Barefoot at the Lake Page 11

  Mr Muskratt’s fish were always just right – like the pictures in my father’s Field & Stream – fat and fresh, and although the lake teemed with fish and cottagers could catch their own, the sight of those bright green fish in Reg Muskratt’s canoe was always picture perfect. My mother never passed up the chance of buying some. When Mr Muskratt visited the other cottagers he never got out of his canoe but if my father was there he did, tying his canoe to the dock, going off together to look at this and that. I burst with pride when that happened. ‘Tonto and the Lone Ranger are making plans,’ I’d tell Grace. We would go down and stare deep into his canoe. He didn’t seem to much care for it, not the way the cottagers took care of theirs. The inside of his canoe was covered in dried dirt, and seaweed and fish scales. His handmade maple paddles were darkened with age, one blade repaired with black electrical tape. There were tarpaulins, nets and a flat granite rock bound by rope that he used as an anchor. Even from the dock we could smell the tar he used to repair leaks.

  Sometimes, after Mr Muskratt and my father had finished whatever they were doing – taking apart the pump from the well, jacking up a corner of the bunkhouse and wedging rocks under it, he stayed and my mother prepared coffee and cake. The men didn’t talk much other than about the job at hand but one day my father asked Mr Muskratt what I knew had been on his mind.

  ‘Say, where do you go fishing?’ he asked.

  ‘The lake,’ was the answer.

  Dad went silent but I could see he wasn’t happy with that answer.

  ‘Use live bait?’ he eventually asked.

  ‘Nope,’ Mr Muskratt replied.

  ‘Lures?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Mr Muskratt finished his coffee, got up from the table, said, ‘Next week?’ My father nodded, and he left.

  NOTHING

  HAPPENS

  As I finished drying the breakfast dishes and my mother put them back in the cupboard, she said, ‘Go talk to your uncle.’

  She tried to hide the tenseness in her voice but I knew when she was pretending everything was normal, and now she was pretending. Besides, before she made breakfast I’d heard her call him a fool and I knew that he wasn’t. Children could be foolish but not adults, especially Uncle Reub. To me he was the cleverest adult, the most intelligent one, the one who knew almost everything and if he didn’t know something he was honest and told you he didn’t.

  Uncle Reub was back in his chair on the lawn, looking down the placid water towards the bridge. Flies were bothering him because every now and then he waved his hand across his face.

  ‘What should I talk about?’ I asked.

  ‘Just talk to him.’

  I wanted to go to Cedar Bay to help Rob, Steve and Perry build a raft, but Rob had told me I wasn’t invited.

  ‘I’m going to take Angus for a walk,’ I answered and my mother replied, ‘After you do that talk to your uncle.’

  I went in my bedroom where Angus was in the clothes cupboard in his basket, his big brown eyes wide open. I picked him up and looked into his eyes. They were the same colour as mine, dark chocolate, and for the first time in my life I wondered what it would be like to be a dog, to think like a dog. Did he think the way I did, wondering what he’d do today? Did he wonder why the clouds moved so fast? Did he know when Mum was moody and needed to be left alone or when she needed someone to just listen to her talk? I carried Angus outside and put him down, but instead of going for a walk we went over to my uncle.

  ‘Mum says I should talk to you,’ I said.

  ‘Did she say what you should talk about?’ Uncle asked.

  ‘No, just talk to you.’

  We were both silent. Angus wandered down to the shoreline where he found a dead sunfish, brought it back to the grass then carefully and purposefully rolled on it.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked.

  Uncle sat up straighter, turned to me and I noticed, also for the first time, that my uncle’s eyes were as brown as Angus’s and mine. ‘We all look the same,’ I thought. ‘If our eyes look the same do we all think the same?’

  ‘Your mother brought me a bologni sandwich.’

  He paused then continued, ‘Brucie, that’s thoughtful of you to ask.’

  They were silent once more.

  ‘Nothing to do today?’ Uncle asked.

  ‘It’s boring,’ I replied.

  ‘Have a look at my watch,’ Uncle suggested.

