The Wild Heavens

  The Wild Heavens

  Sarah Louise Butler

  The

  Wild Heavens

  A Novel

  Copyright © 2020 Sarah Louise Butler

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, info@accesscopyright.ca.

  Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.

  P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0

  www.douglas-mcintyre.com

  Edited by Pam Robertson

  Cover design by Anna Comfort O’Keeffe

  Text design by Brianna Cerkiewicz

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Printed on 100 percent recycled paper

  Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The wild heavens / Sarah Louise Butler.

  Names: Butler, Sarah Louise, 1975- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190217669 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190217677 | ISBN 9781771622585 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771622592 (HTML)

  Classification: LCC PS8603.U863 W55 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  For my parents, Margaret Taylor Butler and Peter Eugene Butler; for botany and Latin and everything else

  Prologue

  In early winter of 1920, a young seminarian crouched in the snow before an impossible set of tracks. Their familiar shape, their massive size—the conjunction of the two properties simply defied reason. Each footprint was nearly twice the length of his boot, yet each showed a round heel, a raised arch, an inside toe considerably larger than the other four. But for their size, it was as though he himself had foolishly wandered out in bare feet. He brushed his fingers through the fresh snow inside one of the deep prints: just a dusting. Whoever or whatever made them couldn’t be far away.

  His scalp prickled. He stood and looked warily around. Cedar-forested mountains rose up all around him; the only discernible movement was the falling snow. The trail led out of the clearing, then wove through the trees and out of sight.

  Snowflakes alighted briefly on his cheeks and dissolved. Far off, a Steller’s jay called out in its unlovely voice; a distant woodpecker drummed against dead wood. Fluffy clusters of flakes fell densely, straight down, in the tireless, unhurried manner of heavy snow under calm winds. The trail would be covered within hours.

  The young man, Aidan Fitzpatrick, followed the line of tracks as they traversed the densely forested mountainside and began to climb. The shape of the footprints became less clear as the snow deepened on the ascent, and he started to question what he had seen until they passed through the thinner snow beneath the draped skirts of a towering cedar. Their form was, again, clearly revealed, as utterly inexplicable as they’d been at valley bottom.

  He crested a ridge and froze in place, heart pounding. It was right there in its own tracks, not twenty yards away. Covered in grizzled brown fur, it stood upright, broad-shouldered and a good nine feet tall. It turned to face him, revealing features that were both simian and human, then it regarded him with a calm, perceptive curiosity. The young seminarian could only stare mutely, his fear held loosely—ready to grasp but at arm’s length—because his primary impression was not that the creature was frightening, but that it was magnificent. It was impossible, and yet there it stood. His right hand twitched up to cross himself, but he stilled it. His legs felt suddenly weak and he fought the impulse to fall to his knees.

  What is this? By what grace am I offered this sight? He was startled to feel the warmth of tears in his eyes and the creature saw this, too. It took a step forward and he closed his eyes, imagined its massive hand gentle against his cheek. The cry of a raven pierced the silence. He opened his eyes as the creature turned and loped away, striding so elegantly on its two legs that he felt an undeniable sense of kinship and reached out his hand. It moved swiftly through the trees and disappeared. He rushed forward, raced along its tracks until they stopped above a low cliff; for as far as he could see, the snow beyond was unmarked. He looked up at the snow-encased trees that surrounded him, but he could see no sign of the creature. There was only the clear, single line of tracks, leading nowhere.

  The young man stood among those snow-ghost trees, looking out over the valley. Nothing moved. That was no animal. And yet, neither was it a man. Man and beast were on different planes, separated from each other not only by the trappings of civilization but by an existential and clearly defined wall; how, then, could such a creature exist? So much like us, so much like them? He pondered the sense of affinity he had felt at seeing it walk, and knew that it was not whimsy but a reordering of taxonomy as he had understood it, which naturally begged the question—he paused, Darwin and the book of Genesis sparring in his thoughts—then shook his head.

  His damp undershirt clung to his skin. Each exhalation was visible in the cold, still air and the snow continued, soft and persistent. A chill began to seep through his heavy pants and sweaters, and he turned away and began the long walk down the mountain, weighing his allegiances, negotiating compromises. He was struck with the vertiginous realization that the foundations of his faith were crumbling beneath him, and he lost his footing and tumbled downslope, landing on his wool-swathed backside in the snow.

  The forest around him was profoundly quiet. Snowflakes dusted his eyelashes and out of old habit he looked up, imagining he could discern their source, but there was only the grey backdrop of sky and the seemingly infinite whiteness moving toward him, and whether the falling snow materialized from a few yards above or from the heavens themselves, he couldn’t say. He knew only that perfect stellar snowflakes continued to settle on his ungracefully sprawled form, and that the cedars rising up around him would persevere long after man and his foolishness, that their dense boughs sheltered tiny chickadees, their feathers fluffed against the cold, their tiny hearts beating fiercely. He knew there were men who could make peace with a God who was not Creator, and he knew himself to be no such man.

