Barefoot at the Lake Read online

  Bridgenorth had all the necessities of cottage life and no more. A general store, a post office, Mr Bell’s gas station, a bait shop that also sold grilled sandwiches, an ice house, a barber’s shop with a pool room the children were not allowed in, and a machine shop. My mother had a Bridgenorth shopping ritual. We never visited the ice house. Collecting sawdust-covered lake ice for our kitchen icebox, where my mother kept her meat, fish and dairy and my father kept his fishing worms, was left to my father to do on weekends. Her first visit was to the post office, to collect that week’s mail and read whichever letters couldn’t wait until she returned to the cottage. ‘Now she’s going to ask the postmistress about her children,’ I thought and as always she did. Then we’d visit the general store, to stock up on the raw materials of life, soap suds, powdered cleanser, matches, spare fuses, forty-eight ounce tins of tomato juice, packets of Freshie and Kool-Aid, popping corn, sewing materials, oil for the lamps. Shopping always took a long time. There were others in front of us, summer people but also local people from Bridgenorth and the surrounding farms, and no one was in a hurry. There wasn’t much more than polite talk between the summer people and the local people although my mother, always smiling, always asking questions, talked to everyone.

  Somehow I knew the local people were unlike my family and my friends. They looked different. Paler. Less animated. They didn’t seem to smile much. Their clothes were old although on Sundays when they went to the white clapboard or red-brick churches in Bridgenorth they dressed in dark suits and dark dresses. It seemed to me they came from a separate world and lived in their own muted solitude.

  I enjoyed going shopping. There were no shops in Toronto like Bridgenorth’s general store, where someone served you and where you could buy just about anything, but now I was getting bored and was happy to leave. It was hot. I wanted to get back to Grace and the cottagers and go with Perry to our fort in the woods.

  At the bottom of the hill, Mum untied the boat, told me to get in and to sit by the motor, then she pushed the boat off the beach into the lake, hopping onto the long bow deck at the very last moment. She paddled far enough out so that she could lower the propeller, then she pulled the starter coil, put the motor into reverse and backed out until it was safe to put the motor into forward, swing around and head back out into the lake. It wasn’t safe. The propeller hit a rock and the shear pin on the propeller broke. Only our momentum now carried us forward.

  Mum cut the engine, lifted the propeller out of the water, rotated it with her fingers and knew exactly what she had done. In the freshening westerly wind she paddled the boat back towards the cedar-lined shore. In the shallows she got out into the water and with a pliers from the fishing-tackle box, removed the flexible safety pin, took off the propeller, removed the broken shear pin and inserted another, one of many spares kept in the tackle box. My mother lowered the propeller back into the lake and got in the boat.

  ‘I bet Grace knows how to change a shear pin,’ she said.

  THE SWIMMING

  LESSON

  Grace’s mother drove her daughters, Rob and me to our swimming lesson the next day. The sky was threatening and there was a chop on the lake. My mother knew it was best not to venture out in the boat on days like that.

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ I told Mum.

  ‘If it’s too rough to go swimming, Mrs Blewett will teach you artificial respiration instead,’ she replied. ‘She will never put you in any danger.’

  I wasn’t worried about danger. On a steely cold, blustery day I didn’t want to get into angry, rough water.

  Steve and Perry were already at the marina. Mrs Blewett arrived and she was in her bathing suit. That meant we’d have to go swimming.

  When my father built our cottage, Earl Blewett’s sawmill just north of the bridge in Bridgenorth was still active, sending its trucks over the frozen lake in winter to collect timber harvested during the summer and fall from the few remaining first growth forests around the interconnected finger lakes of the Kawarthas. Dad bought the cedar cladding for the cottage from Mr Blewett. Uncle Reub told me he thought the Blewetts could be descendants of the very first white men who came through Lake Chemong with Samuel de Champlain in the seventeenth century, that their real name was probably Bleuet, the French word for both cornflowers and blueberries. That was exciting. That meant my swimming teacher was in my school history books.