  I loved Uncle’s watch. The numbers were large. In daylight the numbers and hands looked light green but at night they glowed in the dark.

  ‘Watch the second hand.’

  I did.

  ‘Keep watching the watch.’

  I did.

  ‘Brucie, did you notice that time slows down when you watch it?’

  It did take an awful long time for the second hand to go all the way around the dial but I said nothing until Uncle broke the silence once more.

  ‘Do you know that my watch and the sandwich your mother gave me and the moon are all related?’

  ‘How?’ I asked.

  ‘Brucie, science teaches you about relationships. Hundreds of years ago a man discovered a lump of rock that glowed in the dark. It was on a mountain outside Bologna in Italy. He was a religious Christian so he believed in the devil and called the rock the devil’s stone. The devil is also called Lucifer so he actually called it “luciferous” stone.’

  ‘Why is the devil called Lucifer?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Christians believe there is a devil. They call him Satan or Lucifer.’

  I looked straight into my uncle’s brown eyes.

  ‘Do you believe in the devil?’ I asked and Uncle grinned.

  ‘Yes. There’s a bit of the devil in all of us,’ he answered, ‘but we were talking about bologni sandwiches and my watch. Because the moon glowed at night people thought that it must be made out of the same type of rock, luciferous stone, but Galileo knew that the moon glowed because it was reflecting light from the sun and that the lump of rock from near Bologna was a natural mineral called barium sulphide. My watch glows in the dark because it’s made from barium sulphide.’

  ‘Who’s Galileo?’ I asked.

  ‘He was also a good Christian but a great scientist, perhaps the greatest. He knew the church was wrong about the stars and creation and he said so. You can be religious, Bruce, but that doesn’t mean you must believe everything your religion tells you is true.’

  I stared at a multitude of sky-blue damselflies hovering over the drying seaweed on the shoreline. Uncle watched me stare.

  ‘What does religion say about why dogs roll on dead fish?’ I asked.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Uncle replied. ‘I’d better get out of my pyjamas or your mother will get angry with me.’

  As he got to the cottage door I called to him, ‘What about your sandwich?’

  ‘I’ll finish it later,’ Uncle replied. He went through the screen door but was back outside in an instant.

  ‘You mean what’s the relationship between my watch and my sandwich?’ he asked and I nodded.

  ‘It’s a feeble one. That first glowing rock my watch is made from was found near Bologna in Italy where bologni comes from. If bologni is made from pork it’s called bologna, like the town, but when it’s made from turkey like your mother buys it’s bologni. Everything I say is baloney but it’s good to talk baloney.’ Uncle smiled and disappeared into the cottage.

  THE VISITOR

  My father’s grandfather was a blacksmith. I don’t know my grandfather’s occupation. All I know about my father’s father is that he abandoned his family and moved to Chicago. My father fell into his own occupation accidentally. When his family lived in Ottawa, his oldest brother, Barney, fell in love with Evelyn Byng, the wife of Lord Byng, the governor general of Canada. Evelyn Byng loved flowers and he plied her with them, but buying daily from the local florist proved expensive. For access to flower wholesalers, Barney became a florist and my dad helped out in the flower s
hop. Evelyn Byng also loved hockey and donated what became the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy to the National Hockey League, given yearly to the most sportsmanlike and gentlemanly player in the league. When Lord and Lady Byng moved back to England, Uncle Barney moved to Montreal where he set up Forum Florists in the Forum, the hockey arena used by the Montreal Canadiens. Uncle Barney was the only florist in a National Hockey League arena in North America. I wondered whether Lady Byng had a hand in that. My father helped him out there too, and when my dad, now living in Toronto, looked for a business of his own, he understood the flower business and set up Flowerdale Florists.

  It wasn’t a thriving business. Only two other people worked in my father’s flower store in Toronto. Carl was the delivery man and Mrs Henson did some flower arranging but mostly sold flowers and plants to customers. I knew Mr and Mrs Henson had a daughter my age but I never met her until, one Saturday morning, Dad arrived with her. Anna was neat, with long thick blonde hair the colour of peaches and cream. She kept it all in a ponytail, with a white ribbon tied over an elastic hair band and she wore two white barrettes to keep stragglers from getting in her way. I thought her eyes were the colour of a fresh summer sky and that she looked quite fetching.

