The Death of All Things Seen by Michael Collins Read Free Book Online

The world, or at least a part of it, was seeking a point of reconnection.
    It accounted for a small fortune, but a fortune founded on a dark secret. He remembered, at one time, a teacher asking, what of the fortune of a man who makes it on an initial sum of stolen money – was the investment and return thus tainted? How could one make reparation? Could an immoral act be made right?
    In the quiet of his kitchen, he felt a reflexive ache of deepening loss, how his life had unfolded in those first years, the serendipity of events, the alignment of chance, the run of good luck that might otherwise have seen his ruin. He had been watched over. He truly believed this.
    He gathered wood around the side of the house, then set a blaze going in the fieldstone firepit. This was home now in the enveloping warmth of a dry heat. He felt its deep pull in the throw of amber light contrasted against the outside brilliance. He had cords of wood piled high to see him through winter, a cache gained during the summer months.
    *
    He had come to live in anticipation of future events, to set his perspective in the reach of the next season. He considered this a great personal realignment with the natural order of the universe. He thus accounted for his days in a labor of advancing effort.
    He was seeking excuses to not acknowledge the letter. He might retire now and sleep as the animals did. He was due it. All things must rest. He was stalling. He knew it.
    *
    The letter was a week old and curled at the edges by the dry heat of the fire. He passed it on the way to the kitchen. He found and opened a can of soup, poured the contents into a pot and set it on the stove.
    A crown of flame whispered over his thoughts. He stood in an oblong shadow and stared into the monotony of falling snow. Memory floated in a grey static that cleared and played when he focused and closed his eyes. There was always another life playing within him.
    Where to begin? In 1971 with his arrival into Canada? Yes, there!
    Thank God for the Canadian wilderness and the length of an undefended border. How easy it had been to cross the divide under cover of night, venturing into the far north, passing unnoticed through a drift of human settlements, brief flickers of habitation that had grabbed a living from the inhospitable land. It was still there, the legacy of trading posts that held on long enough for towns to take hold and give rise to generations who intermarried and stubbornly survived long past the boom times of gold or silver mining, or whatever it was that first brought them together.
    In the weeks before he left for Canada, he’d torn pages from an encyclopedia in the public library, circled the names of towns. Havre-Saint-Roche had caught his interest. It was described as a ramshackle town, once beset by debauchery and gambling, where civilization had never quite taken hold. Its original French-Canadian population had been joined by Russian and Ukrainian immigrants lured to the Canadian wilderness with the promise of arable land that had proved unable to sustain a livelihood, let alone a family. Though, as indentured figures, most had been compelled to repay their debt and thus forced to push further west. Most had come down with malaria, smallpox, or trench foot. Some survived, others died, while others walked into the wilds and were never seen again.
    He had arrived in Havre-Saint-Roche following a night and a day hitching north after crossing the border near the shoals of Sault Ste. Marie. He was affirming certain truths to himself about life, how hope and progress could sputter and die without ceremony. He was seeking examples of a truncated and lost history, seeking tangible evidence of the reality of human insignificance, a point of disconnection.
    Havre-Saint-Roche wasn’t really a town anymore by 1971 – just a weigh station surviving on a post office and a Department of Forestry and Land Management Bureau.
    Nate stayed in the vicinity almost a week, pitching a