  Now the sawmill was less active. Mr Blewett couldn’t compete with the prices at Beaver Lumber, where cheap pine from British Columbia was sold, so he retired his tug and added a marina and marine gas station. We hoisted our fourteen-foot cedar Peterborough boat up to the rafters of our boathouse for the winter, but cottagers with more valuable boats were starting to store their boats at the Blewetts’. These were handmade twenty-two-foot mahogany Shepherds, built 200 miles away in Niagara-on-the-Lake, or even more expensive mahogany Chris-Craft, built in Algonac, 300 miles west, across the St Clair River in Michigan. The sawmill owner’s wife, May Blewett, pumped gas at the dockside gas station and also gave weekly swimming lessons to the summer children. At the end of each August, if we passed our tests, she dispensed Red Cross and Royal Life Saving Society pins with our names engraved on them.

  Mrs Blewett was older than our mothers, in her forties, and always wore a white bathing cap when she swam. All our mothers, especially Grace and Glory’s, were small and slim. Mrs Blewett had the robust shape of the local women, a large chest and an equally large bottom. She was what my mother called ‘buxom’.

  ‘It’s fresh today so we’ll practise artificial respiration on land then towing in the water,’ she told us. ‘Pair up everyone,’ and we did so with people we were comfortable with, Grace with Glory, Perry with me, Steve with Rob.

  ‘Do you remember what we learned last week?’ she asked. ‘Put your victim on his side, open his mouth and remove any seaweed. Then onto his front and press your hands firmly just below his shoulder blades so you hear him breathing out. You’ll be doing this to each other so get going now.’

  Before Perry said anything I decided I’d be the victim, lay down on my stomach and put my hands under my shoulders, so Perry had my elbows to pull on when he was told to do so. Perry was almost a year older than me but we were the same height. His mother didn’t cut his curly light brown hair all summer and by the time we returned to Toronto at the end of August I thought he looked like a girl.

  ‘Ready, children? Rescuers, keep your hands flat and press firmly on your victims’ backs to expel water from the lungs.’

  Perry pressed hard and quietly, and involuntarily I expelled air from my lungs. Rob pressed on Steve’s back and Steve emitted a really loud, exaggerated moan. The other boys in the class all laughed.

  ‘This is not a laughing matter!’ Mrs Blewett told him. I thought it was like being back at school and that wasn’t right. It was summertime and we were free to do whatever we wanted to, especially never wear shoes.

  ‘Now pull back on your victims’ elbows to make them breath in good air.’

  Perry pulled my elbows up towards him. It didn’t do anything to my lungs but I intentionally breathed in, loudly.

  ‘Bruce, you are not on stage in Toronto!’

  Mrs Blewett’s bare feet were inches from my head. ‘If you don’t take this seriously you will never learn how to save a drowning victim.’

  Perry kept pressing and pulling and, having nothing else to do, I thought about how I would do this to Angus. Then we switched and Perry was the drowning victim.

  Rhythmically I pressed on his back then pulled on his elbows. It was fun and I wondered whether next week I could practise on Grace instead.

  After we finished attempting artificial respiration we sat in a horseshoe on the grass while Mrs Blewett told us how to break loose from a drowning victim who has grabbed you, then tow him to safety.

  ‘Steven, come here so I can demonstrate how to break a death grip.’

  Grinning back at us, Steve went over and stood behind
Mrs Blewett. Steve was fourteen years old, the oldest of us. His hair was curly like Perry’s but darker. Although he was much shorter than my brother, who was already almost six feet tall and catching up fast with our dad, whatever we did Steve made all the decisions. Rob had light skin and freckles. He burned easily. Steve already had a good tan, but not as good as mine. I never burned. It took only a single sunny day to turn me the colour of the inside of a Caramilk chocolate bar.

  ‘Grab me tight around my neck,’ she told Steve and he did so.

  ‘No! Tighter!’ she said and now he pressed himself firmly against her back.

  Looking at us sitting in front of her, with Steve behind her she said, ‘I’ll do this quickly first then in slow motion so you see how to break the victim’s death grip.’