  He stood, brushed himself off and continued down toward the valley bottom, along the mingled tracks of the miraculous creature’s feet and his own boots. As he walked, he began to prepare the necessary explanations for his confessor and his fellow seminarians and, God help him, his elderly parents.

  A week after the encounter, Aidan Joseph Fitzpatrick stood, for the last time, outside the stone building that had been his home through years of study. The wind was cold and he felt it carried, somehow, the disappointment of his peers and superiors, the dashed hopes of his parents and even the weighty shadows of his ancestors, those threadbare and half-starved Irish farmers who arrived on this continent carrying little but the faith their great-grandson would lose forever in a patch of fresh snow. A gust lifted his hat from his head, he chased it down and the brief motion warmed him—he felt again his own convictions, fresh and untested but right there with him, as close as his warm and beating heart.

  He stepped onto a westbound train in the Interior mountains of British Columbia and emerged the next morning on the Pacific coast, where he would enroll in a secular university to study biology. His knowledge of Latin gave him the disorienting but not unpleasant impression that he had stepped sideways into a parallel world, one where faith was meaningless and evidence everything but somehow the language was just the same. After graduation, he continued his studies and became a veterinarian. He saved for years to buy the chunk of raw land where he’d first see
n the tracks, then moved back to the Interior and started on a cabin. After a year of travelling widely for work, he took a teaching position at a university some hours north. He found that it suited him, and began to spend much of each year there, returning in the spring and summer to the unfinished cabin, to the land that was beginning to feel like his home.

  When the cabin was finally built, he dragged a nine-foot length of cedar into the clearing and began, painstakingly, to carve. He managed a decent replica of the creature’s body, but finally conceded his struggle to reproduce the impossible nuances of its countenance. He stood the flawed sculpture inside the doorway of his new home and it brought him satisfaction each time he saw it—at first despite, then later because of, its imperfection. It seemed fitting that the creature could not be so easily captured.

  He married and had one daughter. She, in turn, would have one child: his only granddaughter, a slight, willful girl who would grow into a woman with a secret.

  My origins include not only that young seminarian but also the creature who, at little more than a glance, turned him from his proscribed path of Catholic priesthood and celibacy. Had my grandfather, Aidan Fitzpatrick, not happened upon those tracks in the snow in 1920, it is unlikely that I would ever have been born.

  Part One

  One

  2003

  Last night’s snowstorm has blanketed the forest in quiet. In the loft of my cabin, I dream of my late husband, Luke. We stand in a forest clearing on a winter night, and he turns toward me. As he opens his mouth to speak, I am awakened by a noise from downstairs.

  Early morning light bathes the loft. Still hazy, I think, mouse. The sound has that light flitting quality of something alive, almost weightless and in rapid motion. I try to fall back asleep but the gentle racket from downstairs persists. I sit up. It’s not a rodent. Its movement is more swishing, fluttery, as though a large tropical moth has strayed thousands of miles north of its range into the Interior of British Columbia.

  I leave my bed and climb down the ladder to the main floor. A fox sparrow has inexplicably found its way inside and is flying lightly and repeatedly at the one window in the cabin that can’t be opened. I open the door and stand back; this has been effective with the bats that occasionally find their way indoors on summer nights. The sparrow, lacking the bats’ ability to echolocate, continues trying to escape through the glass. I move forward, thinking to catch it in my hands, but then I retreat to lift a thin cardigan from the hook. The preoccupied bird seems not to notice my approach and I swiftly enfold it in the sweater, making a gentle shushing noise in an attempt to convey that I am not a threat, the same soft shh-shh-shh I calmed the kids with when they were babies. The sparrow goes still, but I can feel the thrum of its pulse as I carry it to the open door. One fragile, toothpick leg sticks out from the woollen bundle and I obey an irrational impulse to tuck it neatly back in.

  I stand at the open doorway in the muted light of a landscape draped in fresh snow, and unwrap the sweater. There is a moment when one sharp claw is caught, held by a wisp of wool, and then the sparrow tugs free. It flies off, over a single line of massive tracks that bisects the clearing, marking the passing of a visitor I haven’t seen sign of in decades.

  My heart clenches. The sight of these tracks awakens a hope I only now realize I’ve been holding on to, clutching it so long and so tightly that surely the passage of time should have killed it by now, if not my suffocating grip. I hardly dare to look away as I pull on a pair of boots. My steps are silent on the snow as I move closer. I crouch before one of the tracks, lean in and blow forceful, directed huffs of air onto its snow-dusted surface. The fresh, dry snow disperses in a white cloud, revealing an apparently human footprint that is twice as long as my boot.

  I spread my fingers to set them into the smoothness of the toeprints. Something flits in front of me and I look up to see a whiskey jack settling onto a cedar bough at the forest edge. It watches me intently, as though I might unearth something that would be of interest to us both.

