Eliza Robertson’s “Vigil” inhabits a sensorially intense world, one as fluid and damaged as gently rotting peaches in a paper bag, as coppery and tensile as sunlight catching the scales of a coiled snake. Attentive to the micro-currents of desire & uncertainty that charge adolescence, Robertson renders details of ordinary incidents in a way at once lush, casual, and monumental. “Vigil” produces a gentle anatomy of feeling, a landscape difficult to forget. —The Editors and the Fiction Staff
Vigil
By then the peaches had loosened in their newspaper and juice seeped into the jean jacket I had stuffed to the bottom of my pack for when the sun would go down and we’d be surrounded by a haze of campfire where Lana would would boil minute-rice again, which she’d heap with cumin as if that made it a meal, and Jay would skewer day-old chicken, and the trust-funders would fry halloumi, and the students would colonize every burner on the inside-stove for their communal curry. I felt more annoyed than I should have about the peaches because now my jacket was scummy and I’d always resented self-bruising fruits, which atrophied by their own body weight — their vulnerability embarrassed me, like people who cried a lot. It made me want to swallow the whole peach in one mouthful. Lana didn’t let me eat Jay’s chicken because Mom raised us vegetarian and Lana still pretended that had been a principled decision, not a strategy to milk more Lucky from the same E.I. check, as it was cheaper to buy tubs of peanut butter than meat, and Mom didn’t have to cook anything. Lana didn’t let me ask the trust-funders for halloumi either because we weren’t literal panhandlers, and if you want halloumi, you should pick faster and buy some, though I was four inches shorter than my sister and barely old enough to meet child labour regulations, a fact I didn’t have to remind her because when I thought it, something like shame pebbled the air between us. But now the sun was still high and I didn’t need my jacket except to sit on — we’d stopped picking an hour ago before someone got dehydrated and slumped off a ladder. Most of the Québécois had driven to the lake but Jay and Lana lingered back at his trailer, where he played guitar in the dirt and my sister sunbathed beside him, head in his lap, breasts like two spent teabags, pointed and brown.
That morning, one of the girls had found a rattlesnake in her Blundstone, so the men started comparing knives, though rattlesnakes didn’t strike unless you cornered them, you explained. You took the boot yourself and emptied the snake away from camp, which must have emasculated the men with knives because like me, you were half their size and barely legal to work, though the farmers more or less adopted you four years ago and you picked faster than all of us. You let me see the snake before you released her — tongue a thin ribbon, nighttime violet, the rattle calcified to the end of her tail like a half-sucked lozenge stuck to a child’s elbow.
Now you had perched on the slope above camp, shaded by your hand-me-down cowboy hat, back turned to me, knees tented like you were tending a fire, book surely in hand, which drew me to you in the first place — everyone here carried books but no one else read them. They clutched tattered copies of Siddhartha or Tom Robbins, and sometimes let their eyes rest on the pages as they waited for someone to distract them. Most people had been reading the same copy of Siddharthaor Tom Robbins since Lanaand I got here in blossom season. Yesterday I caught you reading Les Misérables with a French dictionary on your lap, and last week you were reading John Steinbeck.
I decided to join you on the slope, stealing first an avocado from the trust-funder who never locked her cooler so I wouldn’t arrive empty-handed — another “rule” imposed by our mother who would show up to neighbours’ houses with half-eaten penny-packs of Neapolitan ice cream and boxes of stale waffle cones she’d received in a food hamper.
