I Cheerfully Refuse

by Leif Enger

Why, you ask. How would I know? When a flame is lit move toward it.

This phrase lit up an old hallway for me, and I tried to follow it with another question or two,

had no wish to wish them well,

The side decks were also embellished with gulls, so too with the tiller and aft rail. So soothing was their company that I tried to retreat below without noise or disruption, but the gull I’d first startled—who must’ve been sitting on the hatch as I opened it—said a small phrase, murk murk, and quietly lifted himself in the air. At this the others took notice and, still without panic, decided en masse to go rest someplace else, someplace without a greasy emerging behemoth. They got up in a small cloud of twenty or thirty birds and flew off with faint questioning cries. How easy and unworried they looked, rising and reforming. How lyrical the piping of their wing feathers. How I hated to see them go.

Whatever you don’t give them they’ll take out of your bones.”

In this way Flower and I poked and drifted in idle drafts up the coast of Ontario, past the entrance to Nipigon and up the Black Bay Peninsula. The sun flared and I got down to sleeves. The keel hummed easily over depths so clear boulders forty feet down shone like pebbles you might lean over the side to pluck. The northerly breeze smelled of spruce marshes and occasionally of damp smoke, which made me feel safe and fully forgotten. We thought we were remote in Icebridge and took some pride in that, but here along the fifty-mile volcanic stone peninsula I saw neither roads nor buildings, no emblem of human ambition or discord. That night I slipped into a primeval cleft and anchored in water still as sky. Boiled a potato and ate it with salt and a little oil, then slept in the cockpit to the booming cry of a heron. In a dream this bird surfaced as a godlike sentry guarding the entrance to the Slates. In a resonant croak it allowed me to enter. And when I sailed out again, Lark was aboard smiling and took the helm without a word. With her at the tiller I took the lines and winches. This episode was as real as the gash on my chin. The pain of waking can’t be told. I sat up uttering a lament of my own that traveled over the water in a vanishing decay.

The horizon was dirty and the waves were back to horses. Sometimes a gust knocked one’s mane clean off and scattered it abroad. The wind remembered ice.

skin-covered howling void.

But I couldn’t despise Burke; I could’ve been Burke. That’s what I believe. Maybe I still could. What scares me is the notion we are all one rotten moment, one crushed hope or hollow stomach from stuffing someone blameless in a cage.