for Forrest Gander
The first foot is found on August 20, 2007 on the shores of Jedediah Island, and it is Lisa Hall who finds it. On an otherwise virgin stretch of sand and stone, she comes across a size 12 Adidas running shoe with a white tube sock lolling out of it like a tongue. Lisa picks it up knows instantly, without having to open the sock, that there is a foot inside. Later, she will tell a reporter from the Richmond News that there had been something about the weight of it, but also something about how the sunlight lay scattered over the sea. To the Campbell River Mirror she will confess that what had surprised her most was not the discovery of a severed foot, but rather her immediate recognition of what it was.
Lisa holds the shoe in her lap as the launch skips across the sound. She tries but cannot remember the name of the man piloting the boat. Gulls soar in long arcs in the sky over islands.
Lisa Hall came from Modesto, California, where her father owned a sheetrock business that her mother operated, and where one day, under the belief that a fully lived life meant saying yes to everything, no matter how repugnant, she watched a video that ruined her in a way that she will never quite understand, except by the wrong word, ruin, and a persistent craving for the irrevocable. She was fourteen years old.
Lisa spent the next decade running away from home, returning sometimes with bruises on her face or tracks on her arms, a smattering of senseless tattoos, though never in tears and never with an inkling of remorse. It seemed to her parents that she always came back more defiant than when she had left. That’s how it seemed to Lisa, too, even though she tended to run off with the opposite expectation.
One day the car Lisa’s mother was driving hit a transfer truck and Lisa’s mother died on the side of the road beside a boy no one recognized, who carried no identification and whose body was never claimed. Lisa was mowing the grass when her father brought the news. She took it in stride, finishing the yard both front and back. Her life had by now acquired a kind of inertia, a feeling of brokenness and inevitability so deep that it was almost holy, so that although everything surprised her, even the inconsequential expressions of strangers, very little really got to her. Like a body in freefall, she understood that she had some control over her life, but that it did not matter much. Lisa tried to explain this to her father when she left for the last time, but it came out all wrong.
Thank you, she said.
After the funeral, where the priest had made a vague but impassioned speech on the theme of mystery and punishment, Lisa left Modesto for Richmond, British Columbia because she had read somewhere that Richmond was home to the two largest Buddhist temples in the Western Hemisphere, and because once, in women’s shelter in Northwest Texas, she had seen Richard Gere interview the Dalai Lama on television. Lisa’s father gave her two thousand twenty-seven dollars for the trip and a bag full of his clothes and some clothes that had belonged to her mother.
The police identify the model of shoe Lisa found as one sold only in India. A sneaker of distinctively low quality, in the words of the official report. The foot makes the national news. Lisa is interviewed. She sees herself on TV.
The phones in the local police detachment ring ceaselessly for a week and then fall silent altogether for three days. Calls come in from all over British Columbia and Washington State, Oregon and Alberta, as far away as Nebraska. Even the cops are unsettled by how many people want to report a missing person, friends and family, most of them male, some of them Indian, all of whom had had disappeared. It is the opinion of one sergeant that many, if not most, call more than once.
A second foot is found less than a week later, also a size 12 running shoe, though Reebok this time, not Adidas, on the shores of Gabriola Island, a sparsely inhabited islet north of Jedediah that is home to nearly 100 petroglyphs dating from around 1,000 B.C. to as recently as 1929. It is a right foot this time.
When she arrives in Richmond, Lisa takes a taxi directly to the Ling Yen Mountain Temple, a perfect replica of one somewhere in China done up in lustrous gold, red, and green. Gradually it dawns on Lisa that most of the temple’s monks have the ruddy skin and sincere features of Midwesterners, and the sight of them all together in the main hall praying in silence fills Lisa Hall with an unexpected feeling of disgust. She finds the temple of the International Buddhist Society more to her liking, though in the end she abandons it, too, once she discovers that success in the practice of meditation comes only at a terrible cost: whenever she stills her mind she sees once again the horrible video, though to say that she sees it does not adequately capture the breadth of Lisa Hall’s experience, the way that whenever her mind goes quiet she revisits with all of her senses, all at once, in an overwhelming spiritual onomatopoeia, the horrible thing she had previously only seen. She is not as sad to leave the second temple as she had been to leave the first, for the discovery of the foot has given her a sense of belonging to something greater than herself in a way she suspects the silencing of unwelcome desire never could.
