Barefoot at the Lake Read online

  Sometimes I didn’t understand what my uncle was telling me but I always knew that even if I didn’t understand, it was – somehow – interesting.

  Our next-door neighbour’s cottage had green windows and doors and the one next to that, Grace and Glory’s, had red ones, so to be different my father painted his windows and doors a deep, dark cobalt blue. Under the relentless summer sun, the cobalt had now turned to a soft powder blue.

  At the end of June the water in the lake was still too cold for me to swim in, but once we finished our chores Rob went for a dip. He was a better swimmer than I was. Mum had promised him that he could try for his Royal Life Saving Society Bronze Medallion this summer. All I had was my Red Cross Junior badge.

  Using a pump from the tool house – my dad’s storage cabin – I inflated a car tyre inner tube and floated on it. I didn’t mind the cold on my legs when the sun melted my back.

  ‘Chicken!’ Rob spat as he surfaced near me and splashed me with cold water.

  ‘I’m going over to Grace’s,’ I shouted to my mother.

  ‘Not in the water, you’re not, unless Robert goes with you,’ she called back from the front of the cottage where she was pushing the rotating-blade lawn mower across the long grass. Uncle Reub had moved his chair onto the dock to get out of her way. Like Angus, Dad had now disappeared.

  ‘I’m not going with Robert,’ I replied.

  ‘Then get out of the water and walk over,’ she said.

  I did. Grace was more fun than Rob.

  CATCHING

  CRAYFISH

  I peered over the side of the boat, looking for the flat rocks I knew crayfish hid under. My father used crayfish for fishing for bass, pickerel and muskies. Grace rowed. In the rowboat we could go far down the lake, farther than we would ever go if we walked in the shallow waters along the shoreline. Less than 500 yards from our cottages a grove of cedar trees had collapsed in a storm into the lake. It was too deep to walk around them and there was too much poison ivy on the ground around their trunks to get past on land. In the rowboat we were on a new adventure, visiting a part of the lake past the fallen trees we had never visited before.

  Looking through the calm, clear water I saw small circles of clean rocks and knew that’s where fish – rock bass, I’d been told by my uncle – had spawned just a few weeks before. He had told me that this is how fish made their homes attractive for their partners and said that’s what my mother did with the cottage. Close to shore I spotted unending flat rocks in the shallows and told Grace to row to the shore. We tied the rowboat to a tree and went hunting.

  ‘Walk slowly,’ I commanded. ‘Don’t scare them.’

  Grace knew how to do this. She was as good at catching crayfish as I was. All these rocks were just perfect. We both knew that but neither said so out loud. In slow motion Grace lifted one end of a flat rock off the bottom without causing a ripple on the lake’s surface and there it was, a perfectly camouflaged crayfish, the colour of limestone and sand. My father had shown all the children on the point how to catch bait, worms at night by muffled light, minnows in minnow traps under the dock and crayfish under rocks. Slowly, like Mr Everett’s brown dog stalking a rabbit, she put her hand into the lake and lowered it towards the crayfish, then in a flash with her thumb and her forefinger she grabbed it behind its claws and pressed it to the bottom of the lake. When she was sure it couldn’t bite her she raised it out of the lake and showed it to me. Its big claws swung back on both sides, trying in vain to hurt her.

  ‘That’s too big for fishing,’ I said, but she kept it anyways and put it in the rowboat.

  I was pleased with Grace, even proud of her. None of the other girls in the cottages on Long Point ever wanted to go crayfish hunting, but she always did.

  We decided to work in opposite directions, me on one side of the rowboat and Grace on the other. Silently, with bent backs and eyes close to the water we looked for flat rocks lying on other rocks, places where crayfish could hide from us, and those rocks were everywhere. Just about every rock we lifted had a crayfish hiding underneath and within a short time the rowboat was crawling with dozens of irritated crayfish. In their anger some were biting others. Each time another was thrown into the rowboat, the nearest crayfish raised its opened claws. In the white bottom of the boat they looked like a congregation of praying scorpions in a dry desert.