So I left Lanaand Jay at the trailer, Jay singing in his Bob Dylan voice, Lanasmiling stupidly, opening and closing the blades of his multi-tool. You disappeared from view as I climbed the bluff, then your cowboy hat peeked into my sight line, orbiting your head like a sombrero because your shoulders hadn’t grown into the brim’s girth. The novel I was reading was Dr. Zhivago, which I found hard to get into because the author kept switching the characters’ names but I made sure I read for two hours a day or the book would pad my back pocket like Jay’s Jitterbug Perfume and I had been snide about that to Lanalast week when she rolled her eyes at my choice off the free shelf and said, accusingly, that when she was my age she read The Baby-Sitters Club, and I told her I had no interest in babies or their sitters so she better be using condoms and she slapped me, but not hard, and that’s when I made the comment about Jay posturing with Jitterbug Perfume, so if I didn’t finish Dr. Zhivagoshe’d call me a hypocrite.
—Hey, I said, when I reached the mound where you’d pitched under your cowboy hat, jean cut-offs frayed around your quadriceps which gave the impression of engorgement, like the tubes of your jeans were boas sucking your thin but ropy thighs.
—Want some avocado?
I sat beside you on the dirt and placed the avocado on my bandana, which I only ever used as a tablecloth or to dab my head with sprinkler water if I felt heatstroke coming on. A tuft of mould had already sprouted from one of the peaches, which I’d also removed from my pack. When I touched the bruise by accident the skin broke and my finger pushed through.
You lay your book down. The handle of your knife peeked above your boot and I reached for it without asking, though as I did, I knew it was a trespass.
—May I? I asked, my hand suspended above your calf.
Your eyes had a solar squint to them, like you’d spent your life blinking in sun, your skin uniformly tanned from picking without a shirt on, which made me resent having to wear a shirt. I didn’t care about tan lines but I envied how primal you looked up there, swinging off ladders, letting down the fruit. You nodded, and I slid the knife from the sheath. I cut the avocado in half, offering you the big side.
—Thank you, you said. You nudged your own snack toward me, a ziplock of jumbo corn kernels you roasted yourself from the food market with a Mexican aisle for the foreign labour pickers who worked at other farms. A fresh bump swelled your cheekbone, and I wondered who had hit you, or if an unripe peach had fallen, but most of the fruit was ripe by now, and the unripe peaches didn’t fall. You saw me looking and neither of us commented. I drifted the knife around the husk of my half and passed it back the polite way, sharp end in, my hand around the blade though there was enough room for us both to grip the handle. You’d already started eating the avocado by peeling back the skin and biting off lush hunks. The roasted corn sapped my tongue of saliva as I chewed though I liked the taste of them, Tabasco and salt.
I never knew what to say to you. The courtesies most people armed themselves with deflated before they left my mouth—I could ask how your day was, but you always said good, even with a fresh bump on your cheek like a bite you’d had an allergic reaction to—another possibility, as bugs were everywhere, though I only noticed when we caught rides off the highway and they gummed the windshields with their waxy spattered insides. My sister was more skilled at asking questions—maybe because she’d done more babysitting, and that’s the role she assumed around you: the babysitter in a milkshake-pink tank top with adjustable straps that she shortened to support her breasts instead of wearing a bra. You didn’t appear enthralled by her like other boys might, but you answered her queries with more words than you answered mine because she knew how to ask. It was my sister who told me you had been homeless for a year with your brother, living in Vancouver parks and beach forts until a February blizzard drove you to a shelter who called CPS. Sure Mom drank, but I had a bedroom to return to, and the reality of your centrelessness captivated me — the canvas satchel Sharpied with your initials, the blue foam roll you arrived with, which someone had thrown in the garage where I sat sometimes for shade, your knowledge of how to sew, your quiet. The thought of you in a shelter made me want to protect you, even as I knew I could offer nothing except my own body, which I imagined sometimes: unspooling my length over yours to provide a human screen. The intimacy of this daydream made me feel closer to you in a way I understood was one-sided so I sat opposite you gnawing avocado from the husk and said nothing, even as I felt a quickness in my chest. Lanahad never asked what happened to your brother, but I imagined us twinned in this way, following older siblings into precarity, though after picking season, Lanahad I could hitchhike home where we still shared bunkbeds and Mom would make her signature “crêpes” from dollar store tortillas and packets of Nutella I’d steal from the Denny’s by our house.
