THERE’D BEEN AN ACCIDENT on 69 near Horseshoe Lake Road. A dipshit driving a Hummer had rear-ended a cattle-transport trailer, killing himself and a bunch of beef cattle. This happened the first winter Danny stayed on Charlotte ’s island, and he’d heard about the accident from his cleaning woman. She was a First Nation person-a young woman with black hair and eyes, a pretty face, and thick, strong-looking hands. Once a week, Danny drove the airboat to the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve; that was where he picked her up, and where he returned her at the end of the day, but she almost certainly didn’t live there. Shawanaga Landing was mostly used in the summer months, both as a campsite and as a gateway to the bay. The residents of the reserve lived in the village of Shawanaga, though there were a few First Nation people who lived year-round in Skerryvore-or so Andy Grant had told Danny. (Both areas could be reached by road in the winter months, at least on snowmobiles.)
The young cleaning woman seemed to like riding in the Polar air-boat. Danny always brought a second pair of ear guards for her, and after she’d met Hero, she asked why the bear hound couldn’t come along for the ride. “The airboat is too loud for a dog’s ears-well, for his one ear, anyway,” Danny told her. “I don’t know how well Hero can hear out of the mangled ear.”
But the cleaning woman had a way with dogs. She told Danny to put her ear guards on Hero when he drove to Shawanaga Landing to pick her up, and when he drove back to Turner Island without her. (Surprisingly, the dog didn’t object to wearing them.) And when the cleaning woman rode in the airboat with Hero, she held the bear hound in her lap and covered his ears-even the mostly missing one-with her big, strong hands. Danny had never seen Hero sit in anyone’s lap before. The Walker bluetick weighed sixty or seventy pounds.
The dog devotedly followed the young woman throughout her cleaning chores, the same way Hero attached himself to Danny everywhere on the island when Danny was otherwise alone there. When Danny was using the chainsaw, the bear hound maintained a safe distance between them. (The writer was sure that Hero had learned this from Ketchum.)
There was an ongoing misunderstanding in regard to where the young First Nation person lived-Danny never saw anyone waiting for her at Shawanaga Landing, or any kind of vehicle she might have used to get herself to and from the boat landing. Danny had asked her only once, but the young cleaning woman’s answer struck him as dreamy or facetious-or both-and he’d not asked her for clarification. “ Ojibway Territory,” she’d said.
Danny couldn’t tell what the First Nation woman had meant-maybe nothing. He could have asked Andy Grant where she was actually from-Andy had put him in touch with her in the first place-but Danny had let it go. Ojibway Territory was a good enough answer for him.
And the writer had instantly forgotten the young woman’s name, if he’d ever really heard it. Once, early in the first winter she worked for him, he’d said to her admiringly, “You are tireless.” This was in reference to all the ice-chopping she did-and how many full buckets of water she hauled up from the lake, and left for him in the main cabin. The girl had smiled; she’d liked the tireless word.
“You may call me that-please call me that,” she’d told him.
“Tireless?”
“That’s my name,” the First Nation woman had told him. “That’s who I am, all right.”
Again, Danny could have asked Andy Grant for her real name, but the woman liked to be called Tireless, and that was good enough for Danny, too.
Sometimes, from his writing shack, he saw Tireless paying obeisance to the inuksuk. She didn’t formally bow to the stone cairn, but she respectfully brushed the snow off it-and, in her submissiveness, she demonstrated a kind of deference or homage. Even Hero, who stood eerily apart from Tireless on these solemn occasions, seemed to acknowledge the sacredness of the moment.
Danny worked as well in his writing shack on the one day a week when Tireless came to clean as he did when he was alone with Hero there; the cleaning woman didn’t distract him. When she was done with her work in the main cabin-it didn’t matter that, on other days, Danny was used to Hero sleeping (and farting and snoring) in the writing shack while he worked-the writer would look up from his writing and suddenly see Tireless standing by that wind-bent little pine. She never touched the crippled tree; she just stood beside it, like a sentinel, with Hero standing beside her. Neither the First Nation cleaning woman nor the bear hound ever stared at Danny through the window of his writing shack. Whenever the writer happened to look up and see them next to the weather-beaten pine, both the dog and the young woman had their backs to him; they appeared to be scouting the frozen bay.
Then Danny would tap the window, and both Tireless and Hero would come inside the writing shack. Danny would leave the shack (and his writing) while Tireless cleaned up in there, which never took her long-usually, less than the time it took Danny to make himself a cup of tea in the main cabin.
Except for Andy Grant-and those repeat old-timers Danny occasionally encountered in the bar at Larry’s Tavern, or at the Haven restaurant, and in the grocery store-the First Nation cleaning woman was the only human being Danny had any social intercourse with in his winters on the island in Georgian Bay, and Danny and Hero saw Tireless just once a week for the ten weeks that the writer was there. One time, when Danny was in town and he ran into Andy Grant, the writer had told Andy how well the young First Nation woman was working out.
“Hero and I just love her,” he’d said. “She’s awfully easy and pleasant to have around.”
“Sounds like you’re getting ready to marry her,” Andy told the writer. Andy was kidding, of course, but Danny-if only for a minute, or two-found himself seriously considering the idea.
Later, back in the airboat-but before he started the engine or put the ear guards on the bear hound-Danny asked the dog: “Do I look lonely to you, Hero? I must be a little lonely, huh?”
IN THE KITCHEN OF DANNY’S HOUSE on Cluny Drive -particularly as the year 2004 advanced-the politics on the writer’s refrigerator had grown tedious. Conceivably, politics had always been boring and the writer only now had noticed; at least the questions for Ketchum seemed trivial and childish in comparison to the more personal and detailed story Danny was developing in his ninth novel.
As always, he began at the end of the story. He’d not only written what he believed was the last sentence, but Danny had a fairly evolved idea of the trajectory of the new novel-his first as Daniel Baciagalupo. Danny was slowly but gradually making his way backward through the narrative, to where he thought the book should begin. That was just the way he’d always worked: He plotted a story from back to front; hence he conceived of the first chapter last. By the time Danny got to the first sentence-meaning to that actual moment when he wrote the first sentence down-often a couple of years or more had passed, but by then he knew the whole story. From that first sentence, the book flowed forward-or, in Danny’s case, back to where he’d begun.
As always, too, the more deeply Danny immersed himself in a novel, the more what passed for his politics fell away. While the writer’s political opinions were genuine, Danny would have been the first to admit that he was mistrustful of all politics. Wasn’t he a novelist, in part, because he saw the world in a most subjective way? And not only was writing fiction the best of what Daniel Baciagalupo could manage to do; writing a novel was truly all he did. He was a craftsman, not a theorist; he was a storyteller, not an intellectual.