“The Burning Wood” by David Williams

David Williams’ first novel is an ambitious work—at once a story of the growth to maturity of a young man, an account of the collision between Christian and Indian cultures, and a reenactment of one of those human stories which, as Willa Cather once said, seem to repeat themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. The novel follows that difficult course between the particularity of private lives and the troubling, inexhaustible patterns of myth.

Central to the novel is the Cardiff family—the father Richard, his father Bran, and the son Joshua. They are farmers on the prairies of Saskatchewan whose difficult life is sustained by a strong Protestant faith. Joshua is the intermediary in the violent meeting of this faith with the Cree Indians of a local reservation. Essentially the plot follows Joshua’s initiation into the Indian culture through a sundance, followed by a wild and ultimately tragic buffalo hunt, after which Joshua returns to the Indian camp. But that plot is interwoven with past events drawn not only from the past history of the Cardiff family but also from the Biblical story of Saul and David, a prefiguration of what occurs between Joshua and his grandfather. The novel rests on a simple article of faith: eadem sed aliter. The same, yet different. Our lives form a story which is both unique and universal.

In this case, the unique happens to be the confrontation of this white culture with a rather derelict band of Cree Indians. Some of the finest writing in the novel is found in those passages which describe this meeting. Joshua’s first memories of the Cree come from his childhood:

He often caught sight of Indians, however, on the road running past the farmhouse. They were scattered like saskatoons on a bush on their way into Lacjardin. They would be clumped like chokecherries though, on their way back out of town, wobbling over the road as on a branch drawn suddenly for picking. In the summertime, they sat among the roadside weeds for a rest, looking like birds on a telegraph wire, except they would pass a bottle to and fro along the edge of the ditch.

This vivid, comic, and innocent view of a broken people concludes with Joshua’s memory of an Indian seen urinating in the snow outside the Cardiff house. Briefly he takes on the appearance of an angel in a Bible illustration as the steam rises above his head. Joshua’s response is to keep his little sister away from the window and, later, to try and stamp out the yellow stain which keeps coming through the snow. This debauched angel seems to follow Joshua through his youth, gradually unsettling whatever illusions he may have about the Indians until he must face their reality. His father, on the other hand, can never free himself of the fear and suspicion he feels for the Indians, as may be seen in one fine episode which exposes his entire pretense of charity. Cardiff visits the reservation in an attempt to get some men to work for him, and is met by an Indian woman who wants to sell him a doorbell. He agrees to buy it, but at a lower price. After a well delivered “gophuckyerself”, she disappears behind the house trailing the wires of the doorbell behind her. Cardiff is enraged, for it was his money which allowed the government to build these attractive little bungalows, complete with doorbells. “You see what you get, don’t you, when you try to help?” With those words he captures the dilemma of the man who is torn between a basic distrust and a conscience that dictates charity.

The accounts of the Indians are characterized by this shrewdness and a willingness to allow them a reality which is neither that of the drunken derelict nor of the noble savage struggling under white oppression. Against the Indians are set the guilt-ridden Protestant community of the whites. That faith can take an unyielding shape as in the grandfather or it can create an illusion of mercy and forgiveness as in Joshua’s mother—a child of God who is broken by her continuous arguments with her more hard-headed husband over Auntie Bee: “I know in my heart I’m a child of God. Maybe she is too. After all, we don’t know her heart. Only God knows that.” To which her husband insists that “we know her heart well enough … ” And the blackness of that heart may be such that no Christian forgiveness can change it. The official voice of this community is Reverend Haagshed who delivers hellfire sermons and Biblical parables to keep the people on the straight and narrow path. Haagshed is a rather ridiculous figure who never quite embodies the full passion of that religious faith. I find the more disturbing aspects of such passionate belief better captured in such short incidents as the story of Ivan Gezdevitch who left the Ukrainian Catholic church to become a missionary and was given the following brief farewell by this father: “‘You don’t come in my yard no more,’ he told Ivan. ‘I teach the dogs to piss on you.’”

