Barefoot at the Lake Read online

  ‘When I practised general medicine in Mandan, North Dakota, a good friend of mine showed me how to do this. What we’ll do is get the ends of these branches under each side of the case. They’ll act like two forks and we’ll slowly lift it up and out of the water.’

  Uncle and I walked back along the tree trunks. First we acted as a team, with me pushing one branch under one side of the metal case and my uncle doing the same with the other, but each time we tried to raise the glasses case the branches bent too much and the case slid back into the black leaves and stirred up the guck at the bottom of the pond. Or my uncle and I couldn’t coordinate what we were doing and the glasses case slipped back to its murky home. Uncle tried using both branches himself but with no success, and now the water was so murky it was almost impossible to see where the glasses case was. I wanted to give up and go home. When I was young I found that easiest to do. My uncle knelt on the tree trunk. He was a small man and sometimes reminded me of Humpty Dumpty but now he looked even smaller and I felt sorry for him.

  ‘Are you sure you can’t get it for me?’ Uncle Reub asked.

  I felt embarrassed. I was in my bathing suit. I loved the lake. There was nothing better in the whole summer than floating in hot sunshine buoyed up by the warmth and the strength of a truck or car tyre’s inner tube. But getting into the bog was scary. I didn’t mind the goo on the bottom. In fact I liked the squishy feel. I didn’t mind the frogs or painted turtles either and the water snakes always hid when Grace or Perry got into the bog, but there were snapping turtles in there too and the year before I was bitten when I caught one. It was horrible. I was carrying it back to show Grace and hadn’t noticed that the snapping turtle’s head had slowly emerged and turned upside down over its back. At the instant I saw this the snapper crushed its jaws into my forefinger. It didn’t let go until I put it back in the bog and it swam off.

  I never talked about that. I certainly wouldn’t have told other adults but Uncle Reub was different so I said, ‘I’m frightened of the snapping turtles.’

  ‘They are frightening. You’re very sensible. Now I’ve got these sticks and I’ve got my knife, and Edgar, my friend in Mandan, taught me how to throw it. I can knock the right eye out of a rattlesnake at ten paces with this knife so if you get in there, I promise, nothing will come near you. You’re safe with me.’

  The sun was higher. It was almost nine o’clock and I felt its warmth heat my bare back. With my uncle’s assurance I slid off the log until my feet felt the mushy bottom of the bog. The water was colder than I expected and came to the top of my bathing suit. My shoulders lifted and I squeezed my arms against my sides.

  ‘You don’t even have to look at what you’re doing. We’re a team,’ Uncle said. ‘Now, open your fingers and bend your body over to your right.’

  I obeyed. In slow motion I leaned over to my right, reaching down towards the bottom of the bog until my whole arm and shoulder were in the water. I didn’t like what I was doing but I said nothing.

  ‘Over a bit more. Now forward. Keep your fingers open. Down. There. Can you feel it?’

  I could. I grasped the case, together with some leaves as black as coal, and, still not smiling, raised it all out of the water and handed everything to my uncle, who opened the case and emptied it of water. I hoped there’d be a tadpole in it, stabbed to death by a water bug, but there wasn’t. Now, standing up, I felt warmer, and quite satisfied with myself. I actually felt like going for a swim but I climbed out of the pond, onto the log and with my uncle walked back to the shore.

  Before we left the woods for home, Uncle cut a handful of sweetgrass with his knife.

  ‘The next time your father makes a barbecue, let’s put this on the embers,’ he said.

  ‘Will it make the hamburgers taste better?’ I asked and my uncle replied, ‘Better than that. The incense from this sweet-grass will relieve us all of our weariness. And yes, the meat will taste better too.’

  We walked back through the trees and just before the gravel road and cottages on Long Point became visible, Uncle Reub said once more, ‘Hold on for a moment.’

  Again he took his knife out of its beaded sheath and deftly cut two bands of bark off one of the surrounding birch trees. ‘When we get back we’ll soak these in water. I’ll show you how to make an unsinkable birchbark canoe.’

  By the time we got back to the cottage, my family was already having breakfast. ‘Where’d you go?’ Robert asked me.

  ‘Nowhere,’ I answered.

  ‘What were you two doing this morning?’ my mother asked Uncle Reub.

