Barefoot at the Lake Read online

  I was surprised one Thursday to see him at the Quaker Oats factory in Peterborough. I didn’t know that Indians worked in town. Grace’s mother took her daughters and Rob and me to the factory where there was a tour of the premises. We were told in advertisements that Quaker Oats were light and puffy because they were made by being shot from cannons, and sure enough, in the last room on the tour, there was a big black cannon in the middle of the empty room surrounded by messy piles of Quaker Oats. Mr Muskratt was in a Quaker Oats uniform sweeping the corridor outside that room. He briefly said ‘Howdy’ to us all then continued sweeping.

  We motored out into the lake and even though we were going with the strong wind, not into it, and were gliding over the whitecaps, my father drove slowly so that his wash didn’t capsize the canoe. I sat up front. I loved getting splashed as the boat broached the waves. Dad was at the back and Mr Muskratt sat on the cross seat nearest him, occasionally shouting something over the motor’s noise but I couldn’t hear what it was. As we approached Kelly’s Island I could see that Mr Muskratt was instructing Dad to slow down and go to the left. As we passed the island Mr Muskratt stepped to the front of the boat, where I was, and pointing with his right arm said, ‘There!’ My father slowed to trolling speed and headed for the wooded shore Mr Muskratt had pointed to.

  The lake bottom was steep but rocky around Kelly’s Island and as we neared the shore my father cut the engine and raised the motor out of the water. Mr Muskratt got onto the bow deck and using one of the boat’s paddles, silently guided them along the edge of the boughs of the trees that overhung the lake.

  ‘There,’ he said and I saw it before my father did, an abandoned wooden boat, wedged in a locked embrace with the trees and shore.

  I understood right away why Mr Muskratt had come to my father for help. He was the strongest man on the lake. Even Mr Muskratt knew that, and he needed all the help he could get to move that boat off the shore.

  ‘Are there dead people?’ I asked.

  ‘Nope. Lost boat,’ replied Mr Muskratt.

  There was no motor on the boat but I could see it was a much better boat than ours. It looked the same length, had the same maker’s name, Peterborough, on the side at the back and the same brilliant red-painted bottom below the splash rails, but inside it was completely different. Our cedar boat had two rear side seats to drive from and two cross seats with no back rests. This boat was also made of cedar strip but the inside was made of darker mahogany and, as well as a bow deck, it had a rear deck that made it look like an inboard. There was a white plastic-and-chrome steering wheel up front, even a glove compartment, and I thought it wasn’t fair that we couldn’t keep it ourselves.

  Without rolling up their trousers or taking off their shoes, Mr Muskratt and my father stepped over the sides of the boat into the water. They were on the lee side of the island so the water was calm and they tied the bow rope to an overhanging branch. With one man on each side of the beached boat’s stern they rocked it side to side but it didn’t budge. Not an inch. They reminded me of a dog team working together, not having to tell each other what to do, silently just doing. Both men disappeared amongst the whispering tree boughs then I heard my father’s voice, ‘Heave!’ Then again, ‘Heave!’ and again, ‘Heave!’ and again, ‘Heave!’ and I saw the boat start to move out a little from where it was locked.

  Mr Muskratt reappeared from the trees. He untied our boat from the tree branch and led it to the beached boat where he roped the two boats together and, with a powerful thrust, pushed me in my boat away from the shore.

  ‘Start the boat. Keep it in neutral. When I shout “Go!”, gun it.’

  Mr Muskratt disappeared back into the trees.

  I put the gear in neutral, pulled the starter coil and the motor roared to life. I strained to listen above the engine’s noise and when I heard ‘Go!’, I threw the gear into forward and rotated the steering handle to full throttle. The engine screamed. The propeller dug into the water with such power it seemed to empty the lake behind the boat of water. The bow bucked up but the boat didn’t move forward. I kept the throttle twisted as far as it could go. I knew what my father and Mr Muskratt were doing, using all their strength to unlock the boat from where it was wedged. It took almost a minute, a long time with the motor roaring, but eventually I saw the bow of my boat come down a little and as it did I saw the beached boat slowly emerge from the trees. Instantly I reduced the throttle and pulled the gear back to neutral. The men emerged and silently they each inspected their side of the boat’s hull. It was intact. It was seaworthy. They floated the boat onto the lake and it looked just perfect, its cedar flawlessly varnished. There was six inches of water in the boat itself. That’s what made it so heavy to dislodge from the shore. I wondered why they hadn’t bailed it first.