But it is in the relation between Bran, the grandfather, and his dead father that we see the most unrelenting form this faith can take. The latter was a Welshman who “went Indian” with a vengeance, apparently contracting the syphilis which later results in the loss of Joshua’s hair. He was murdered (decapitated in fact—his bleeding trunk and severed head reappear in one of the flashbacks) by an Indian who mistakenly suspected him of sleeping with his wife. As a result of this violence, the grandfather uses his faith as a means of relegating the Indians to outer darkness. His faith thus becomes a sustained attempt to escape the terror of his father’s death. The irony of course is that he can never escape; his father’s violent connection with the Indians returns in Joshua’s marriage to the Indian girl, Lulu, an act which the grandfather can never quite forgive.

Out of this confrontation Williams creates something more than a realistic tale of the two cultures. The novel is constantly extending itself into a dimension that can only be called “mythic”. The myths of the Christian and Indian cultures appear in the novel as inherited patterns of experience which are renewed in the struggle of each individual life. Often they are an argument with death or whatever inner disquiet we may feel. One fine passage traces the dim beginnings of that need for mythic structure in life. Joshua recalls how when he was young he would catch one wing of a fly in a vice and then set the fly on fire:

The fly leaps in the fire, its buzz increasing like a rising siren. The air stinks. Then only the silence. It is finished. No, that’s a lie, it’s not finished, not for me anyway, even if for Joel, because it’s gone inside. I can’t get rid of it. That fly won’t die until I do. And what if I don’t then.

Myth begins in this need to “be rid of it”. Death persists within Joshua just as the memory of his father’s murder persists within grandfather Bran. To be free of that terror, Bran uses the Christian faith as a vast projection which answers to the emptiness he feels. But that belief becomes a trap because it is an externalization of an inner fear that will not be faced.

It is in the character of Joshua that Williams explores the complex relation between myth and the reality it wrestles with. Joshua is obsessed with a dream of a buffalo hunt which “enters his waking life” and persists there for two years. The dream is described in sentences that try to capture its still fury:

Then they were riding suddenly the horses reaching terrifically for distance bodies already blurred and elongated like greyhounds chasing deer in a meadow and it was closer than anything to flying, riders horses bison beating on soporific wings through the high dry air their close-ranked bodies blotting out the earth so as to be uniferant of the progress except that the hooves beneath them jolted on the solid ground drumming in the grass and they were all one now fused with the dust and the motion … Then only the steady dip and rise of the horse beneath him the sound like rain on a barrel of the steady hooves and Thomas beside him riding in that same peaceful fury to the silence at the edge of the world.

All events gather themselves into one continuous sentence in which the inevitable end—the kill itself—is forever delayed. That vision is enacted in what begins as a comic pursuit of a herd of cattle with the pursuers mounted on Clydesdales. It ends in tragedy when Joshua’s Indian friend Thomas is gored by a bull. Again the death and the events leading up to it are contained by a single sentence, but this time a sentence which doesn’t hold back from death, but rather draws both life and death into itself. This sense of inclusion is then confirmed when Joshua makes love to the Indian girl Lulu and sees her as both life and death.