  Mum had explained to us before Anna arrived that her parents were having a holiday and Dad had told Mrs Henson that Anna could stay with us for the week. Mum told Rob and me that Anna had never been to a cottage before. Although she brought a bathing suit and bathing cap with her, she arrived with lots of dresses and not much else. Her brown leather shoes had laces. She didn’t have moccasins. This was the first time in her life, she told me, she had been out of Toronto.

  It was the middle of summer. The weather was coming from the southwest and I knew it would be hot, hazy and humid, day after day, that one day would just follow the next with no change, even at night. I knew it was good to be out of the city when that happened.

  After Anna met the rest of the family, Mum asked me to show her around the cottage. I took her to the dock, the boathouse, the tree house and the bunkhouse where guests usually slept, but because she was so young Mum had decided she’d sleep in the spare room in the cottage and Uncle would move to the bunkhouse.

  By the time the tour was over it was time for lunch. Anna asked where she could wash her hands and when she returned she asked my mother what we were having. She was told peanut butter and jam sandwiches and she asked what type of peanut butter. ‘Crunchy, dear,’ was the answer.

  ‘What type of jam?’ she asked.

  ‘Grape jam,’ Mum answered.

  ‘What am I drinking?’ Anna asked and she was told that as a treat everyone was having fresh-squeezed orange juice.

  I was surprised at all these questions. Rob and I ate what we were given. We knew not to ask.

  Anna enjoyed her lunch and finished it all.

  ‘I want more orange juice,’ she said, lifting her glass from the table in the direction of my mother.

  ‘I want never gets.’ That’s what my mother always told us when we forgot to say ‘Please’, but without much ado she refilled Anna’s glass although I saw her catch my uncle’s eye and her eyebrow rise a little.

  After lunch I took Anna to meet Grace. On hot days like that there are always deerflies and horseflies buzzing around, especially if you were swimming in the lake. You just get used to them but Anna screamed and screamed when a horsefly dived around her hair and I had to swipe at it for what seemed an eternity before it left and Anna calmed down.

  Grace was lying on her bed in her bunkhouse reading a Nancy Drew book when we arrived. I introduced them and while Anna was looking around the bunkhouse I whispered to Grace, ‘I think she’s pretty.’

  ‘She isn’t,’ Grace replied, then she said she had to do something or other for her mother, left the bunkhouse and went into her cottage.

  My visitor and I were already partway down the point so I suggested that we walk up to the county road and across it to where the wildflowers were at their most luxurious. Walking up the widened track, I asked Anna, ‘Do you believe in God?’ and she said, ‘Yes, he’s everywhere in everyone and everything.’

  ‘My mum says that God can’t be everywhere so he made mothers,’ I replied.

  ‘He couldn’t have made my mother. She hurts me,’ Anna said.

  When we reached the road I saw something down towards the Nichols’ farmhouse and we walked over to investigate. It was a just-run-over garter snake with the last of her young crawling out of her crushed body, slithering towards both sides of the road. Anna held her head with both hands, jumped up and down and screamed.

  ‘Shush!’ I told her angrily. I was upset to see the dead mother snake and irritated at Anna for being so uncaring, for showing no respect for the dead mother. I picked up the baby snakes, sometimes two or three at a time, and placed all of them together in the roadside ditch, where the weeds were lush and the ground cooler.

  ‘We’ll go back to the cottage now,’ I said firmly, after I finished, and walked there so fast Anna had to break into a run now and then to keep up with me.

  I hoped that Robert would be at the cottage when we got back but he had gone off to Steve’s. Anna said she wanted to unpack and I was relieved to get rid of her. I went to find Uncle Reub who was in the bunkhouse.

  ‘She’s come here to bother me. She’s very childish,’ I said and sat on the end of my uncle’s bed.