  After a while Grace got bored and walked to the shaded shore where she sat on a large rock between two great cedars that leaned out over the lake. Behind her was a meadow of summer flowers, airy and shimmering and light, gently dancing to the soft south wind. I could see that no one had ever walked through that meadow. ‘I wonder whether this is what heaven’s like,’ I thought. On the shoreline spring storms had washed away soil from around the trees’ massive chocolate-brown roots and peering out from within those roots Grace saw two tiny eyes.

  ‘Get the flashlight,’ Grace ordered, but I knew I couldn’t. It wasn’t there.

  Rowing at night shortly after we arrived, Uncle had broken our shared silence by saying, ‘Let’s throw the flashlight into the lake.’ I was disturbed by the suggestion. I didn’t want to. The flashlight had made me feel safe and, besides, it was my father’s.

  ‘I’ll buy another. Turn it on. Let’s throw it in the lake and watch what happens.’

  I turned it on. Holding it in both hands, not really wanting to throw it in the lake, I asked my uncle, ‘How long will it shine?’ and my uncle, smiling a broad grin, said, ‘Long enough to entertain all the fish in the lake. Then, when it’s served a purpose, when it’s had a reason for living, it will go out.’

  I liked that answer so I gently placed the flashlight into the water and watched as it twinkled into the deep. For a moment I had an impulse to follow it, to see what lived at the bottom of the lake.

  I didn’t tell Grace why the flashlight wasn’t there, I just said, ‘It’s not here,’ and quietly walked over to where she was.

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ I said.

  ‘Stupid! It’s your fault it’s gone.’

  ‘It’s not my fault. Anything would run away just looking at you!’ I hissed.

  Sometimes Grace was like Angus. She didn’t think first. She just said things or did things. That made me angry and I said things I didn’t really mean. We both decided not to talk to each other ever again and to go back home.

  Rowing back to the cottage – with Grace rowing because she said so – the army of angry crayfish marched this way and that on the bottom of the boat, all their claws raised in anger. Grace rowed squatting with her feet beside her. I sat backwards with my feet over the transom. That boat filled with crayfish was just too thrilling and it didn’t take long for Grace to speak.

  ‘Mr Muskratt says that crayfish are tasty and we should eat them.’

  ‘When did he say that?’ I asked. Mr Muskratt lived up the lake, on the Indian Reserve. He was thickset and strong. His leathery face was the colour of the woods. Even his dark brown eyes blended into the landscape. He never said much, almost nothing at all. ‘Yep.’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Eh?’ when he wanted you to say something again.

  On Friday, when he came in his canoe selling fish, he saw the crayfish my dad had for fishing and told him that instead of wasting his time fishing with them, my dad should just buy Mr Muskratt’s fish and eat the crayfish instead. He said that Mrs Muskratt sometimes boiled them and sometimes roasted them for Mr Muskratt and their children.

  AN EARLY

  SUMMER DAY

  Sometimes, even when you’re little, you know when life is perfect. You just know. The sun woke me up early and it dazzled off the white clapboard siding on the back of the cottage. It was so clear and it was so bright it almost hurt just to keep my eyes open. Warm rain overnight had left the grass heavy with wet and the black soil in the vegetable patch near the gravelled road steamed.

  It was my second week at the lake and so far it only rained at night. I walked round to the front of the cottage. The lake looked lik
e an enormous puddle of mercury and it gave such a pure reflection of the cloudless morning sky and the forested shore on the far side I couldn’t tell up from down. When the water looked like that I knew that nothing would happen. Fish wouldn’t bite. Ducks wouldn’t fly. Only dragonflies enjoyed that nothingness. I wasn’t surprised my uncle was there, motionless in a lawn chair only yards from the shoreline facing the lake. He was always looking out at the lake. Sometimes he’d sit there in his pyjamas all day until my mother would tell him to get dressed. This time I wondered whether my uncle had died during the night and I was the only one to know.

  I didn’t move. For a long time I just stared, watching to see if he was breathing but somehow he knew I was there.