Williams leads up to this complex vision through a series of reversals in which Joshua finds that his normal vision of things has turned into its opposite. Though Joshua is the only character who actually undergoes this shift of perspective, there is throughout the novel a subtle sense of relation between Christians and Indians. The faith of the Christians takes its own sense of identity from all that it denies in the Indian culture. Joshua’s own changing sense of value appears clearly in a dream sequence. In the final chapter he awakes beside Lulu to find that he is terrified of the coming day. When young it was the darkness of night that he feared. Now his demons seem to await him in the light of day. He imagines himself climbing the stairs into the light where Thomas, Coming-Day and, surprisingly, his grandfather stand looking not so much at him as into him. What he is actually coming to is something beyond the simple dichotomy of Indian and white, beyond that violent process of mythic projection in which we become our own victims. When Coming-Day commits suicide and confesses to having killed Joshua’s great-grandfather, he tells Joshua that what we need most is “savin’ from ourselves”. What we need are the very things we repeatedly deny. Otherwise we are trapped in the elaborate defenses we build around ourselves. The novel concludes with Joshua’s attempt to gain his grandfather’s blessing, but this is told in counterpoint to a mysterious description of a face seen in a burning wood towards which Joshua imagines himself running. The face seems to have no particular identity, as if it were beyond all recognizable torm, possibly something beyond both the terrible willfulness of the Protestants and the wild and inhuman element Joshua sees in the Indian rituals.

Often it is the incidents that lead up to this apotheosis that contain some of the finest insights into belief and fear. When Joshua is put on trial for the hunt, all those present in the court wait anxiously for him to give some reason for his actions,

as though a simple explanation would save the whole community from the need for introspection, as if the simple chain of words in the reason could be repeated in the curling rink and the Post Office until men were linked tightly together again, united and unassailable for the very reason that there was no unknown within the circle of their emptiness.

That desperate need for confirmation of belief takes a wonderfully comic form in the story of Night Traveller, an Indian who joined the Traveller’s Day parade in Saskatoon in the belief that it was named after him. After being beaten by the whites who won’t tolerate him in their parade, he makes a triumphant escape with the drum from the Saskatoon Police Boys Band. He floats off down the river and over the dam with the drum while the enraged whites pursue him along the water’s edge. As Joshua looks at Night Traveller his face suddenly appears like a potato jack-o’-lantern while the story begins to sound like a “masked trick or treat”. The Indian is indeed a trickster in this episode, one who ridicules the whites with all that they have excluded from their lives.

The language of the novel also deserves some attention. At one point there is a brief reference to a local farmer by the name of “old Bill Falkner”. The acknowledgement had to come somewhere, if not in a dedication then buried in the body of the text. The ghost of William Faulkner stalks this book, in the rhythm and syntax of the sentences,in the construction of particular phrases. One only has to look at the description of the dream of the buffalo hunt which I quoted earlier. There we find that love of an elaborate sentence structure which gathers a series of actions into one complex whole. Or there is the use of such phrases as “uninferant of progress” which recalls the strange latinate concoctions of which he was fond. Unfortunately the writing sometimes sinks to a level of violent melodrama which recalls the worst of Faulkner. I quote from the scene in which Joshua copulates with Lulu:

For a moment he was terrified, his conscious part wheeling already, set on the instant to dash pell-mell out through the bush and away though his body stood rigid and frozen before her—and the horror swelling now in the roaring silence, soul, reason, mind, whatever, gathering in furious recoil, flinching not alone from the dread of putrefying flesh nor from the thought that even thinking would be inhaled at last like a bubble exploding inward, snapped through the pinhole of a vacant skull: but from the uncreate feeling that it was Death herself, the Gorgon, Medusa-face, on which he had looked ….

This is too desperate an attempt to suggest the meeting of violent extremes. The same failure mars the scene of the road accident in which Joshua, his father and grandfather, come upon the woman whose head has been partly severed but who is still alive and moving. This seems an exaggerated and gratuitous horror which fails to be convincing.

Finally it must be said, however, that the novel is not a purely derivative work. There is a tangible base of experience which I imagine stems from William’s own youth on the prairies, experience which surfaces in the descriptions of the land, the individual characters, particularly the Indians, and the sense of immediacy in some of the stories. These prevent the novel from becoming overly schematic in its structure, while the vitality of myth gives the book that unity that saves it from being a mere collection of vivid but aimless character studies.

Robert Quickenden edits the national poetry quarterly Contemporary Verse/Two from Winnipeg. He is a frequent contributor to Canadian literary periodicals.