Lisa rents a detached apartment in back of a Chinese widower’s house for two hundred dollars a month and gets a job cleaning exhibits at one of Richmond’s two First Nations museums. She dusts exquisitely carved canoes once used for war and for fishing. She polishes the bent boxes, the many shamanic masks, intricately carved wooden clubs and tall, wooden totems, Gitxsan and Kwakwaka’wakw. Without warning, Lisa’s life, at least between the hours of eight and four thirty, overflows with privileged moments. Significance, she thinks, as she stands on the top rung of a ladder and rubs the beak of a god with an oiled rag. Over and over that word, such that gradually it displaces in her mind, in her memory and reservoirs of hope, certain old yearnings and instincts attached to words like chaos, earth, yearn, the real, and she is happy. Significance, she repeats, and Kwakwaka’wakw, practicing, though for what she did not know.
Kwakwaka’wakw.
Of all the museum’s employees, there are two who do not regard Lisa Hall with contempt or suspicion: a middle-aged woman named Carol, whom Lisa cannot help but dislike on account of her resemblance to the girlfriend of a man who assaulted her a few years back, in Redding, California, and a shy, slyly mischievous Tlingit man named Daryll. From her first day Lisa finds herself attracted to Daryll, to the bones of the wiry body she pictures underneath his loose clothes, shirts always a size too big, pants held up by a homemade belt of nylon cord.
After a while she and Daryll begin to eat their lunches together, apart from the others in a storeroom full of undisplayed exhibits. During one of these meals she tells Daryll why she had left the first temple and he remarks the irony, which Lisa does not appreciate.
There’s a difference between a religion and a museum, she says, though when pressed she cannot put her finger on the distinction. She tries to change the subject, but Daryll will not let it go. The way he speaks to her, quiet and calm but full of confidence and command, turning over her ideas to gently expose their weak spots and hopeless contradictions, stymies and confuses Lisa.
Nevertheless, she says despite everything.
One night Daryll suggests that they stay in the museum after hours. They go up onto the roof where they smoke cigarettes and drink rum out of coffee cups from the break room as the sun sets into the harbor. Lisa shows Daryll the constellations her father had taught her over many evenings in Modesto, she even makes some up—the hunter, the hourglass, and the plow—though Daryll does not seem to notice. He is enjoying himself and the cool, thick air of spring.
I haven’t had sex in over a year, Lisa says, partly to Daryll, partly to the horizon, partly to the rum in her cup.
That so, he says.
It is six months before another foot is found, this one also washed up or deposited on the shores of an island off the coast of mainland British Columbia, a place called Valdes, some fifty kilometres from where the others were found and where evidence of human habitation goes back at least eight thousand years. It is another right foot, presumably a man’s, in a Nike basketball shoe, size 11.
In June, Lisa is fired from the museum for accidentally breaking a nineteenth-century amulet carved in the form of a land otter with a woman on its back, which she had been inspecting closely. She soon finds another job at a breakfast place by the wharf frequented by fishermen and the occasional tourist where Daryll’s brother Dwight is the manager. One Sunday the three of them, Lisa, Daryll, and Dwight, who could almost be his brother’s twin though he is nine years older, drive up Route 99 in Dwight’s pickup to Lion’s Bay, where there is a nudist beach. Because of how long it takes Dwight and Lisa to close the diner, and because of heavy traffic in Vancouver—some American football teams had come to play in the False Creek stadium—they do not arrive until late afternoon, by which time the beach is empty, if anyone had ever been there in the first place.
A thin stretch of sand by the highway.
Grey water and rocks.