  ‘Not much,’ replied her brother.

  ‘You’re not going to tell us anything?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Brucie and I were discussing the meaning of life,’ Uncle Reub answered.

  I smiled inside me. I loved that we had a shared secret. We finished our breakfast all together, white toast, butter tarts and milk.

  THE CANOE

  The slapping rain was sudden and passed in minutes, leaving a rainbow over the still lake. Grace and I found my uncle inside the cottage talking quietly to my mother who, when we arrived, left and went to her bedroom.

  ‘I’ve just finished making the canoe,’ Uncle Reub said.

  I had been surprised that my uncle had promised to make me a model canoe. I was more used to seeing him just sit in his chair or read a big book. Uncle Reub had found an aluminium bucket in my father’s shed and filled it with water to soak the white bark he had cut from the birch tree near frog bog. I had watched him make some slits at both ends with his knife and bend the bark in half with its woody side out, not its bark side as I’d expected, but before I could ask why I got bored and left to find Grace.

  ‘Do you hear how shrill that woodpecker’s cry is?’ my uncle had asked. ‘A storm’s coming.’

  And in not much longer than it took that storm to come and pass, the miniature boat was finished.

  ‘Folks, that stitching at the bow and stern, it’s called whipstitching. When I used to patch up people at The Mayo I used something called mattress stitching but this is better for boats. Both of them make the seal watertight. Along the gunwales where I’ve bound in sweetgrass, those are called simple stitches.’

  I was impressed, especially by the two thwarts my uncle had whittled with his knife, to keep the canoe firmly spread.

  ‘Will it float like our canoe or just tip over?’ Grace asked, and my uncle replied that we should take it out on the lake and find out.

  Grace and I wanted to go in the big red canoe – we were allowed in it with a grown-up – but Uncle Reub said it was too wobbly for him to get in and out so we all got in the rowboat. Angus was on the dock asking to come but Grace said he had to stay at home.

  ‘I row,’ said Grace, so she did, with me in the front and Uncle in the back.

  As she rowed, my uncle leaned forward and said to Grace, ‘Do you know where all the flowers go when winter comes?’

  ‘They all die,’ she answered.

  ‘That could be true,’ Uncle replied. ‘But I have a friend who thinks differently. He says that God would never let such beauty die. He says all the flowers go to heaven and come back next year to make rainbows.’

  ‘If God decides all the flowers come back, what does he do with the birds?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s difficult to know,’ my uncle answered. ‘Our Jewish religion tells us that each year God decides who will live and who will die. My friend Edgar’s religion says that nothing ever dies forever, that everything comes back in one way or another.’

  ‘Is Edgar a Christian?’ Grace asked as she continued rowing.

  ‘You know, I don’t exactly know what his religion is,’ Uncle replied. ‘Edgar is a Lakota Sioux medicine man but he’s a modern thinker. He goes to church but he also believes in his people’s ancient customs.’

  ‘I’m going to frog bog,’ Grace said and we returned to silence.

  The lake was perfectly still as we glided past Grace’s, Dr Sweeting’s and
all the other cottages, each nestled amongst the cedars that lined the shore. Some women had returned to their front lawns and were quietly getting on with their chores. Their motorboats remained silent in their boathouses, their rowboats, sailboats and canoes tied to their glistening, wet docks.

  Grace and I had rowed to frog bog before but could never get into its still ponds. A canoe would be able to get through the pickerel weed and bulrushes and fallen trees but our rowboat with its fixed oars was too wide. Grace let the bow of the rowboat nestle into the bulrushes. ‘The canoe will look good here,’ she said. Uncle leaned over the side of the boat and gently placed the birch bark canoe on the water where it immediately rolled over and floated on its side.

  ‘The bark is heavier on that side,’ Uncle Reub explained. ‘I can shave it down with my knife but ballast is best.’

  ‘What’s ballast?’ I asked.

  ‘Ballast is anything heavy. The grain or lumber or iron ore that Great Lake ships carry acts like ballast and keep those ships stable. If a laker doesn’t have a good load on it, even it can tip over in a strong wind.’

  Uncle Reub reached into his trousers pocket where he had put some gravel. He put five pieces in the canoe, lowered it over the side of the rowboat then, with the model floating on the surface of the lake, moved the gravel around until the canoe was sitting absolutely straight in the water.

