Jimmy is still lying on his side, facing the window.
The principles they spoke of, he and Linda, their freedom to love, those were never undone. Not even on their wedding day. Not overtly.
And the marriage has lasted. Canada has lasted.
He is keenly aware of two things now. The stalks and leaflets of the fern blades on the window seem hoary but alive, even though they are an illusion, merely a cold replica of a living thing. And the bed. He is aware of the bed.
He eases from his side onto his back.
He turns his head.
The bed is empty.
Not that she is gone, Heather Blake. She has never been here.
He lifted himself from the doorjamb yesterday morning and stood straight and thanked her for her Internet expertise, and he turned away from that little cocking of the head she gave, as if she’d expected him to say something else. Lately she always seemed to be waiting for him to say something else. But he turned and went about his business.
Through the years he has acted three times on the principle of personal freedom that he and Linda agreed upon. Briefly acted. The incidents were discreet but never intentionally hidden; they simply were never spoken of. That deceptionless silence also was decided between them. There’d been no need to say anything; their daily lives, each with several separate friendships and separate responsibilities in their business, especially during the two decades on Twelve Mile, made that easy. The commune founder seemed to have been a brief thing for her. Jimmy is not sure if or how often she has exercised her privilege, since.
But why exactly is his own bed empty now?
He does not quite regret it. If he has regrets, he could still act. But he does briefly wonder why.
The answer, he senses, lies in the image of the fern frost lingering deep in his chest like a nascent cough. Long ago he and Linda left their parents’ religion — left all religion — behind. But for the past few years there have been things Jimmy’s been trying to work out in some other way. Most recently he has been telling this to himself, which, indeed, he does again now: It is only science of the past hundred and fifty years that has shaken our belief in our consciousness surviving death. But elemental science gives us examples that confirm the ancient and abiding paradigm. The caterpillar, for instance, does not even have the sensory mechanism to perceive the butterfly it will become; but it will be transformed nevertheless.
He is sixty-eight.
He coughs, drily, from the chill he carries inside him.
Surely the pale nakedness of Heather Blake would be a more certain hedge against death.
And yet it isn’t, somehow. The young feel they are immortal. Must they, to care so much about fucking?
He is to have lunch with his leather tanner today. But Jimmy wants simply to drive the three hours home. The lunch is mostly a social meeting. Maybe he can pull the meeting forward to a morning coffee.
And he does.
So shortly after one o’clock he turns off the Trans-Canada Highway onto Twelve Mile Bay Road. For nearly a week there has been no snow and the road is clear, the drifts and plow-spew mounded up on both sides of the narrow pavement, tunneling him home. After seven miles he takes the fork onto Harrison Trail along the north side of the bay, and six miles farther he turns off Harrison toward the water and into his ten acres, thick with snow-swathed white pines.
He emerges from the tree line, and off to the right is the south-facing, two-story, board-and-batten, Italianate house he and Linda restored from a century’s worth of battering by Lake Huron winters. The place is a homely architectural idea, especially in its simplified farm version, a box with a low-pitched hip roof and a runt of a front porch. A Birkenstock of a house. But perhaps even because of that, it has always felt right to them, and they’ve made it their own.
He took their Volvo to Toronto and he parks in their adjacent garage. Linda’s Forester is gone. He hoped to catch her at the house before going out to the barn. He didn’t even have a thought of what they might do. Just sit together for a while. Talk about small things.
He walks the hundred yards west along their asphalt connecting drive to the leatherworks, their converted and expanded three-bay English barn where they still make their own highend handbags and purses, satchels and briefcases, portfolios and backpacks, sketchbooks and journals and Apple appurtenances. The car, the two SUVs, and the pickup of the four women who work for him are aligned before the barn. There are no marked spaces on the asphalt skirt but most days the order of the vehicles is the same, the spacing even. His Gang of Four is meticulous in everything.
As he approaches, the low roiling of his mind subsides. There should be laptop satchels and messenger bags ready for edge finishing. When the pieces are intended for shelf stock it’s understood Jimmy will always do the finishing himself. As he’s become successful and volume has increased, he’s let all the other work go to his gang. But this near-last thing, this labor-intensive thing, subtle to the eye but a hallmark of a quality bag, this he has kept for himself on as many of the bags as possible: the application of his special formula of beeswax and paraffin wax and edge paint layered and heated and sanded half a dozen times and sometimes more, sealing the leather tight from rain and snow and the moisture-laden air itself. He has occasionally wondered, but never tried to calculate, the number of hours of his life that he’s been sealed inside the doing of this thing. Jimmy’s Zen, the women of the leatherworks call it.
He steps through the middle bay door.
As soon as it’s shut behind him, before he deals with people, he pauses and takes in the smell of the new leather, thick in the air from a recent shipment of top-grain sides. The leather that he buys, from the man he saw this morning, is speciaclass="underline" trench-cured, packed tight in rock salt and buried in the earth for three months; and bark-tanned, bathed with oak and hemlock. Gamey still, this smell, fatty, faintly briny, but with an undercurrent of a smell like hazelnut. He closes his eyes to concentrate on that deep-current scent, a promise of the settled, sweet-fumy leather smell to come, something his customers will want to put their faces against, to breathe in.
He opens his eyes.
In this central barn space, the women, knowing his ritual, are looking up from their stations, waiting for him. Two of them have been cutting pattern pieces, skiving edges — the skiving the only thing done by machine on the best of their bags — and the always laser-focused Mackenzie twins have been hand-stitching.
“Good afternoon, Gang of Four,” he says.
“Good afternoon, Jimmy,” they say in unison.
All but Mavis immediately return to work.