But maybe it does, and maybe I’m just fooling myself, because I’m afraid to do anything else. Maybe everything’s linked, like atoms; all the component parts of some unknown universe, laid parallel beside our own. Maybe it was fate, always: inexplicable, inescapable.
Be nice if it was, I suppose, on one level, because then there would never have been anything I could’ve done—or not done—to make what happened . . . happen. Then it would’ve been out of my hands from the very beginning. From long before.
And none of it would be my fault.
That conversation with Safie is actually the last thing I remember clearly from our entire trip. It’s after this point that things begin to skew, smearing together, a tangle of moments I still find difficult to set in linear order—I know certain events happened, but not when or how, let alone why. Luckily, I have Safie’s footage to refer to, with its built-in time-stamp and freeze-frameable visuals, as well as her physical notes, scrawled but scrupulous, in a series of sixty-sheet Staples mini-notebooks she bought in bulk; she’d used them to track continuity on editing jobs, mostly, developing a quite amazing eye for detail. And all of that becomes even more important now, when I no longer have Safie herself to consult with.
But that’s for later, right? A place for everything, with everything in its place.
Safie’s notes say we reached Quarry Argent around 4:30 P.M., by which time I was pale and slightly faint from vertigo, but I refused to stop long enough to recuperate—just chugged some water, donned a pair of wrap-around sunglasses I’d bought at Shopper’s Drug Mart, and set off for the museum. The person who answered the door was Bob Tierney, interim director, standing in that weekend for actual director Sylvia Jericote, who goes up to Gravenhurst every October to spend time with her family.
Tierney hadn’t been there during Jan Mattheius’s sojourn in Quarry Argent, but he knew the basic details, and when we showed him the clips from Untitled 13, he perked up considerably. The footage shows him as a square-set guy with hyperthyroid eyes and an unfortunate neckbeard, gesticulating excitedly as he tells us: “Wow, that looks so much like her paintings! It’s uncanny, huh? Isn’t it just. You know, we have the largest collection of Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb in Canada, not that she was ever so well-recognized, you understand, outside of Ontario.”
“We’d heard that, yeah,” I can hear myself say, from slightly outside the frame. “Love to film those, if the museum’s okay with it. And Mr. Whitcomb’s private papers, you have those too?”
“Right, right; we’ve a whole three file boxes on Mr. Whitcomb at least, down in the basement. Though two of them are mainly about the mine, and I guess you probably don’t want to see those.”
“Not as such, no.”
Later, in the hospital—recuperating—I scrolled past Safie’s beautifully centred shots of Mrs. Whitcomb’s art, arranged earliest to latest, and was frankly amazed by their complete lack of familiarity. Oh, they all shared a certain visual kinship, obviously; all fell inside a particular spectrum of artistic influence, displaying Impressionist or even Fauvist leanings and an Orientalist design sense, much like Mary Cassatt’s domestic portraits or Odilon Redon’s famous “chimères.” The colours she used were pale and slightly off, even in the studies she’d done as a teenager, as though she routinely diluted everything in her paint box with white lead or Chinese yellow. Her favourite subject matter seemed to be country landscapes that, on closer examination, proved to have figures lurking suggestively in almost every part of them—white-draped, long-limbed, oddly contorted, their faces hidden by hands, hair, the folds of their flowing robes.
One of the most evocative, done when she was only thirteen, was of a cornfield that could have literally formed the backdrop for Untitled 13. Indeed, when I examined them more closely and cross-referenced them with Mrs. Whitcomb’s films, almost all of the paintings soon began to look like location scouting stills done in oil: the swamp from The Old Man With a Frog’s Mouth, the dock on the Lake of the North itself from In Spring We Drown the Winter, the quarry where The Pots With Candles In Them are dug up. I remember staring at that one for at least a minute, the shot in which the chief excavator lifts a random pot lid free replaying in my memory: inside, a quarter-face with a single eye, blinking, bloodless. And the carefully lettered title insert card immediately afterwards—Those Old Heretics Have Been At It Again, Mocking God’s Will With Their Evil Ways And Feeding Their Elders To The Earth—could that have been Mrs. Whitcomb’s own handwriting, that slightly spiky copperplate?
The story that movie was based on, from The Snake-Queen’s Daughter, ran a page long at most: For it is told how near Riga, before Christ took hold, those old heretics used to sacrifice their old and young alike at harvest’s end, to seed the fields and bring on next year’s crop. How they cut them into pieces then put those pieces into pots with candles in them, each signifying the soul cast away to be eaten by She Who Gives All, who walks behind every row. And when they were taken up by godly men and asked to defend their actions, they said only: “But what better gift to give my true Mother, the Mother of everything, than that of she who bore me or he who bred me? To fold them deep in the soil’s open mouth and let dirt fall down upon them like a blanket, softly extinguishing them, returning them to seeds in the darkness . . . unless it be my own child, of course, my best-loved, my favourite. . . .”
(And that dreadful sin was practised as well, here and there, in different places. But the priests put an end to it, as is only proper, with fire, sword,
and salt, and nothing ever grew again on the spot where these terrible criminals were finally done away with.)
“What can you tell me about Mrs. Whitcomb?” I can be heard asking Tierney as Safie tracks past the quarry painting to frame a miniature of a flower garden in full bloom, so small yet vivid it almost seems like a tiny window opened from one season onto another. “Does anybody know where she came from? Or why she was committed to Miss Dunlopp’s in the first place?”
