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

separating the toil of one’s daily labor with the reprieve of nature.
    In the town center stood the remnants of a chapel. Prayer services had been read from a belfry over a loud speaker, so when the wind blew, people forty miles away had been given to proclaiming that they could hear the word of God carried on the wind through the whispering pines.
    It was not then the place it had once been, but it showed how one man’s influence could make a difference, how those who might not have fared so well could be saved by being born into a place where attitudes and ways of conduct were well-established. In a way, it reminded Nate of the influence of John F. Kennedy on his own adolescence, how the decade started with a promise of putting a man on the moon. How strange, Kennedy long dead, and Nate out in the Canadian wilds, while at the decade’s end, a man did walk on the moon, and the world knew all about the Sea of Tranquility , while, in South East Asia, war raged unabated.
    How could it have been, that anomalous proposition, the claiming of a moon when there was so much yet up for grabs on Earth?
    *
    Nate lodged for the first few months in what had once been a plush hotel, complete with a grand tearoom with velvet-covered couches and a dance hall with draped curtains and a stage.
    At the time, everyone understood what brought an American up there, and yet he was regarded with neither suspicion nor interest. Vietnam was not Canada’s war. The work at the mill kept the workers busy and attentive. The whirling bite of a blade could cut a man in two. Nate was hired and worked a year that shaped him into a man.
    He met Ursula Abenakis right after he arrived. She was a twenty-two-year-old half-blood native who worked at the hotel. She met his stare with the greenest of eyes, her sallow skin framed by a black sheen of hair, betraying her lineage.
    She wrote his name into a leather bound ledger, the languid sweep of her writing style suggesting a convent education. She had, in fact, been brought up in a Catholicism that never took hold. In the pulse of nature, in daily life, there was a more powerful God.
    She became his fascination, this Ursula Abenakis. He took his meals at the hotel, tipping with a view to catching her attention. He watched the way she filled the pepper and salt shakers, topped up the milk jugs, turned over the damp brown sugar in the glass bowls, and at the day’s end dutifully changed the fly-strip paper.
    He learned, in the coming weeks, sitting by her in the dying evenings, that her father had been a fur trapper, three-quarters First Nation and a quarter French-Canadian, as were most trappers in the region after centuries of interbreeding along the Saint Lawrence and the fur-trade routes.
    Nate was fresh-faced back then, a young man destined for great things. Or so Ursula told him. It didn’t take her long to come out to the cabin he found in the fall, her housewarming gift a rhubarb pie and a pound of ground coffee beans.
    At the hotel, she had called him ‘My American’, smiling with a beatific grace. He had thought her a beauty he could never possess, and he carried the thought of her in the way men carried lost dreams into battle. He loved her for her intelligence and mystery. When she poured him coffee, he felt like weeping. He thought he would never have her.
    When she arrived with the rhubarb pie, she wore nylons under her jeans, but no underwear or bra. It was revealed as she removed her top and then her jeans, placing them by her side, and doing so without the slightest sense of urgency or impropriety. She observed a polite restraint in the wake of their lovemaking, which was full of struggle and passion. She never asked directly about his family, or if he might return to America. Vietnam was the reason for his being there, and yet it seemed so remote, it didn’t bear mentioning.
    For her part, she revealed she was from the Anishinaabeg tribe, a name which literally meant, ‘Beings made out of