  Mr Muskratt signalled me to turn off the engine. The men talked quietly, then Dad got in our boat and Mr Muskratt, with the paddle from his canoe, got in the rescued boat and like a string of ducks, with the canoe the duckling straggler, we set off slowly in the direction of Mud Lake. As we approached, at a point that they had previously chosen, my father idled the engine, untied the line and threw it back towards Mr Muskratt who pulled it in. Dad gave a wave to Mr Muskratt – really just a hand up – and I watched as Mr Muskratt paddled his new boat, the wind helping him, back to his home.

  ‘Why didn’t you bail the boat first?’ I asked, and Dad told me he’d forgotten to take a bailing can with him.

  ‘Why didn’t he ask his friends on the Reserve to help?’ I asked Dad as we watched Mr Muskratt ever so slowly glide away.

  ‘He’d have to share the boat with them.’

  Dad started the motor, turned the boat and headed back to the cottage. I thought that rescued boat with its extra-long bow deck, its rear deck, its cockpit to sit in, its sensuous shape, was so much more beautiful than the boat I was in.

  ‘So will we share it with him?’ I asked.

  My father smiled and said, ‘It’s for him. He needs it more than we do.’

  THE FLOATING

  BRIDGE

  The residents of Bridgenorth decided to have a party on the fifth anniversary of the new causeway, replacing the old floating bridge across the lake, which was broken up and sold off to cottagers.

  The year my father built our cottage, 1949, was the last year that Bridgenorthers could claim title to ‘the longest floating bridge in the world’. ‘Isn’t it a shame,’ everyone had said, but I didn’t think so. The floating bridge had frightened me, that flimsy and fragile bridge. When my father drove over it I was sure our car would go through the thin cedar rails, sink to the bottom of Lake Chemong and we would all die. ‘Scared?’ my father would ask. I knew my father liked giving me a scare but had no idea why. He never took me alone on drives across the bridge. He filled the car with other children from the point, Grace and I always in front with him, Rob and the others on the back seat. Grace was always quiet, her brown eyes intent. I always teared up from fear.

  Lake Chemong is a finger lake, ten miles long, created by glaciers at the end of the last ice age. Uncle Reub had told us stories about how farmers from Britain had arrived a hundred years ago, cleared the forests and settled the land. He told us how, after the eastern shore had been cleared of its richest forests, after fields were laid out on the blackest soil and rid of their ice age crop of stones, after livestock and crops were successfully raised on that land, a floating bridge was built across the lake to access the western side. Irish Catholic families already lived there, he said. The Scottish and Irish Protestants on the eastern shore, our shore, called them ‘the Fenians’ and their village, Ennismore, ‘The Cross’. Loggers from the sawmill in Bridgenorth had already cleared that land of its best trees but the soil was good and crops grew well. To get their crops to market, the Catholic farmers had to haul their wagons around the bottom of the lake doubling the distance to town. A steamboat service across the lakes proved too expensive and so, in 1869, a floating bridge opened. It me
ant Ennismore farmers could drive their livestock straight across the floating bridge to the Peterborough market, less than seven miles away. Sometimes their cattle bolted through the split cedar wooden rails into the lake, but cattle are good swimmers and most would make it to one shore or the other. Horses were more reliable. If you were in a horse-drawn buggy Uncle said you were safe. Horses halted, even in the most miserable sleet of November, when they reached a section of open water where part of the bridge had broken away in a storm.

  Grace’s father said that to build that bridge, half-ton rocks had holes bored into them, then iron rods were placed in the bore holes, then molten lead was poured in to secure the rods. Those were the bridge anchors. One end of a chain was attached to each iron rod and the other end to a massive white pine log. During winter, horses dragged these rocks and chains and logs out onto the ice, in a straight line from the bottom on Colborne Street on the Bridgenorth shore across to the far side of the lake.