  ‘I’ve been looking down towards the bridge. It’s too far to see now but when cars had their lights on earlier, they looked like tiny fireflies slowly gliding across the water.’

  He paused and again we were both silent. That wasn’t unusual. Sometimes Uncle Reub let his silences stretch out and I didn’t mind that.

  ‘What do you think of this morning?’ Uncle eventually asked but I didn’t answer. I knew what I thought. I knew a lot but I didn’t always talk about it.

  ‘I’m going to frog bog,’ I finally said, not as an answer but as a fact.

  ‘With Robert?’

  I never did anything with my big brother. If we played together we ended up fighting. We had the same parents and lived in the same house but that was the extent of our shared togetherness.

  ‘Just me.’

  We both looked down the lake, me straining to see a car crossing the bridge, then to my surprise my uncle said, ‘May I come along?’

  Uncle Reub didn’t do much at the cottage. He didn’t swim, or even put his feet in the lake. He certainly didn’t take walks on his own like my mother did. He didn’t seem to care much about his clothes. During the first week at the cottage he wore city trousers held up by braces, over a white shirt. Now that it was hotter and more sultry during the day he wore a white undershirt. This morning he was in trousers but still wearing his pyjama top. He always wore black leather city shoes, usually with white socks. To me, my uncle seemed separate from other adults. He listened to me and I was pleased with that attention. I said, ‘Yes.’

  Frog bog was part of the dead forest, the part that lay in the lake. I thought there once must have been a great battle with an evil spirit that lurked in the depths of the lake and that the trees gave up their lives and drowned themselves to save their friends in the living forest. Maybe it was just a shooting star that had fallen on them. Most of the trees were cedars but there were willow trees too. I knew that because, out of all that death, some of the fallen trunks had green shoots emerging from them and on those shoots were magical new willow leaves. Each year the muddle of fallen branches and trunks seemed to get more complicated. They sank deeper into the bog, nestling in each other’s arms. This is where I came to catch tadpoles and frogs, painted turtles and water snakes.

  Uncle Reub sometimes told me stories when we were alone together but today we walked in a mutual solitude, across the dew-damp lawn, up to the gravelled road that ran behind the cottages. My bare feet were already tough. I never wore shoes when we lived at the cottage, except when my family took me to a restaurant or to a movie in town. Shoes were for city boys. Even on the hottest days, when tar melted on the road to Bridgenorth, I only ever experienced a satisfying warmth in my bare feet that made me feel I was connected to the land, that I understood it, that it was part of me.

  We walked up the point, past silent cottages where not a single curtain was yet drawn. In the fluorescent yellow light of early morning, all the cottages looked and smelled as if they were freshly painted. They probably were. I was only a boy but I understood how proud the cottagers were of their summer homes. Each garden was perfection, lush green lawns, pink granite stone and concrete pathways from the gravel road to the cottage door, petunias and begonias in a constellation of marshalled perfection. It was as if the cottagers challenged the wild around them, that they vied with each other to be the best at taming the surrounding forest.

  Passing Dr Sweeting’s clapboard grey cottage, a dog barked and a wiry brown mink darted from the stand of white pines the cottage nestled in and across our path. I was glad Angus wasn’t with us. He would have killed that mink. We walked on in a complicated silence until the road and the cottages ended and the woods began.

  ‘Is this your secret place?’ Uncle Reub asked.

  I thought that was a childish question but I didn’t say so. It wasn’t a secret. Everyone knew where the living woods and the dead forest were.

  ‘It’s the woods,’ I answered.

  We followed a track that all the children on Long Point and Cedar Bay had made, through the maple and birch trees, down to the lake. ‘That’s frog bog,’ I told my uncle, pointing to the shambles of tree trunks, branches, weeds and reeds that lined that deep and hidden bay on Lake Chemong.

  Uncle walked to the edge of a bank of sweetgrass and looked out over the stillness. I sometimes did that too. In its quiet and calm that scene, that view of the rushes and reeds and the forested far shore of the lake and the turquoise sky, that picture, even to me as a young boy, was perfection. I looked at my uncle standing there, as still as a totem pole, and for a moment I thought he might suddenly march forward right through that sweetgrass into the sparkling still water – without taking off his shoes or rolling up his trousers – that he might forge a path through the pickerel weed and water lilies then let them close together behind him. But he didn’t.

