Barefoot at the Lake Read online

  Uncle was sitting in his lawn chair listening to the radio on a long extension cord from inside the cottage and when he saw how upset Anna was he got up and walked into the cottage with her. Later they both went back outside, to the vegetable patch where they picked and ate every single ripe raspberry. I saw my uncle smiling and Anna laughing.

  That evening I lay in bed and before I fell asleep I decided I’d be extra nice to Grace for the rest of the summer.

  Dad took Anna back with him the next day and during the following week the Provincial Police car from Bridgenorth arrived at the cottage.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Fogle,’ the policeman announced as he got out of his car. ‘Mrs Nichols’ phone isn’t working so Mr Fogle phoned me to let you know he won’t be here until Saturday evening this week.’

  ‘Did he say why?’ my mother asked.

  ‘He’s short staffed,’ the policeman replied.

  ‘Thank you for letting me know,’ Mum replied, and the policeman doffed his cap, returned to his car and backed down the point far faster than I thought he should have.

  We had corn on the cob for dinner that evening, the first of the season, but both Mum and Uncle Reub were silent until my uncle said, ‘Kid, I think you should explain what’s happening.’

  My mother told us that Mrs Henson was no longer working at the flower store so Dad had to work that Saturday.

  ‘Aileen, I’m sure Robert and Bruce would like to know why Mrs Henson isn’t employed any longer.’

  ‘Children,’ my mother began, ‘in our family we might get angry and we sometimes say foolish things but we never hit each other. Ever. Especially children. I’m afraid that in other families adults sometimes hit their children and Anna lives in one of those families.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Rob asked and our mother explained to us that Anna had talked to her and Uncle Reub about how her parents treated her. Now I knew what Anna meant when she said her mother hurts her.

  ‘We told your father and he’s fired Mrs Henson so he has to work this Saturday.’

  ‘Is Dad going to teach her parents a lesson?’ Rob asked, and for the first time since the policeman arrived Mum’s face softened into a radiant smile.

  ‘Your uncle and I had to physically restrain him.’

  ‘Boys, your father might not say much,’ Uncle added, ‘but he knows right from wrong. Woe betide anyone who raises a hand to a child.’

  Rob washed and I dried the dishes after supper. We didn’t often talk with each other when we tidied up but that evening we played ‘What if’.

  ‘What if Mr Collis hit you?’ Rob asked me.

  ‘Dad would punch him so hard he’d end up on Mr Yudin’s front lawn.’

  ‘What if Mr Yudin hits Mum?’ I countered.

  ‘He’d have such a sore kisser he’d end up on the other side of the lake.’

  ‘What if Mr Everett comes into the cottage?’

  ‘We’d all punch him so hard he’d end up on the moon.’

  THE MONOPOLY

  GAME

  Some summer days were perfectly still on Long Point but more often the wind gently whispered. Even when it spoke softly, the sensitive poplars that lined the gravel road tenderly rustled and I felt good inside when I heard the trees talk that way. But now it was August and sometimes the wind suddenly woke up and then the cedars along the lake crackled and the poplars bellowed and roared.

  Rob and Steve were building a raft, while Perry and I were in the shallows skipping stones, when the clouds got angry, then full of wrath. Colour drained from the sky and the summer day quickly turned into shades of grey. Seagulls floated in the air; in the increasing wind they had no need to use energy to keep aloft. Then, in no more than seconds, the horizon across the lake went black.

  ‘Get out of the water NOW!’ Mum screamed at us and we did. I listened to the rumbling thunder across the lake and wondered whether bits of the world were breaking off.

  Curtains of rain raced across the lake towards the cottage then blasts of powerful wind hit the shoreline, blowing the lawn chairs over and I thought that God was playing his whole orchestra: the whistling wind, the churning waves, the bawling leaves.

  Inside the cottage, even with the windows tightly closed, the curtains swelled then fell as if each one was breathing in the storm’s energy. We gathered around the dining room table. We got out the Monopoly board but then the lights flickered and went out. That always happened with electrical storms. Outside it was as dark as dusk. Thunder cracks and lightning strikes surrounded the cottage. When storms like this suddenly arrived the whole world got as heavy as lead. Solid rain slid down the front windows. The windows looked like waterfalls. I stared through the picture window but I couldn’t see a thing. It was as if the whole world had capsized.