  When the ice melted the following spring those rocks sank, anchors that would keep the floating bridge in position, more or less, for over eighty years. The pine logs on those anchor chains provided staging for the cross timbers and plank sections of the bridge that was built out from near the sawmill on the Bridgenorth shore. A log boom twenty feet wide was anchored along the length of the floating bridge, to save it from ice damage during the winter but it didn’t help much. There was always winter damage. Summer too. Steamers sometimes accidentally ran into it.

  In that last year of the floating bridge’s existence, when the local people called it ‘the wandering bridge’, my father drove us back and forth over the bridge for his own amusement. I was frightened most because looking out the front window of my father’s car all I could see was water, not road, just lake water with parallel wooden rails on either side. Over time the squared cedar timbers under the surface planks had become so waterlogged the weight of a car sank the roadway below the lake’s surface. At least on the bridge itself I could see the road’s visible surface rising out of the water ahead of us. I could see the bridge was heading straight to the far shore. But the bridge wasn’t wide enough for two cars. When we met an oncoming car Dad or the other driver had to move aside, into one of the five pull outs built alongside the floating bridge, and it was always my father, it seemed to me, who did. The car’s weight meant the pull out was completely under water. All I could see was the ragged rail of the fence and the unending water up the lake and I was sure my father was intentionally driving us all off the bridge. When that happened the other children squealed with delight.

  Back in 1949, Grace’s father arranged that all the cottagers boat down to the opening of the new causeway in mid-summer. Our flotilla from Long Point had dropped their anchors a few hundred yards offshore from the lumber mill, watched the boat races, watched the Air Force Vulcan jets do barrel rolls over the new causeway, watched parachutists land in the water on both sides of the new structure. Grace’s mother thought it would be fun to water ski under the new swing bridge, which she did although the bridge master got angry with her husband for letting her. There was a lot of shouting.

  Today all the cottagers at our end of the point prepared picnics and in a gay, motley flotilla, motored slowly down the lake to the new causeway, just as we had five years earlier. There wasn’t much happening except speeches so in convoy we passed under the swing bridge then headed for the western shore of the lake for a picnic.

  It was hot and sunny but with a fresh breeze when we beached our five boats on a sandy strip of shore where cedars offered shade. Grace and I sat down on the shore to rummage through the seaweed and flotsam looking for treasures.

  ‘My bubba says if you tell a lie you have to spit over your shoulder three times or God will be angry with you,’ Grace whispered, out of nowhere.

  ‘That’s not true,’ I replied. ‘She says that because she has an accent. She’s superstitious.’

  ‘But what if it is true?’ Grace asked. She found a red-and-white plastic float in the seaweed and was following the line it was attached to. ‘I don’t want God to be angry with me.’

  I carefully tore apart the seaweed the line disappeared into. I too wondered whether we would find a good fishing lure at the end of the line, something we could use when we went fishing together.

  ‘Only grown-ups lie,’ I offered my friend in encouragement.

  ‘Children sometimes too,’ she replied then, stopping what she was doing, Grace turned her head over her shoulder to the lake and spat three times.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ I asked. I tried to sound unconcerned but felt uneasy. What dreadful lie had Grace told? Had she stolen something? Had she broken something precious and blamed her sister? Who had she lied to? Horrible thoughts raced through my mind and as they did she said, ‘I lied to you. I pretended I wasn’t worried about Angus when the porcupine shot him but I really was. I cried after.’

  I wanted to look into Grace’s eyes but she wouldn’t let me. She just stared at the sand on the beach and drew parallel lines in it with her finger. She didn’t seem comforted at all that she had confessed her lie to me but I felt curiously joyful, like a great weight had just lifted from my heart.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said, and I continued to work my fingers through the seaweed, following the fishing line. Grace was silent as I pulled a lead weight attached to the fishing line out of the tangle of weeds.

  ‘No lure,’ I said. Grace only shrugged her shoulders.

