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.
Yet Danny was unavoidably remembering those last two U.S. helicopters that left Saigon -those poor people clinging to the helicopters’ skids, and the hundreds of desperate South Vietnamese who were left behind in the courtyard of the U.S. Embassy. The writer had no doubt that we would see that (or something like that) in Iraq. Shades of Vietnam, Danny was thinking-typical of his age, because Iraq wasn’t exactly another Vietnam. (Daniel Baciagalupo was such a sixties fella, as Ketchum had called him; there would be no reforming him.)
It was with little conviction that Danny spoke to the yawning, otherwise unresponsive dog. “I’ll bet you a box of dog biscuits, Hero-everything is going to get a lot worse before anything gets a little better.” The bear hound didn’t even react to the dog biscuits part; Hero found all politics every bit as boring as Danny did. It was just the world as usual, wasn’t it? Who among them would ever change anything about the way the world worked? Not a writer, certainly; Hero had as good a chance of changing the world as Danny did. (Fortunately, Danny didn’t say this to Hero-not wanting to offend the noble dog.)
IT WAS A DECEMBER MORNING IN 2004, after the final (already forgotten) question for Ketchum had been taped to the door of Danny’s refrigerator, when Lupita-that most loyal and long-suffering Mexican cleaning woman-found the writer in his kitchen, where Danny was actually writing. This disturbed Lupita, who-in her necessary departmentalizing of the household-took a totalitarian approach to what the various rooms in a working writer’s house were for.
Lupita was used to, if disapproving of, the clipboards and the loose ream of typing paper in the gym, where there was no typewriter; the plethora of Post-it notes, which were everywhere in the house, was a further irritation to her, but one she had suppressed. As for the political questions for Mr. Ketchum, stuck to the fridge door, Lupita read these with ever-decreasing interest-if at all. The taped-up trivia chiefly bothered Lupita because it prevented her from wiping down the refrigerator door, as she would have liked to do.
Caring, as she did, for Danny’s house on Cluny Drive had been nothing short of a series of heartbreaks for Lupita. That Mr. Ketchum didn’t come to Toronto for Christmas anymore could make the Mexican cleaning woman cry, especially in that late-December time of year-not to mention that the effort she’d had to expend in restoring the late cook’s bedroom, following that double shooting, had come close to killing her. Naturally, the blood-soaked bed had been taken away, and the wallpaper was replaced, but Lupita had individually wiped clean every blood-spattered snapshot on Dominic’s bulletin boards, and she’d scrubbed the floor until she thought her knees and the heels of her hands were going to bleed. She’d persuaded Danny to replace the curtains, too; otherwise, the smell of gunpowder would have remained in the murderous bedroom.