  ‘She’s very demanding,’ I continued. ‘Her mother hurts her. She’s very pretty.’

  Uncle looked at me.

  ‘Did she tell you her mother hurts her?’ Uncle asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  ‘Do you want to be her friend? She’d like that,’ he said and I shrugged my shoulders.

  ‘She’s only here until next weekend. If you want to be a good friend let her say what’s on her mind. And if you think she’s pretty let her hear you say that about her to others.’

  Over the following days, I decided to be good to Anna although I hated her prissiness and her lack of manners with my parents and my uncle. My mother was always saying, ‘Examine the contents, not the bottle.’ I thought hard about that. Anna was the bottle and the bottle was attractive. The more I looked at Anna the more beautiful I thought she was but the more I examined what was in the bottle the less I liked her. I introduced her to the lake but she hated it. ‘The bottom feels icky,’ she said.

  I showed her crayfish and she said they looked like they were from a horror movie. I showed her how to put a worm on a hook and she screamed and said she would faint if I ever did that again. She was afraid of fish, afraid of frogs, even afraid of ants. I found her increasingly annoying.

  Uncle Reub spent as much time that week with Anna as I did. They went for walks together. Uncle Reub never asked my mother to join us when he walked or talked with me, but when he was with Anna he asked Mum to join them and she did. Mum smiled a lot when they talked. She always absently touched people and when she talked with Anna she held her hand or stroked her cheek. Sometimes she had her serious face on and I knew something was troubling her. I asked my uncle what they talked about and he told me they were just letting Anna say what was on her mind.

  Before Anna arrived I had thought that each day was new and different but with Anna there I began to think they weren’t. I had set routines, checking the shoreline before breakfast, going to frog bog with Perry, rowing with Grace, fighting with Rob, the fathers arriving on weekends. With Anna there that rhythm had changed.

  I tried to stick to my routines and was happy that for the rest of the week my uncle spent considerable time with Anna. He told her some of his favourite short stories and also some of his long stories, the ones that meandered every which way but were still fun to listen to.

  Grace seemed to keep an eye on Anna. Wherever Anna went, Grace was sure to find her, just to be there. When I took Anna to the abandoned barn, Grace followed. After I gave Anna a helping hand climbing into the hayloft and we sat there talking about nothing much, Grace
sat down beside me and held my hand in hers.

  On the day before Anna was due to return to the city I decided to row her out to the new diving raft and Grace accompanied us. It was another hot day and for some reason or other the mallard ducks were squawking like nobody’s business. My father had bought sections of the old floating bridge and he’d had some of the twelve-inch squared timbers towed by one of the Blewetts’ logging boats back to the cottage. He used some bridge timbers to build the foundation for a new dock, and clad it in the smoothest finished pine so we wouldn’t get slivers in our feet. In fact almost all the cottagers on the point bought sections of the floating bridge and built new docks from it, solid docks that would withstand the ravages of winter ice and spring storms for decades.

  My father bought extra bridge timbers and built a diving raft for all the children on the point to use and clad that too in the finest finished pine. We arrived at the raft and Grace and I went for a swim with our life vests on. We weren’t allowed to swim at the raft without them on, unless Rob or Steve or one of the other older children accompanied us. Grace and I played in the water as we always did, splashing each other, grabbing each other around the waist. When we did that we could feel each other’s warmth through the cool lake water. But then Anna said she wanted to go back. It was her last full day so I stopped playing and got out of the water and Grace followed.

  I stood up to untie the rowboat from the raft, with Grace standing beside me. Anna stood up to get in the rowboat but as she did so Grace said, ‘Whoops!’ and bumped into me, and I knocked against Anna, who fell in the lake.

  ‘My hair!’ was the first thing Anna screamed.

  I felt upset, and amused. I didn’t like seeing her cry but enjoyed seeing her in the lake, and with her face and hair wet I thought she looked even prettier. I pulled her back onto the raft, wrapped her in my towel and we rowed back to the dock. This time I didn’t let Grace row. I rowed.