, English, and Scottish fur-trappers, traders, and loggers. They carved an increasingly lucrative existence by their desecration of nature: the brutal felling of trees and the clearing of old growth forests daily for the limitless requirements of industry. All in the name of a new religion called Progress.
Bernard grew up with a brooding sense of indignity at the relentless rapacity around him across ever-enlarging stretches of virgin forests where 800-year-old trees were brought to their knees with a screech of un-abiding metal. Thundering vortexes
of swirling air shifted and displaced life itself. Doubting the virtue of the timber industry was like questioning the existence of God. For the sensitive boy, however, the certainty that God was the tree, or at the very least resided in the most ancient of trees, was apparent. Over time, however, he learned to keep the knowledge to himself, hidden from the laughter of other boys, away from the unbending beliefs of those who would not understand, and away from the parents who adopted him and loved him, but could not understand.
Col Tenderfield was the superintendent of the saw mill where Bernard’s natural father had worked since he himself was a boy. His father’s fatal accident orphaned him at age five, as his mother had died shortly after his birth. She was a poor, nearly deaf French girl whose family disowned her for running away with an Indian. Her unexpected passing left the boy’s father bereft, but determined more than ever to make a decent life for himself and his son. He refused to find a family to adopt the newborn and so brought the unfortunate young soul to the mill every day and entrusted him to Providence, and the Good Grace of God. After the accident, the Tenderfields took the boy in as one of their own among their four older boys.
Bernard’s world began with the shrill roar of circular saws and planing machinery, but at five it become muted. His fate was truly in the hands of a merciful God who took away the sordid sound of the trees being cut piecemeal in their prime, and reduced it to a low resonating vibration and the whisper of displaced air, a ghost passing unperceived. It was not hard to imagine that the trauma and horrendous carnage of his father’s accident, which the boy had witnessed, had an implicit and undeniable impact on his disability.
Through the refuge of a large close-knit family, young Bernard grew up in his own teeming world to become strong of character but gentle in demeanor. He stood tall and straight and eventually even imposing among the cedars that bordered his family’s modest log home. As he grew to become a man, his square jaw and chiseled eagle’s profile revealed his Native constitution, but the heavy dark eyebrows framed intensely green eyes, which were deep-set and fringed with thick dark eyelashes. The copper red facial hair which appeared at puberty created a further mystery of his origin. Although his voice was not lost, his desire to use it diminished with each passing year. To his young mind, he was simply the son of God-fearing mill-worker parents, and brother to four older brothers. There were few questions worthy of asking.
Ellen took it upon herself to home-school her adopted son, teaching him spelling, reading, and arithmetic, a basic sign-language of simple gestures, and lip-reading. At times both mother and son would reach a mutual impasse in this arduous learning process, and would draw a truce. As adolescence approached, Bernard’s hearing rapidly declined and by thirteen he became completely deaf. The roar was silenced, replaced with a monotonous hum. That same year he began an apprenticeship at the saw mill while his brothers joined the war effort. The brothers — John, Jordan, Aidan, and Callum Tenderfield — were all trained to pilot the locally built Hurricane fighter bomber planes, and prepared to fly them in Europe. It was an unhappy time for the envious young boy, but out of a sense of duty he learned to wield the saws and stack the boards without complaint.
The tears of the cutting season had stopped several years earlier but no one knew the agony he continued to bear inside his heart as the timber succumbed seasonally to the saws. As diligently as any one of the young men keeping the wheels of the industry turning, Bernard worked the timber. The constant noise of the saws made wordless communication the norm amongst the workers, mostly older men now, even several who came out of retirement to fill in the places of the younger men who were sent off to pilot training or to the European Front. Through this period, a silence seemed to fall over the infrequent social gatherings as if everyone was in silent prayer.
The outside world had impinged very lightly on this tiny community over the years, even during the first war, but the second war came to claim heroes even from the smallest hamlets across Canada. Very few words escaped the lips of those who were left behind. The women deferred to the silence of the older men, only speaking when instructing the children and keeping social interaction to a minimum. Everyone was in a waiting mode. And then one day, the war came abruptly to an end. John, Aidan, and Cal returned to St.-Gérard decorated as heroes. Jordan, the second brother, did not return; his Hurricane Mk1 had heroically taken down two Luftwaffe bombers before it was shot down over London. His Atlantic Star arrived at the Tenderfields’ door one evening the following winter. The young RCAF officer bearing the medal had trained with Jordan at the RCAF camp in Montréal and it was his honor to hand-deliver it to the mother’s trembling hands.