  Mum got a flashlight and checked the fuse box but she knew it was a typical power failure. It could be minutes or it could be hours before power was restored. She lit the oil lamps on the dining room table, on top of the piano and on the table in front of the big picture window overlooking the lake, then she sat down in one of the rockers and got out a paperback to read. Her brother sat in the other rocker, looking out the window, although there was nothing much to see what with the driving rain.

  ‘I’m banker,’ Rob declared. He always did. He sorted the Monopoly money and property cards into neat piles beside him and the game began. Pretty soon all of us except Steve had acquired property to build houses and hotels on and in no time at all an hour had passed. There was still no power. Mum lit a Coleman stove to boil water for tea for herself and for her brother, and as she did Steve landed on ‘Jail’ and had neither property to sell nor enough money to get out of jail. He didn’t even have a ‘get out of jail free’ card.

  ‘The bank decides to lend Steven five hundred dollars at no interest,’ Robert said and I exploded in fury, ‘You’re cheating! You always cheat. You never help me. He’s got no money so he stays in jail!’

  ‘I’m the banker – Iris – and I can lend money to whoever I want,’ Rob replied.

  One day that spring, as our father was driving us to school I’d told him that I thought the blue irises in our back garden were pretty. From that day on, Rob called me Iris, never Bruce, until a few days before going to the cottage for the summer, when Dad said to Robert, ‘Enough of that now.’

  Rob knew exactly how I would respond when he called me Iris and he was already ducking when I threw his Monopoly hotels and houses at him and stomped off, hiding my tears.

  ‘That’s it,’ Mum said. ‘Game over until you’re civil with each other.’

  Perry went into the kitchen, put corn kernels into the screened popper and started making popcorn on the Coleman. I was in my bedroom when my uncle came in.

  ‘I’ve got a story. Why not come and listen? You don’t have to sit near Robert.’

  Perry came back with hot popcorn and a bag of pretzels, and while the three other boys sat around the dining room with Uncle Reub, I came out of my bedroom and sat on the nearby sofa.

  ‘Uncle, is this one of your North Dakota stories?’ Steve asked.

  ‘Yes it is,’ Uncle replied and he sat down with us and started his story.

  ‘Beyond the trees in the land of the ghosts,’ he began, but before he got further Robert said, ‘Uncle Reub, can you make the story short instead of long?’

  ‘Fine,’ he replied. ‘Would you like to hear about the turtle who, like a wise woman, hears many things but says nothing?’

  Rob and Steve groaned.

  ‘How about how the Mighty Spirit painted spots on the fawn to protect it while it was young?’

  ‘Tell us a story about Indians,’ Perry said.

  ‘All right,’ Uncle replied and looking at me he said, ‘This is a story about how you might think you’re not strong but in fact you really are,’ and he began.

  ‘One warm summer a beautiful Indian woman was pregnant and about to give birth. She lived in an exquisite tepee where she kept everything in immaculate order b
ut her husband was seldom there. He was a young chief and had better things to do than spend time with his pregnant wife.’

  ‘I thought chiefs are always old,’ Robert interrupted.

  ‘Yes, there are paramount chiefs who are old but there are also young chiefs who lead the hunts and war parties. The beautiful woman’s chief was a young chief and he had many things to do – cut trees to make poles for the tepee, rebuild the canoe, fish for food, protect his family.

  ‘The beautiful Indian woman was proud to be married to such an eminent man. He was certainly the strongest and the handsomest of all the men in the village but even so she was unhappy and fretted. When she talked with the other wives in the village they all seemed happy with their husbands, even if they weren’t as powerful or as handsome as her husband was.

  ‘That’s not to say that she didn’t know her husband cared for her. He had just finished painting bear paws on the skins of their tepee to stop the arrows of renegade Indians and right now he was down by the lake lashing flint heads to shafts of wood to turn into arrows to shoot deer for dinner. So she consulted the tribe’s medicine man whose name was More Clever Than He Thinks.