  We got up and walked to the water’s edge where we washed sand and seaweed from our hands, then walked up the beach and through the cedar trees. I offered Grace my hand to help her up the steep bank. She took it and squeezed it tight, holding onto it until she could see where the mothers had laid out their picnic in the clover pasture. She quickly ran ahead of me and when she reached the picnic, turned and shouted, ‘I’m the winner! I’m always the winner!’

  THE MYSTERY

  ‘The one reliable thing about Reg Muskratt is his unreliability.’ That’s what my mother said. She’d also say, ‘He’s a law unto himself,’ or ‘Don’t set your clock by him.’ Things like that. Sometimes Reg Muskratt appeared on the dot each Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., paddling his canoe down the lake from the Reserve, an oily tarpaulin covering the bass and pickerel he sold to the summer people. Sometimes he never visited at all. I figured he never thought a lot about the summer folk.

  Mrs Muskratt was completely different. Every now and then, after it had rained for several days running and it seemed the sun would never shine again, Grace’s mother piled all the children on the point into her car and drove us up to Mud Lake. It took much longer to get there by car than by boat. She had to follow the straight concession roads, up to the top of Lake Chemong to Selwyn, then west towards Buckhorn, then several miles down again, along a rutted and potholed dirt track she had to take very slow, to the end of the peninsula that separates Lake Chemong from Buckhorn Lake, to the Indian Reserve.

  There were no telephones on the Reserve, electricity either. The houses were made of wood, white like our cottages, but smaller. Some had verandas but most didn’t. Almost all had vegetable patches beside them. Mrs Muskratt never knew we were coming but was always smiles.

  ‘Grace, what pretty barrettes,’ she’d say, or, ‘Bruce, don’t you think you should have your moccasins on?’ Her round cheeks were as shiny as her jet-black hair. Her neighbours the Whetungs had built log cabins on their land for summer tourists and took them fishing. It was Mrs Whetung’s idea. That was no surprise, Grace’s mother said. The women on the Reserve always seemed busier than the men. I thought the men never did much, not even talk. They sat on verandas or outside the store or by the gas pump and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. Except for Mr Muskratt. He was never there when we visited and I knew he must be doing this or that, something or other. Like my father, Mr Muskratt seemed ill at ease, out of sorts, when he wasn’t busy. I figured the two men were friends because neither of them ever had a single thought
in their heads. On this visit I saw Mr Muskratt carrying boxes of fish to the Reservation’s ice house.

  ‘Done good fishing last night,’ Mrs Muskratt said, when she saw me watching her husband.

  On visits, Mrs Muskratt and Mrs Whetung always showed us how to make things ourselves, like tepees out of birch bark, fragrant dried sweetgrass and black cotton thread. They showed us how to make beaded bracelets. The women on the Reserve made these and more beautiful birch boxes, some small and round, others big enough you could use them to cover a box of Kleenex, all decorated with dyed porcupine quills or coloured beads. The women told us they collected the quills in winter, cut birch bark in late spring and gathered and dried sweet-grass in early summer. We learned that one porcupine could provide thirty or forty thousand quills of all different lengths and thicknesses and that quilling took great patience as you had to pierce your design first then pull both ends of each quill through the birch bark. Small fingers were best doing this. The women sold their crafts to Woolworths in Peterborough where most of the summer people bought theirs, but Grace’s mother always bought her beaded and quilled containers and boxes directly from Mrs Whetung and Mrs Muskratt. Once, driving back to the cottage, Grace’s mother turned to Grace and said, ‘Mrs Muskratt wears the pants in her family. She’s running for Chief in the elections next week.’ I worried that she meant that Mr Muskratt didn’t have any pants to wear.

  My father was the most successful fisherman on the point but even so I could see he was jealous of Reg Muskratt’s fishing skills. When my dad took off a day’s work and came to the cottage on a Thursday, he always followed Mr Muskratt with his binoculars the next day, hoping to see where he fished. But after emptying his canoe of his catch, Mr Muskratt always paddled straight back up the lake without stopping and my father always lost sight of him as he paddled past Kelly’s Island.