With the long war over, life began to resettle into its normal pace. The mill, which had nearly shut down during the war, now became a bustling factory — building resources hit the highest level of demand ever in the history of Canada — and expanded exponentially over the next five years. Now seventeen, but his services to the mill no longer as essential as they had been during the war years, Bernard discovered the underlying beauty in the grains of the sawn timber that revealed themselves gradually with the assistance of planing machines, careful hand sanding, oiling, and polishing.
In the slope of the evenings after the mill-workers called it a day, working half by lamplight and half by the feel of the grain, he coaxed arresting pieces of furniture and exquisite and sometimes curious objects from the off-cuts of timber. Eventually it overtook his time and efforts during the normal hours and propelled him into a different echelon of timber craftwork than could be expected of an untrained craftsman. The noise of the saws around him made no impact on his tranquility as his steady hands moved the jig-saw across the wooden slabs, with the precision and deftness of a surgeon saving a life. In a single continuous cut he revealed the forms that transformed the damaged timber into things of beauty. If it was not for the families of the camps who were willing to give a fair portion of their hard-earned savings to purchase these items, he would have forfeited his artistry within a short time to assist with the supply of construction timber whose demand increased manifold after the end of the war.
Bernard became regarded by the residents of his hometown of St.-Gérard as an artist of major talent. After years of dedication to his craft, the income he derived from his gift allowed him to purchase a small plot of land not far from his family’s home fronting Lake Aylmer. There he built his own modest timber-framed cabin from logs he lovingly cut and milled from the surrounding cedar forest. In his constant and soundless world, he worked the timber alone, using the full power of his strong lean body to lift and rotate larger and larger slabs of wood. Well before the cabin was complete, he set about creating an adjacent woodworking studio.
The pieces he wrought from the bare wood rang out with a remarkable truth, simplicity, and purity. In a time and place where rough manners and the monotonous drone of machinery dominated lives, the sublime beauty of the fine furniture and decorative art objects were a kind of salve for the mothers who secretly promised themselves someday more glamorous, or at least more respectable lives beyond the timber-yards. These very women created a competitive clientele base for Bernard’s output, swarming his studio like honey bees, or protective hens, keeping others at bay without actively appearing to. They came to watch him carve and tame the timber with his large graceful hands and admire the placid almost beatific expression on his finely chiseled face. Over time he realized that their feminine aura helped his creative efforts, but he never wittingly encouraged their presence even as his fan club grew exponentially.
Lorraine was the exception. Being seventeen and the only child of overly protective parents who sent her away to an exclusive Catholic girls’ boarding school, she had never heard of the wood artist. And when she arrived that fateful summer evening, he considered her to be the second most beautiful creature he had ever seen. Her father, the tool-making Scotsman and engineer Glen Stewart, owned the small specialist har
dware store which supplied Bernard with his growing arsenal of precision wood-working tools. Her mother Sylvie-Marie Bédos Stewart, a Breton woman who also had some very distant Native ancestry, made sure her only daughter was raised with the love of Our Lady in her heart. Lorraine had just returned after graduating from the exalted Catholic girls’ school Sacré-Coeur des Trois-Rivières, when her father suddenly fell ill one Friday afternoon. She arrived at the studio late in the afternoon to deliver a custom-made awl Bernard had ordered some weeks earlier.
In the door of the workshop she leaned her petite frame, straight thin legs turned in like the pegs of a stork and a white cotton dress nearly opaque in the late afternoon sun. Her soft brown hair fell in waves over her shoulders to the middle of her bare arms, which were crossed now over the heart-shaped neckline of her summer dress. A gold chain around her neck suspended a small gold cross that shared its space below her collarbone with a small mole. Her face was luminous as only a blossoming teenage girl’s complexion could be. She was the picture of a Titian Madonna with high pale and peach cheekbones, finely appointed eyebrows arched above light golden brown eyes, and pink rosebud lips thin, small, and sensuous.
The girl knew the young man by description from her father, but when she saw him in his studio working, never lifting his head once during the thirty-five minutes she stood diffidently at the entrance, she knew that he was a true artist, as she had never seen that kind of focus in someone her age before. When finally the head rose up and a pair of green eyes met hers, their emerald brilliance locked on her gaze and they both knew something was about to change.