  ‘If the medicine man had been younger,’ Uncle explained to us boys, ‘she would have called him More Clever or just More but keeping to formality she asked, “More Clever Than He Thinks, my husband is always busy making things for the tribe, hunting for the tribe, protecting the tribe but soon I will produce a child for him. What can I do to ensure he spends time with his child and with me?”

  ‘The medicine man looked at this fine-looking woman and was reminded that he too had once been married to a gorgeous raven-haired brunette.

  ‘“The land is the mother of all people,” he told her, “but you will be the mother of his own son. Name him well, and as he grows ensure his name speaks to his father.”

  ‘Boys,’ Uncle said, ‘Indians can have many names, play names, formal names that are given to them, formal names they give themselves once they’re grown up and have taken part in hunts or war parties. That’s what the medicine man meant when he told the pregnant woman to ensure her child’s name speaks to the father.

  ‘Soon after, the beautiful woman gave birth to a healthy baby boy and gave him the name Best By Far. She fed him well, sewed handsome clothes for him, taught him how to swim and spear fish and recognise the sounds of the woods. Her husband continued to do all the things chiefs need to do, hunt, fish, trap, but she could see, even if he didn’t spend his time with her, he was proud of how she was raising his son. As the boy grew she gave him a more formal name, Like Father Like Son. The other boys in the village made fun of these names and called him Minnow because he was small but he knew he had his parents’ love.

  ‘One day the boy and his father were standing in the lake looking for fish to spear when a massive muskie – as big as an alligator – crept up behind his father. As its sharp-toothed jaws opened and it was about to eat his father, the boy threw his spear into the muskie’s mouth. That spear prevented the giant muskellunge from shutting its mouth and it swam off never again to eat another Indian.

  ‘The handsome father turned to his son and said, “Now you are a man. It is time for you to choose your own name. What will it be?”

  ‘The boy thought for a while and said, “It will be Minnow.”

  ‘“But you can give yourself a powerful name,” his father replied. “You can be Son Who Saved Father or Muskie Slayer. Why call yourself Minnow?”

  ‘And the boy replied, “Because you taught me to hunt quietly and that surprise is best.”’

  Like most summer storms, the one that day passed in a shorter time than it would have taken to play a complete Monopoly game. Nature’s orchestra went silent. I walked outside by myself, where everything somehow seemed more vivid, more pure. The cottage sparkled and glowed in the sunless ozone. I knew my uncle had been speaking to me.

  THE SHOT DOG

  It was Saturday and I had been up for a sunrise more fiery red than Mr Fitzpatrick’s Cadillac. ‘Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning,’ Mum had said to no one in particular then, ‘I hope we don’t have another lightning storm later today. I phoned Camp Cleveland from Mrs Nichols’. It’s pickerel tonight. We’re taking Steven and Perry.’

  ‘I’m going to Beaver Lumber,’ my father replied.

  ‘You’ll take Bruce with you,’ she said and I felt excited. I knew Dad would be visiting more than the lumberyard.

  In the middle of summer there were always tent caterpillars in the trees along the county road, but that summer there was a plague of them. I had once asked Uncle Reub why there were so many apple and crab apple trees along the concession roads but not in the woods and he said, ‘You might hear that Johnny Appleseed travelled along all the concession roads in Ontario, spreading apple and crab apple seeds that he’d brought from England, but that’s not true. The true answer is more wonderful than that. Birds planted all those trees. They love the sugar in fruit and carry fruit seeds wherever they fly. If you give them a line to settle on, a hydro line, a telephone wire, a wire fence, a cedar fence, that’s where they poop most of those seeds. That’s why there are so many raspberry stalks along the fences. And that’s why the apple trees are on the concession roads.’