Eventually I scooted around so we faced the same direction and I didn’t have to watch you in silence. I saw what had snagged your attention—at the edge of the bluff, a few feet away, a fat cord of snake puddled in the sun. She looked similar to the one that morning—sand-rose with rusty splotches, but no husk of lozenge glued to her tail. For a moment I wondered if it had fallen off, or if the females didn’t have one—she had the same eyes as the first snake, vertical, like coin-slots, but the other one was more grey, scales protruding like they’d catch your nails if you grazed your hand the wrong way. This snake was smooth by contrast. An elegant band crossed her eyes and fastened into a sort of collar. She slept with her head resting on her tail.
—Normally they avoid people, you said.
I wondered if her brazenness should concern us, like bears entering campsites or parked vehicles, unafraid of humans, fixated on their raw hamburger meat or energy bars. But I noticed this was a forced wariness. In truth I wanted to lay next to her. The sun melted into her scales, which bore an orange tint like everything else, the bunch grass and iron-rich dirt. The more minutes that passed, her trust of us—her ability to rest here—felt like grace.
—She’s not poisonous, you said.
—So she’s not a rattle?
—No.
Below, I noticed my sister had unlatched from Jay — she wandered away from the camp, shouting into the funnel of her hand. She often swivelled between these extremes: so entranced with her boyfriend she forgot I was there, then overcome with panic when she couldn’t locate me in her sightline. I didn’t like watching her panic, but it felt pleasurable in a way you’re not supposed to enjoy like scratching a mosquito bite till it bleeds. You sparked the same disquiet in me, an empty stomach I pushed to see how far I could carry it, a holding breath under water, which preoccupied me wholly, muscles bunching, attentive to every sweep of your eyes, every twitch, the field between us, and what would happen if I touched you. When I was younger, I practiced standing outside in the alley, among the gravel and dandelions and dense blooms of cat shit. I’d stand for an hour sometimes—swaying for balance but not releasing my feet from the earth till eventually they numbed. I wasn’t trying to hide, but I didn’t say anything either—even when Mom shouted at Lanafor leaving the door open, as if I were a cat who got out. I had left the fence ajar as a clue. I knew if they only looked they would find me.
It took me a moment to notice the snake was moving, because as her spots rolled forward, she left the same length behind her like dirt re-assembling beneath our eyes. She skated forward a few inches then idled again into a heavy loop. I couldn’t see Lanadown below anymore. I hoped she hadn’t gone off in the truck looking for me, because she’d miss the start of her shift and they’d cut her pay. But when you tweaked your ear as if you’d heard something, I knew it must be her stomping up here. The silence found me like it used to. I let my hands slacken over my knees and I closed my eyes. Eventually, the voices reached us, Lana’s and Jay’s, and I wondered if they might keep walking if only I sealed myself in stillness. You did the same, I noticed when I peeked, we must have looked like two yogis or snakes, coiled up and breathing through our eye slits.
Then a hotness flicked past our ears, or that’s how I’d remember it later. A swift pock split the silence. Then lashing. A limb of dust drifted up.
—Got it, said Jay, as the dust parted around the snake, her body ribboned open on the rock.
I didn’t hear what anyone said then, all I saw was the lurid red seeping into the dirt as her body stilled, and a terrible emotion surged in me like nothing I’d felt before, less purifying than rage, more helpless. I locked my arms around my knees to remain seated, for if I stood I would shove Jay off the side of the bluff, and even as I felt this action would unclog an important valve, I knew, rationally, I couldn’t do so. Beside me, you sat so motionless I wondered if you hadn’t realized yet, though that was impossible.
Yet I joined you there. Lana said something with a sharp tone—to me or Jay I didn’t hear—and eventually they hiked on while you and I sat with the dead snake. For a long time we still didn’t open our eyes.