  ‘There now. Perfect. Should we leave it here, to embark on its own voyage, or take it back to the cottage?’

  ‘Leave it here,’ we said in unison. Without speaking to each other we both knew we wanted to return the next day to see where the canoe had gone.

  ‘Let’s leave it over there,’ I said, pointing to a narrow channel through the bulrushes, so Grace rowed over and Uncle Reub placed the canoe where it would be washed by the wind into one of the quiet pools in the lagoon.

  ‘It’s best to get back now,’ Uncle said. ‘It’s almost lunchtime.’ And Grace turned the boat and rowed back towards the cottages.

  ‘My friend Edgar, who says that flowers come back as rainbows, he says that those pebbles in the canoe will protect it from harm.’

  ‘Why do you listen so much to Edgar?’ Grace asked.

  ‘That’s a profound question, Grace,’ my uncle replied. ‘I can only answer by telling you that I had forgotten what a wise man Edgar was, until this spring when he came all the way from North Dakota to see me. It was Edgar’s wise words that encouraged me to come and stay with Bruce’s mother.’

  ‘How can pebbles protect a canoe from harm? They’re just pebbles,’ I asked and my uncle’s thoughts returned to the canoe.

  ‘Our religion teaches us that only people have souls and it’s our souls that go to heaven, but Edgar says everything has a soul, even a pebble. He says that’s what will protect the canoe, the souls in those pebbles.’

  ‘My father says that type of talk is nonsense,’ Grace said, as she pulled on the oars.

  ‘He might be right but, Grace, no one yet knows,’ Uncle replied.

  He paused for a while, looking at the cottages we slowly rowed past then he spoke once more.

  ‘Edgar calls his god the Mighty Spirit. Doesn’t that sound wonderful, the Mighty Spirit? He says the Mighty Spirit ensures that everything has a soul but to my mind it’s those pebbles acting as ballast that protects the boat.’

  Uncle Reub paused once more, then looking beyond Grace to me in the front of the boat he continued, ‘Bruce, you’re ballast for your mother.’

  My mother was always telling me how she felt, especially about other people. I knew what Uncle Reub meant.

  When we arrived at the dock and after we tied the rowboat to it and got out, Grace turned to my uncle and said, ‘Can we go back tomorrow?’

  SHOPPING IN

  BRIDGENORTH

  There was a rhythm to summer life. Patterns. The Silverwood’s Dairy truck delivered milk to the cottages on Long Point early each weekday morning. The milkman wore white pants, a white shirt and a white peaked cap. The Browns’ Bread deliveryman arrived an hour later, the driver in a muddy brown uniform the colour of a chocolate bar wearing a peaked cap the colour of a muskrat’s head. Angus would announce their arrival. Dr Sweeting’s son, James, delivered the Peterborough Examiner just before supper. James was old enough to drive, but late each afternoon he bicycled the two miles into Bridgenorth to pick up the newspapers then bicycled back to deliver one to each of the cottages on Long Point. When it rained hard, Mrs Sweeting collected the papers for him. Sometimes she drove James down the point on his delivery round. Mrs Nichols brought us fresh eggs each Monday. We had swimming lessons from Mrs Blewett at her family’s lumber mill in Bridgenorth every Tuesday afternoon. Mr Everett, the grumpy farmer who owned all the land around the Nichols’ farm, collected garbage from the cottagers every other Thursday. He didn’t like children. Best of all, the fathers arrived Friday night while children slept. Fathers meant more cars and cars meant we went places we didn’t go during the week. That’s what fathers were for. Mothers were for everything else.

  My dad had brought fresh meat from the butchers in Toronto until Mum discovered how tasty meat was from the General Store in Bridgenorth. ‘Imagine. This chicken lived within squawking distance of Bridgenorth,’ she’d say as she prepared it for the oven. ‘My mother killed her own chickens. Isn’t that dreadful? We had chicken each Friday. She went to the market and chose the chicken she wanted, took it home and wrung its neck. I had to watch. Then she cut its head off and held it upside down. Imagine. Then she said a prayer and swung it around in the air. There was blood and feathers everywhere. It was terrible. Such superstitions.’

  ‘Why did she say a prayer?’ I once asked.