  ‘I didn’t know there was sweetgrass here. I bet muskrats think this is paradise.’

  ‘I’m going over there,’ I replied.

  I walked along the straight trunk of one fallen cedar tree and then another out into the marsh, to an open pool of clear water. Along the southerly shoreline of the bog, bulrushes were all standing to attention, their tops like thin little bearskin hats on skinny green soldiers. The water lilies were all shut tight. They wouldn’t expose their hearts until the sun was much higher. Later in the summer, if all of July was hot and humid, the water in the pond would get covered in bright green algae but now, in early July, it was crystal clear and you could see absolutely everything in it. Streamlined silvery minnows were easy to see but if you looked harder there were tiny, long slender dragonfly larvae that looked like they’d got baby leaves stuck to their tails. At the edges of the pond that’s where the tadpoles were.

  Uncle walked slowly along the same fallen tree trunks. I thought he looked quite ridiculous, with his arms straight out to keep his balance, like Christ on the cross, I thought. He reached where I was and joined me where I was kneeling on a stump looking into the water.

  ‘Is it interesting, what you’re looking at?’

  I knew my uncle couldn’t see what I saw. Grace and Perry, Steve’s younger brother, could but grown-ups couldn’t. Giant water bugs were stabbing the tadpoles to death. It was scary to watch and I didn’t like it but also I did like it and always watched.

  All that my uncle saw were iridescent green dragonflies, like phosphorescent toothpicks, hovering over the pond, and on the water, long-legged water striders skating gracefully over the surface, never sinking.

  ‘Are you wondering how those insects can walk on water?’ my uncle asked.

  Other grown-ups never knew what was in my mind but my uncle sometimes did. I really wanted to know why the water bugs were so mean to the tadpoles but I’d also wondered why water striders didn’t sink when they stopped skating.

  ‘They’re lighter than water so they don’t sink.’

  I thought for a moment.

  ‘But ducks are heavy and they don’t sink either,’ I said, not so much as a question but as a fact.

  ‘You’re right. Good thinking. What ducks do is they trap air in their feathers. The trapped air makes a duck lighter than water and that’s why a duck doesn’t sink. I really should have explained it better. Water strid
ers do the same as ducks. They trap air on their legs just like ducks trap air in their feathers. Shall we catch one and see?’

  On his knees on the log, balancing himself with one hand, Uncle Reub reached down to the water, trying to grab a water strider and show me its legs. As he leaned out over the pond his glasses case, in the breast pocket of his pyjama top, slid out and plopped into the water. It sank almost immediately, just like the Titanic I thought, raising its stern to the sky before dying. Uncle pulled himself upright and rested on his knees. It was easy to see his glasses case, shiny and silvery, nestling in the black leaves and guck a few feet away at the bottom of frog bog, but I could see the concerned look in my uncle’s eyes.

  ‘I’ve got my shoes on. Can you go in and get it?’ Uncle asked.

  ‘No,’ I replied, not because I couldn’t but because I didn’t want to get into frog bog.

  Uncle Reub paused for a while then said, ‘OK then. Let’s see if we can fish it out.’

  He walked back along the logs, this time faster, with his arms more like you’d expect from a grown-up, over to a willow tree and took a knife from his pocket. Grown-up men all carried penknives in their pockets. My father’s penknife, in his pants’ pocket whether he was in trousers in the city or shorts at the cottage, was made from brown tortoiseshell and had two blades that my dad kept razor sharp with a small pumice stone. Black electrical tape kept the tortoiseshell from falling off. My uncle’s knife was completely different. It was a small single blade, thicker than a penknife, three inches long with a horn handle. The blade was in a soft tan leather sheath covered in white and red and black beads. I thought it was the most wonderful knife I had seen.

  With that knife, Uncle Reub cut two green branches from near the trunk of a willow so that both were the same thickness and each had two fingers at their ends.