  Each summer some of the trees that grew from those seeds had caterpillar tents on them, silky caterpillar homes built where tree branches forked, but this year there were so many pests the apple and crab apple trees had already lost almost all of their leaves to the voracious foragers. Wild cherry, ash, birch, willow, witch hazel, poplar, maple, even oak trees were smothered in tents. Worst of all, the new peach, plum and Northern Spy apple trees Dad had planted behind the cottage were infested. At night the caterpillars crawled out of their tents and ate the leaves. My father was going to kill those caterpillars that weekend. He planned to blowtorch their tents to death.

  Our first stop was Beaver Lumber where we loaded the station wagon with eight sheets of four-by-eight-foot knotty pine plywood to finish the interior walls of the bunkhouse with. By the time we got to Canadian Tire, to buy a new propane cylinder for the blowtorch, grey clouds, the colour of old nickels, filled the sky. Dad walked up and down all the hardware aisles at the store. I spent my time looking at fishing tackle.

  On our way back we stopped at the ice house in Bridgenorth. That was my favourite place in the village. The wooden front was level with the ground but the back of the ice house was built partly into the side of the hill and that’s where the ice was stacked, covered in wet sawdust. On other buildings, pinewood siding weathered to an ethereal silver. The ice house’s wooden walls were black as ink. Inside was always moist and cool with the same sweet syrupy smell I loved so much at the lumberyard.

  Using his ice tongs the iceman lifted a block of Lake Chemong ice from the sawdust it was buried in and carried it to the car where it only just fit on top of the plywood.

  ‘Did he cut the ice last winter himself?’ I asked my father.

  ‘Himself. Probably last February,’ was the answer. ‘He’s a strong man. There’s his ice-cutting saw and picks,’ Dad said, pointing to a band saw with serrated teeth as big as a shark’s. ‘He used those ice picks to pull the blocks out of the lake. Then he put them on a flat freight sleigh and borrowed the Blewetts’ tractor to get it here.’

  It was drizzling by the time we left the ice house, but it was muggy so we left the car windows partly open. There was just one more stop, at Mr Everett’s farm to buy more corn. I heard that like other farmers in that part of the country, Clarence Everett tried everything to make his land productive, egg layers, swine, dairy and beef cattle, silage corn, barley, rye, red Fife wheat, Christmas trees, pumpkins, linseed, now sunflowers. Farmers like Clarence Everett grew barley, wheat and rye for milling but as often as not all they got for their hard labour was animal feed. Now he was trying corn on the cob, to sell to local grocery stores and direct to the summer people.

  As we drove up the tree-lined drive from th
e county road and slowed as we approached the farmhouse I heard a noise, ka-pow, then a yelp that cut into my heart, then again ka-pow, ka-pow.

  Dad gunned the car’s engine and shot past the farmhouse, skidding to a stop in front of the barn, where he threw open his door and, standing as straight as a hydro pole and as big as a grizzly bear, he shouted, ‘Stop that!’

  I stayed in the car. I wanted to see what was happening but was frightened by my father’s sudden anger, a rage I’d never seen before. I watched through the front window as Dad marched over to Clarence Everett. I heard shouting but I couldn’t make out what they were barking at each other. I worried because even though Dad was bigger than the farmer, Mr Everett was holding a rifle. The men waved their arms and bellowed for what seemed forever, then Dad stopped shouting and gesticulating, got down on one knee, picked up a big, limp brown dog and carried it back to the car. I knew that dog and called him Brownie, although I never knew his real name. He accompanied the farmer’s cattle when they ambled along the highway and sometimes came to our cottage to see what Angus was up to.

  ‘Bruce, open the tailgate,’ my father demanded, which I did, and Dad pushed the block of ice forward, laid the dog’s lifeless body on the plywood, slammed the tailgate shut and we both got back in the station wagon.

  My father started the engine then sat with both hands on the steering wheel, going nowhere, saying nothing. I felt all mixed up inside and didn’t know what to say. I worried that Mr Everett had a rifle and might kill us too, but then Dad suddenly threw the car into reverse, spun it around and sped back to the county road so fast he almost landed the car in the ditch when he finally braked. Again, he sat with his hands on the steering wheel, going nowhere, saying nothing and then, loud and crisp he said, ‘The bastard!’

  He didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at the dead dog in the back of the car, he just sat there then said, ‘Bastard!’ again.