  ‘It certainly wasn’t for the poor chicken,’ my mother replied.

  ‘She was thanking God that we had food on our table for the Sabbath.’

  ‘Do you thank God for food?’ I asked and my mother smiled at me, came over and pressed me hard to her chest.

  ‘I thank God for you,’ she answered.

  On Saturdays Dad sometimes drove us to Peterborough, for supper at Fosters Restaurant on George Street. Some of our Peterborough neighbours on the lake had stores on George Street. Mr Silver had a shoe store, Mr Collis a men’s clothing store, Mr Cherney a furniture store, Mr Yudin the theatre. Their children were either a few years younger or older than I was. I saw them when we went swimming out to our raft and at swimming lessons each week but we didn’t search each other out to play with. Not until we were a lot older and understood the sustaining worth of shared, warm memories.

  At our end of the point, early on Monday mornings the fathers all left to return to Toronto, leaving the mothers with us. Our family had only one car so when my mother wanted to go to Bridgenorth during the week, to shop or pick up mail, we went in our red-bottomed fourteen-foot cedar boat with its fourteen-horsepower Evinrude motor.

  The milkman and the bread man had both come and gone. Rob was at Glory’s cottage and I was searching through the stony gravel by the shoreline, looking for the roundest and flattest stones to skip across the lake’s still water. Angus, lying in the grass, was watching me. I hoped that making stones skip as many times as I could might make them flatter but I was interrupted by my mother who asked if I wanted to go to Bridgenorth with her.

  ‘I’ll have a cigarette then we’ll go,’ she called from the cottage porch.

  The lake lay listless, shrouded in a heat haze. The water by the shoreline was warm, almost hot. I walked through it and with each of my steps, grey clouds of lake bottom swirled up to the surface where it just lingered. A school of jet-black, baby catfish darted away in all directions then, as if drawn by an invisible magnet, found comfort in each other once more and moved on.

  Across the lake a mile away, a single cotton candy cloud cast its shadow on the hills, then onto the lake itself. When the wind was blowing, I sometimes watched a cloud’s shadow cross the lake and would run down the point and up to the highway, just to see if I was
faster than the sky itself. Today, I shuffled around on the shore playing with seaweed. Others thought seaweed was smelly and dirty but I was intrigued by it. A single strand of lake weed was as soft and as fragile as a strand of cooked spaghetti but when it was torn by storms from the bed of the lake and twisted and tied by the lake’s waves it became stronger than my father.

  Outside, on the cottage terrace, my mother lit her Black Cat cigarette and looked out over the lake. I knew that I shouldn’t speak to her until her cigarette had burned to its cork tip. This was her quiet time.

  My mother always checked up and down the lake before taking the boat out. If there was a wind developing, even if it wasn’t strong, even if there weren’t any whitecaps, the shopping trip was cancelled. Today the lake was calm. She took from the wall her pencilled list she had tacked there, put it in the pocket in her shorts and walked with me to the boat.

  ‘Reub, put this cardigan on if you get cold,’ she said to her brother as she stopped by the lawn chair where he was sitting, a heavy book resting on his lap, unread.

  In the boat she lifted the gas tank and gave it a shake: she never blithely trusted the arrow on the fuel gauge. If it was low we would stop at the marine gas station at the Blewetts’ lumber mill.

  Mum and I put on our Kapok-filled life preservers. Hers was like a vest with ties in front. Mine slipped around the back of my head, down my chest and tied at my waist. In her short shorts and tight blouse and wearing her padded life vest, I was aware of how my mother’s arrival in the village always attracted the attention of the local men in Bridgenorth. At the age of ten I didn’t understand how exotic, how alien and how sexy she appeared to them. I don’t know whether the other young ‘city’ mothers had the same effect on the local men. They probably did.

  On a calm day like today it took no more than fifteen minutes to reach the bridge, then only five minutes more to get to where the boat could be beached. Mum talked to me most of the way but what with the engine noise I didn’t hear much. There was no dock to tie up to, so Mum always approached the beach at a good speed then cut the motor and lifted the propeller out of the water, allowing the boat’s momentum to drive us far enough onto the beach for her to hop over the bow onto the sand without her getting her feet wet, then tie the boat’s bowline to a tree while we walked up the steep dusty road to the general store at the top of the hill.