  Her hands came up to Steve’s arms around her neck and suddenly Steve let out a high-pitched howl and his arm was in an arm lock.

  ‘Shit, la merde! You broke my arm!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘No I haven’t. It just hurts a little,’ Mrs Blewett replied.

  ‘Now in slow motion I’ll show you what I did.’

  ‘Are you going to hurt me again?’ he asked.

  ‘No. This is a slow motion demonstration.’

  Once more Steve went behind her.

  ‘There’s something on your neck,’ he said, wiped it off then wrapped his arms around her throat once more.

  ‘Children, when a drowning victim puts you in a death vice this is what you do.’

  In slow motion she grabbed one of Steve’s hands with one hand and the elbow of the same arm with her other, then pushed up on the elbow while pulling down on the hand. Steve theatrically released his grip and, with the grace of a trained ballerina, Mrs Blewett pirouetted around behind Steve and put his arm in an arm lock.

  ‘With your one hand keeping the victim in an arm lock, use the other to cup his chin while you tow him to safety,’ she explained to us.

  After practising this on each other we were ready to practise in the lake.

  During our lesson the weather had got bleaker. There were whitecaps on the water and Mrs Blewett told us that as the weather was now so bad she would demonstrate towing on the shore side of the landing dock, rather than the lake side where we usually had our swimming lessons. The water was just as cold there but much calmer. All she needed was a volunteer to be the rescuer and Steve suggested Rob who, showing how manly he was, immediately dived into the water. Mrs Blewett used the new aluminium ladder to gently descend into the lake, all the time explaining to us how to tow properly.

  The class, around twenty of us, all boys except for Grace and Glory and Mr Yudin’s daughter, Sandy, and two girls I didn’t know, lined up on the edge of the dock while Mrs Blewett grabbed Rob from behind and he broke her vice-like death grip, swung her arm into an arm lock, cupped his hand under her chin and towed her slowly past all of us. Mrs Blewett’s blue bathing suit was coming undone, her chest looked like two white archery targets with big red bullseyes. None of us said a word, not even the girls.

  ‘I’ll tow you back once more,’ Rob suggested and making a tight U-turn he towed her back past us, her enormous and amazingly white breasts breaking the water with each scissors kick of his legs. Mrs Blewett realised her bathing suit had come loose only when she started to climb the ladder from the lake and quickly tied the strap behind her neck.

  ‘Mrs Blewett went skinny dipping the way you do,’ Grace told her mother as she drove us back to the point.

  ‘I don’t think so, children,’ her mother replied.

  ‘She did. Her knockers are enormous.’

  ‘Where did you hear such a word?’ Grace’s mother asked, and Glory told her how the strap on Mrs Blewett’s bathing suit had come undone.

  ‘How did that happen?’ she asked.

  ‘Steve told me it had partly come undone and I tried to tie it back when I towed her but that might have made it worse,’ Rob offered.

  ‘I think you boys are growing up too fast,’ Grace’s mother said as we arrived back at her cottage.

  THE ROCKY

  SHOAL

  Lake Chemong is long and narrow, with few islands and fewer shoals, although there are dangerous rocks just below the lake’s surface near Perry’s cottage on Cedar Bay, about a mile up the lake – beyond frog bog. The day after our artificial respiration lesson it was sunny once more, but not too hot and humid. Perry and Steve’s mother had invited my family and Grace’s family for lunch. That wasn’t unusual. Perry’s parents always came to the Saturday night parties the cottagers on Long Point had. Perry’s father hadn’t built their cottage. In fact no one else’s father had built their cottage except mine. They’d all been built by builders.