  I stand, shivering in my nightdress. The trail skirts around the gnarled apple tree, then crosses the clearing and disappears into the cedars. I walk up the cabin steps, mentally preparing a checklist. Snowshoes and collapsible ski poles, the emergency kit and both thermoses, filled with hot, honeyed tea. I’ll need trail food, nothing that will freeze solid in my pack, and my own winter boots, not this old pair of Luke’s I’ve pulled on, two sizes too big and broken open at the toe. They are really no use at all anymore, but I haven’t yet managed to throw them away.

  The cabin door creaks as I open it. The wooden sculpture stands inside the door like a sentry, its features suggestive of man and ape and god, all at once. The feet are oversized, even for its considerable height; it looms over me as I rush around the cabin retrieving items to stuff into my pack.

  The creature, whose image my grandfather held in his mind as he carved, has been called many things, but Grandpa feared the inevitable day that one of us would let its name slip, revealing in an instant what he had dedicated a lifetime to keeping secret. So, for our purposes, I was taught to call it, to call all of them, “Charlie,” and I have continued to do so. Always Charlie, although at least one was male and another certainly female, and although the individual that passed through these hills in 1920 was likely not the same one whose tracks I came upon as a young girl in the 1960s—which was itself perhaps not the one Luke tracked so many years later.

  I pause at the coat hooks. I have kept just one of Luke’s old coats, an insulated wool parka, and I am tempted to bring it now but it’s too bulky to pack, and too warm for the exertion of what will surely be an uphill climb. I leave it on the hook and pull on my own jacket and boots, swing my loaded pack onto my back and tighten the straps. I reach up to touch the smooth wood of Charlie’s broad chest. His eyes stare straight ahead and he looks at once anguished and resigned, as though he knows a terrible secret, the revelation of which will change nothing. I slip on my gloves and leave the warmth of the cabin, cross the porch and step down into the snow.

  I follow the tracks across the clearing and beneath the heavy canopy of cedars, where the fresh snow has only lightly penetrated and the marks of each toe are clearly visible. I follow them downslope, roughly following the trail to the lake, through cedar and hemlock, past the dead, frozen stalks of devil’s club and thimbleberry and the bare branches of aspen. My spinning thoughts have distilled into two sharp points, and they march alongside me in their own rhythm. Charlie. Luke. Luke, Charlie. Charlie, Luke. I walk quickly, setting a pace I won’t be able to keep. Through the trees, I can see the white expanse of the lake, spread out across the valley bottom.

  I met Luke when we were both seven years old. I can still see him as he was then: his open, expectant face, his narrow chest and skinny, little-boy arms. He looks back at me; I can see everything that will come to pass between us and I hesitate, unable to decide whether to let it spool out the same way again, or to turn from him and walk away. His eyes beseech me to believe the impossible words forming on his lips. It was right here on this beach, in late August of 1959.

  Two

  I stepped off the porch and out into the warm air, a wiry, freckled child squinting in the late afternoon sun. Steep, forested mountains wrapped around the cabin in all directions but one. Downslope from the clearing, the cedar forest was shot through with sparkling flashes of sunlight glinting off the small lake that filled the narrow valley bottom. The sun warmed my bare arms as I plucked seeds, one by one, from the nodding, yellow-ringed head of a stunted sunflower that would never grow taller than me, despite enjoying the sunniest spot in the clearing. I slipped the seeds into the back pocket of my jeans and ducked under the cedar boughs onto the worn dirt path that led to the lake.

  It was cooler under the ceiling of trees. A jay’s raucous call rang out and I stopped, scanning until I spotted it perched on a tree; its shape familiar but its plumage blue and black, instead of blue and white like the ones back ho
me in Ontario. The day before, Grandpa had told me its full name but I couldn’t recall it, so I tested myself on the names of the plants living on the forest floor. Falsebox, with toothy leaves like my new front tooth coming in, prince’s pine—not princess, as I’d thought before. Western teaberry, with its rare, cinnamon-tasting red berries, and rattlesnake plantain, which had been a disappointment when Grandpa showed it to me, as it bore no resemblance to any kind of snake. I thought of the garter snakes back home, my mother pointing one out to me, telling me not to be afraid as I shrank back against the comfort of her body. Now I felt a stab of fear, thinking of her, and I moved more quickly along the trail.

  I stopped and crouched before the live squirrel trap I’d woven yesterday from flexible young branches. I peered inside: nothing. I dug the sunflower seeds out of my pocket and laid them out in a trail, leading to the trap. While waiting for the squirrels to notice my offering, I concocted furnishings for them from bits of moss and wood. Occasionally I hooted softly to attract owls, until it occurred to me that my hooting was doing little to endear me to the squirrels. I continued down the trail until I’d nearly reached the lake, then held seeds on my outstretched hands and tried to lure the chickadees from the shrubby dogwood and snowberry that grew between forest and beach. I imagined the birds’ slight weight, their feet scratchy against my palms. One had a damaged foot—the clawed toes were misshapen into a ball of tissue; the bird seemed untroubled but I was determined to take it home and nurse it back to health, regardless. The word home had a blurred, unsettled edge to it; this was to be my home now, the cabin and Grandpa. I’d been here three days already, each morning waking disoriented in my loft bedroom in the cabin, but it still seemed impossible.