The Cheesewring – by Campbell Andersen
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When it first happened, I blamed her. I wanted to act out some sort of rage – whether it was just throwing a spoon or making a fist-sized hole in one of her canvases, something obviously reactive and stupid, although no less satisfying – but we were crying and distraught and so I held her and said the words she wanted. We made a community Facebook post (pleading for information, offering a small reward) and I drove around at night shouting the dogs’ names out the window. Some nights I imagined I would find just one of them, without the other, skirting the streets by the quarry. I tried to conceive what questions I could ask the dog that he would understand, so I could maybe find the other, but the only question that came to mind was: do you blame her too? Each shadow was charged with meaning; one week in, I stopped going out to search on windy nights because there was too much movement. Everything had the strange gait of a German Shepherd.
***
I guess now – two years later (Freyja and I standing in the yard, witnessing the demolition of the house across the street with hand equipment and heavy machines, a hailstorm of irregular sound) – we’ve reached a shared point of grief and acceptance, knowing that the likelihood of the dogs returning is at odds with reality. We’re watching one of the demolition workers knock bricks from an exposed wall with a digging bar. He takes the bricks and puts them on a pallet, lining them up, sweeping off the dried mortar at their edges, taking pride in the massive task (the wall is big and he’s doing this one brick at a time). Freyja is playing with the zip of her jumper. It goes up and down across her sternum like this when she’s anxious or thinking deeply. I want to hold her hand, but it’s been a while. I’m worried that my sudden desire to touch her will come off as jarring (grappling fingers, the clunky reach of a desperado), even though we’re engaged. We watch a red excavator strip the house of a bedroom. The mechanical arm swings down and into the building, dragging debris with it as the machine backs out. At some points, the house across the street looks top-heavy, its foundation destroyed with parts of the structure above still standing. The balance is all wrong. It makes me remember something I’d seen in a National Geographic magazine: the Cheesewring, a granite tor on the edge of a steep cliff in Cornwall, England. Seven thick slabs of rock, each a different size. It’s a tall thing (in the magazine there was a reference photo with a man beside it – for scale), reaching thirty-something feet with the granite blocks at the top much larger, thicker and heavier than those at the bottom. Simultaneously perfect and dysfunctional, a pile of rocks formed over thousands of years. I remember it was hard to look away. Hard to accept the idea that they were not deliberately constructed that way, and were instead the product of erosion, wind, rain and random chance.
The demolition worker knocks more bricks from the wall – four, five at a time, working with steady pace now – while Freyja rubs her hair between her fingers, checking it for oil. She brings it to her nose and smells it.
She says, I’ve been thinking about taking a trip, somewhere new and cheap, where the currency conversion rate is good. She says, I don’t want it to be exotic.
I find it weird how some forgotten moments are jolted by the present, stirred awake, suddenly made living. On the first night the dogs went missing (at something like five o’clock in the morning, after I’d driven around for hours, my throat sore from shouting out of the slow-moving vehicle), Freyja and I lay in bed together, on top of the covers. I still had my shoes on. Freyja had been crying and her hair was stuck to her face. I remember saying something to the effect of, Your hair looks like a series of thin rivers on a map. She took some of her hair and smelled it and then buried her face in the pillow. Outside, the sky was morning violet, and condensation had collected in the corners of the windows. In the madness of responding to the situation, we had forgotten to pull the blinds down (but there was no point in doing it then, at five o’clock, because the second day had already arrived, and we were both wide awake).
Maybe there are things I should forget about the day and those that followed – each harder and more complex in their own distinct ways (mostly due to hope, and how hope fades with time) – but I hold the vision of that day like a painting. A series in still life. Freyja moving the charity bags from the front door to the back seat of her car. How she had everything prepared. Every door being opened and remaining open (or at least ajar) so that she could move freely around the house, gathering stuff, clothes and shoes and books, old electronics, speaking to me from behind walls, asking if I had used certain items within the last year, and with every answer of ‘no’, the bags would fill up. I was at the back of the house, doing something in the laundry. The dogs confined to the backyard. The way they licked at the screen door when they wanted to come inside (the only closed door in the house at that point). My memory even extends to the tracks of dog spit along the bottom half of the screen. At some point here (with the front door open, a dry wind carrying through the hallway), Freyja’s phone rings and she walks out into the backyard to answer it, her voice lifting through the laundry window, soft and intense, nearly secretive. Then the final unseen image: the dogs, nudging through the open screen door as it closes slowly after Freyja. The picture of them moving through the house and out into the street.
Then came the collective issue: hope and time. All through the first and second weeks, things felt loaded, weighty. Freyja spent time painting (her regular themes and images, fire and wood, trees in pairs, always with vines wrapped around them because she liked the way it looked) and, at the end of the second week, I returned to work.
***
Here, in the present, I still sift the scene of that day for clues to understand how it happened, what Freyja’s phone call was about, and how maybe the dogs had their escape planned from the outset, formed in their kennel as pups. I realise that she never really said I’m sorry. Never verbalised the apology, this standard reaction to error. (Or perhaps I’ve forgotten the moment in which she said the words, having pushed the memory out from some prefrontal storage space. But this is unlikely as the scene in my head remains so clear. Down to the detail of the hair on her face. In fact, I’m absolutely sure she didn’t say the words at all. Definitely.)
***
In profile, watching the demolition worker across the street take a short break, Freyja’s face appears different. She is no longer a map from which to read directions. She could say the words. She had probably thought them. I want to reach inside her and pull them out, make her say them, make her understand the toll of loss without closure, the feeling of not knowing if the dogs are alive, wild and skittish, roaming a national park, or if they’re dead, hit by a moving car that never even looked like slowing down; or starved, bare ribs, ticks and mange, resigned to the role of host for the world’s afflictions.
She says, Maybe Vietnam, or Cambodia.
She says, Where should we go? (She speaks while still facing forward, testing the airspace of the yard, the kind of question a parent asks a child, knowing full well what the outcome will be. And I answer in my head: Cornwall, England – the long grass pinned down at right angles by the wind, a light rain falling. The Cheesewring unaffected by the gale force, positioned at the edge of a cliff. I will be up there alone, seated behind the controls of an excavator with a long, red arm. My thoughts will be narrow and focused. Something like: I’ll take this thing down, this stupid old rock stack. I will drive the excavator close, right up next to it, until I can see the small glass crystals in the granite, and I will extend the excavator’s arm and drive forward, turning the treads of the vehicle into the earth. And after a minute, I will feel the give. The transfer of weight. The Cheesewring will start to fall, the stupid fucking thing, the witness to more than a thousand years, dispersed, a series of dead rocks resting at the bottom of a hill with the ghosts of hope and time.) ▼
Image: by Tobias Kleeb on Unsplash
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