Dwight parks on the far side of the road and the two brothers get undressed right there on the shoulder, throwing their clothes in the bed of the truck. Lisa watches them without moving a finger toward the buttons of her shirt or jeans. She looks hard, hard but not closely, if that makes sense, at their faces and hands, the hewn look of their muscles, their identical brother’s cocks. Maybe Dwight is a little plumper, probably because he eats at the diner, she thinks, and compared to his brother, at least, it looks like he trims his pubis. The men hardly seem to notice her as each takes a handle of a metal ice chest and lift it from the truck and carry it across the highway toward the beach without a word to Lisa. She watches them go, watches the backs of the naked brothers walking toward the spuming sea, the shining cooler suspended between them. The sea, the shore, all of it is like a fire that threatens to engulf her, rising toward the sky.
On June 16, 2008, a left foot in a men’s size 11 Nike is discovered on Westham Island. The Chief of Police in Delta, the nearest town to Westham, orders a DNA test, even though everybody knows about the other size 11 Nike that had been found on Valdes, barely thirty kilometres to the north and west. To the surprise of no one, the tests confirm that the fourth foot is indeed the pair of the third. It is suggested in the Delta Optimist that perhaps the cave tunnel to Valdes is involved. The Optimist devotes a whole column to a description of a cave whose mouth opens in the center of that island, its extension beneath the bay in the direction of Westham, and the rockfalls and flooding that have prevented anyone from exploring the passage in its entirety. Few take this suggestion seriously, though among those who do is a retired fisherman and net mender living on Valdes named Clyde Begat. When he reads about the fourth severed foot discovered on the shores of the Salish Sea, he descends that very day into the cave and sets about clearing the tunnel of obstructions. At present he has spent nearly two thousand consecutive days underground breaking and rearranging the stone, state and federal holidays excluded.
One morning in July, Clyde Begat, who had come into Richmond in hopes of raising money or labor to assist him in clearing the tunnel, comes to the diner for breakfast and sits at one of Lisa Hall’s tables. She does not know him. He is just another Indian to her, a kind and tired-looking man who tips exactly eighteen percent, down to the penny. That night she lies in bed with Daryll and dreams of maps without geography and ghosts who never lived, and the next morning she reads in the paper that four feet—that is, three others than the one she had held in her lap—have already been found on shores not far from where she now lived.
Lisa and Daryll go to the movies, mostly horror and adventure. They share meals at the houses of Daryll’s friends where they eat bland food prepared with tenderness and expectation. For the first time since she was a teenager, Lisa Hall goes out on proper dates.
She begins to talk a lot about what she calls the underside of presence, which for her is not absence but something else. Whatever it is, Daryll does not feel like helping her understand.
It’s like you’re talking about the wind, he says.
The next foot is discovered on August 1 by a woman who wishes to remain anonymous. She stumbles across it on the mainland of Washington State, near the mouth of the Pysht River where in 1900 a Klallam village, ceded to the natives in the Point No Point Treaty of 1855, was razed while the villagers were away netting ducks. That the foot is found here is significant to both Clyde Begat and Lisa Hall, who had, unbeknownst to one another, each begun to scour the area papers for news of severed feet. They both know the story of how when the Klallam villagers returned with their haul of coot, mallard, and bufflehead they found a blank space where their village had been, and how the youth were confused and assumed that they had made some sort of mistake and that their village lay elsewhere, while the elderly acted as if all their lives they had been expecting their homes to vanish as soon as they were out of sight. Daryll had told her that story; it was, she realized much later, likely the only bit of area lore he had ever shared with her, despite her constant questioning. After DNA testing, the foot inside the size 10 Asics running shoe is determined by the Clallam County authorities to be of human origin. […]
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Lowry Pressly is a writer of fiction, essays, and cultural criticism, whose work appears widely. He lives on Rhode Island and teaches at Harvard College.
“Lisa Hall Smiles” was originally published in The Puritan (now The Ex-Puritan) as the winner of the 2015 Thomas Morton Memorial Award in Literary Excellence judged by Miriam Toews.