  The families went to Perry’s by boat, the fastest way. Only children walked along the lake from Long Point to Cedar Bay. At the far end of Long Point was the dead forest and adults didn’t like walking through it. Up by the road was an abandoned barn and from there through the woods to the lake was private property. When you emerged from the woods the ground was wet and boggy and the air filled with mosquitoes, although at night the mosquitoes were joined by fireflies. After that there were three tarpaper shacks where poor people from Europe who didn’t speak English spent their summers. The shacks were no more than four walls and a roof with a round aluminium chimney vent up the outside wall of each one. The roofs were made of red asphalt tiles all covered in lichen. I don’t know who built them first but the people living in them repaired them each year, nailing overlapping rolls of new tarpaper on the outside to the simple shack frame, floor to roof. It was easy to see what was fresh and new and black. Old tarpaper went slate grey in a year. The tarpaper shack cottagers got their water from the lake and shared an outhouse you could sometimes smell even from frog bog. Fronko, the same age as me, lived in one of those shacks and every now and then went to our fort in the woods. Adults got to Cedar Bay by walking up the hill to the county road, then along that road to the narrow lane that led back to the lake. That took at least half an hour. The boat trip took only a few minutes.

  My mother drove the boat with Angus in the bow. He liked to be lookout. As she neared Perry’s cottage she slowed it almost to an idle and asked us to look in the water for rocks. She didn’t want to shear another pin on them. I saw the rocks first and guided my mother away from them to our landing at Perry’s dock.

  We had lunch together on the lawn and after lunch Perry and I went down to the lake and waded out to where the water was up to our waists. With our feet we felt the sand for clams. It wasn’t long before we had dozens of them. Our families didn’t eat them. We only ate fish with scales on them, but Dr Sweeting loved these clams almost as much as he loved the catfish we caught but were too frightened to take off hooks.

  Uncle Reub watched us and, out of the blue, Perry asked him why there was that rocky shoal near here but nowhere else.

  ‘Well, that’s interesting,’ Uncle explained.

  ‘You see, long before the summer folk came to Lake Chemong, long before Farmer Everett’s ancestors cut down the forest and cleared the boulders from the land alongside the lake, for his corn and pigs and cows, long before the Bleuets became the Blewetts, an Indian hunter lived here. His name was Albert Gonquin although his good friends called him Al, Al Gonquin.

  ‘Al had a beautiful daughter, Minnemoosah, and all the young men in his tribe were in love with her and asked Al for her hand in marriage.’

  The other children all knew that my uncle was a great storyteller. I thought that he enjoyed telling his tales as much as we enjoyed listening to them. Mum sometimes reads us stories, especially on rainy days when we were tired of playing cards, but my uncle told stories. We never knew whether they were for real or whether he made them up as he told them. One rainy day, when Mum had gone shopping in town with Grace’s mother, and Perry was visiting and my uncle had been left to look after us, he emerged from his bedroom with a tomahawk in his hands and a twinkling look of worry in his eyes. ‘Men and wome
n,’ he said, ‘we’re under attack from Indians!’ But we knew he was making that up. He told his tale anyways and today, on the front lawn of Perry’s cottage, he continued.

  ‘Now Al couldn’t decide which brave should marry his daughter so he set a competition. Whoever threw the heaviest stone the farthest into Lake Chemong would marry her.’

  Grace grinned and pushed me with her hands.

  ‘Boys, the day of that competition wasn’t a calm day like today. It was a rough day, a hellish rough day. The sun was shining in the sky, shining with all its might. It did its very best to make the day seem smooth and bright but the North Wind was howling down the lake and the whitecaps were taller than the tallest brave in Al’s tribe. The braves threw stone after stone out into the lake but because of those waves no one could tell exactly which was the heaviest that had landed the farthest. From dawn until dusk those strong braves threw rock after rock into the lake until they had thrown so many stones that that shoal of rocks just down from your cottage had grown in height to where it is today.’

  My uncle continued, ‘Al Gonquin was now in a pickle. He’d promised the hand of his daughter in marriage to the brave who threw the heaviest stone the farthest but no one knew who that man was and now Minnemoosah entered the picture. She was a bit like your mother, Brucie, small, sensible, feisty, a good woman but with her own mind. “Fearless Father,” she said, “it’s my life and I’ll decide who I marry,” and right then and there she chose a brave brave named Mikkimoosah.’