“Well, it’s all pretty vague if you’re just looking at the official documents—she doesn’t have a birth certificate, for example, so she had to visit Europe under her husband’s passport on their honeymoon—but we were eventually able to find a copy of Miss Dunlopp’s register. The year that Mrs. Whitcomb was admitted, there were only three other orphans who stayed at the Home, and two were boys who got fostered out quick, apprenticed to local farmers; the third was a girl who never shows up again. It’s like she just vanishes, but if she’d died Miss Dunlopp would’ve recorded it, because that tended to happen a lot—there was a definite protocol in place for dealing with it. So what we think is this girl might’ve been Mrs. Whitcomb, except Miss Dunlopp changed her first name to Iris and gave her her own last name, never making a clear connection between the two.”
“Why do you think she would’ve done it that way?”
“Oh, that’s because the other girl was kind of famous around here. There was a scandal associated with her—nothing she did, more something got done to her—so Miss Dunlopp probably wanted all that forgotten, to give Mrs. Whitcomb a fresh start.”
“What was this other girl’s name?”
“Giscelia Wròbl. She came from up around God’s Lips, or maybe Your Ear; was a lot of farmland in between, with quite the little community of Wendish Anabaptist immigrants—her father, Handrij Wròbl, defected from one of their sects after his wife Liska died in childbirth. But the other Wends mainly moved away after it happened.”
“After what happened?”
Tierney pauses. “I’ll go get the file,” he says, at last.
Safie’s notes say we asked for copies of the stuff he showed us next, and Tierney obliged us, same way he did with almost everything else we requested; poor guy spent a good couple of hours xeroxing stuff from Mr. Whitcomb’s non-mine-related box alone, later that evening, while Safie and I checked into our little room in the Gooden Tymes Bed & Breakfast down the street. But the file on Giscelia Wròbl was considerably lighter, which you can see Tierney apologize for. “We had a fire back in 1957,” Safie’s notes have him saying. “And then a flood, then another fire . . . you’re sort of lucky we have anything from that time period at all, really. 1886 just wasn’t a good year, by most accounts.”
There were three newspaper clippings: one from Chaste, one from Overdeere, one from Upper New York. Story must’ve travelled, and I could see why. I remember doing research about the turn of the century, how there were a series of Millennialist scares as the 1800s drew to a close, though obviously nothing like what would happen in 1999, let alone what had happened in 999. Sometimes these were jump-started by actual cults—the Children of a Living Voice set their followers three or five separate deadlines for the apocalypse, for example, depending on your sources, before finally giving up on the idea. But then again, telling people the world’s about to end has always been big business of a sort, though it’s not as though Handrij Wròbl made any money off seeing his particular version of it through to conclusion.
According to all three articles, Handrij was such a recluse that locals first figured out he might be going a little wacky after he let all his animals go, then harvested his crops too early for them to be worth anything, stacked them together in his barn, and burnt the whole thing down. When the constabulary arrived to arrest him for endangering his neighbours, Handrij’s family convinced them he’d already run off; actually, he was lurking in their root cellar, where he passed the time praying and pounding nails into his own head “like Jael with Sisera,” as the paper from Chaste put it. When night fell, he collected his children and mother-in-law, leading them at gunpoint into the smoking ruin of his fields, where they spent the next two weeks waiting in vain for Jesus Christ to arrive on a chariot drawn by angels and whisk them off to heaven, hopefully without the minor inconvenience of having to die first.
On Tuesday morning of week three, Giscelia was discovered hiding underneath a pile of ashy dirt and discarded stalks, the sole survivor of the incident—her siblings and grandmother having either died of privation during their wait or had their brains beaten in. Handrij, meanwhile, was once more notably absent. A subsequent manhunt failed to turn up any leads, though a week later a man’s body was recovered from a nearby swamp with its head neatly severed at the neck, the wound cauterized, as if with a red-hot implement. And two years after that, the next person to plough Handrij’s “cursed” field broke his blade on a human skull buried a foot or so beneath the surface, with four iron nails driven halfway through its right-hand occipital ridge.
“She was blind, hysterically, when they found her,” Tierney tells the camera. “Spent the next few months at Miss Dunlopp’s, eventually regaining her sight, and started to paint sometime soon after. People thought it was a marvel—this uneducated farmer’s daughter, no culture but the Bible, making the kind of art she did. Used to have blackouts, go into these trances and paint all day and night without stopping, like she was sleepwalking. Got bad enough they had to tie her to her bed and feed her knockout drops just to make her rest. But Miss Dunlopp said her hardship was a gift from God, so they had to let it run its course, and as Giscelia—Iris, by then—got older, she stopped doing it quite as much. Miss Dunlopp also told anybody who asked it was a mercy she didn’t remember more about what’d happened.” He pauses. “That last part was a lie, but again, I can’t help but think she meant well.”
“How would you know she was lying?” Safie asks, from off-screen. To which he shrugs and answers, “Because we have her statement—Giscelia’s, Iris Dunlopp’s, Mrs. Whitcomb’s. From right after she was rescued.” One last nod, toward the file in my hand. “It’s in there, at the bottom.”
Statement of Giscelia Ezter Wròbl, aged nine years & eight months, collected 1886, at Miss Guinevere Dunlopp’s Formatory for Orphaned Girls and Boys (Schoolmaster Euan M’Latchey, acting as clerk):