Barefoot at the Lake Read online

  ‘They’re filthy,’ Mum said.

  ‘They’re for the hot water tank,’ he replied.

  Most days there’s an afternoon breeze on Lake Chemong but when we returned to the cottage it was as hot and humid as the farm was. Rob was still at Steve’s. Angus had been in all day so Mum let him outside. Dad took his purchases to the tool house while my uncle and I carried the paddles down to the dock.

  ‘Shall we see how they work?’ Uncle asked.

  ‘But you don’t like canoes,’ I answered.

  ‘Angus will calm my nerves.’

  He got down low, opened his arms wide and called, ‘Angus!’ and Angus scampered over to him.

  He carried the dog to the dock, put him down, then gingerly stepped in and sat on the bow seat holding both gunwales with his hands. Once the canoe settled he turned to me and said, ‘Pass Calm Dog to me.’ Which I did. I knew what Uncle Reub was doing, giving Angus another name, the way Indians do. Uncle put the dog down by his feet.

  ‘Now put your life jacket on,’ Uncle told me.

  ‘You should too,’ I answered.

  ‘I don’t need one,’ Uncle replied.

  I put my life jacket on, handed a paddle to my uncle then got in the stern of the boat with the other two paddles. One was a flat-sided beaver tail, good for straightforward deep water canoeing. The other was an otter tail with more rounded sides, better for the short, quick strokes you make when paddling in the stern. They were made from solid maple. I wanted to try both.

  ‘Untie your end,’ I told my uncle, then I untied the stern rope, pushed the canoe away from the dock and paddling hard swung the canoe out into the lake.

  ‘Don’t do anything yet,’ I told Uncle Reub, who balanced himself on the bow seat with Angus sitting at his feet.

  Grace’s father had shown me how to use a paddle, to keep my back straight, to use my whole body for power, not just my arms. To push at the top and pull at the middle, to bring the paddle back in a J shape to hold a straight line. I had watched Mr Muskratt paddle his canoe. That’s who I wanted to be in a canoe.

  ‘You can paddle now,’ I told my uncle, then added, ‘did you and Edgar go canoeing?’

  ‘No. His people used nets. There are big fish in the Missouri River. Pike. Pickerel. That’s what they netted. Sometimes they stunned fish with a stick of dynamite. Boom, and they all float up to the surface.’

  ‘You’re rocking the canoe. Don’t lean over when you paddle,’ I commanded.

  Then something that sometimes happens on the lake happened. A surface wind arrived. It didn’t make waves but like an invisible hand it pulled the canoe away from the shore and I decided it was best to go right back home. I tried to turn the canoe around but in the surface wind it was difficult to do.

  ‘Paddle on the other side,’ I told my uncle, but every time he put his paddle in the lake he leaned so much the canoe almost tipped over.

  ‘Stop rocking the canoe!’ I bellowed.

  ‘It’s harder than it looks,’ Uncle answered.

  ‘Angus would be better than you. Don’t paddle. Just sit!’ I screeched and Uncle Reub did so, once more holding both gunwales in his hands to control the rocking.

  I paddled hard on one side, trying to turn the canoe towards home and that didn’t work. Then I tried going backwards and turning my paddle in a J and that almost worked, but each time I had almost turned the canoe around, another gust of wind caught it and turned it back towards the far side of the lake.

  ‘Uncle, get on your knees and crouch down. Low.’

  That was where Angus was sitting so Uncle squashed Angus under the canoe’s bow then kneeled down and lowered his body still holding the gunwales.

  ‘That’s better,’ I said, and now as I stroked my paddle backwards in the water, the canoe did turn in the direction I wanted it to and paddling as hard as I could I headed the boat straight back to the dock.

  When the canoe entered the protection of the bay, paddling got easier. ‘You can get up now,’ I told my uncle.

  Angus moved out from under the bow, gave his body a shake and woofed. As soon as the boat was close enough to the dock he jumped onto it and ran back onto the lawn, woofing some more.

  ‘Calm Dog didn’t like being ballast,’ Uncle said.

  ‘You should have had a life jacket on,’ I replied. There was anger in my voice.

  I tied up the canoe and went in the cottage but didn’t tell Mum how foolish I thought my uncle was.

  WALKING TO

  BRIDGENORTH

  ‘Are there snakes in heaven?’ I asked my uncle. ‘Because if there are there must be chokecherries too. Snakes eat chokecherries. If you do, you choke and you die.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Uncle asked.

  ‘I made it up but everybody knows that.’

  Uncle Reub and I were friends again and were walking to Bridgenorth. I was allowed to cross the county road but never to walk alone along it all the way to Bridgenorth. Mum sometimes did, especially when Dad was there. She’d say, ‘I need to get out,’ take her blue pack of cigarettes, and walk all the way, but even so she said it was too dangerous for me to walk there. Few cars used the county road that paralleled the eastern shore of Lake Chemong, and anyways you could hear them half a mile away. As they drove by the drivers always waved an arm from the open window but she still wouldn’t let me walk alone.

  It was one of those hot and hazy and humid July days when it seems that the whole world has slowed down to an idle. Grace was away. I was bored, so I asked my uncle to go for a walk. I didn’t tell him what my plans were because I knew Uncle Reub didn’t like walking far.

  We walked down the point, then up the now cleared and barren track to the county road, the only paved road in the whole township, split and broken by winter freezes, its potholes patched with black asphalt. The highways department oiled it once a month during the summer but only remnants of the last oiling were visible on the dirt shoulders. We walked past the small sand quarry where kingfishers lived, past the Nichols’ farm, past a field of sunflowers, a new sight in that part of the countryside, then through wild flowers that had colonised the verges of the road, when I asked about snakes in heaven.

  I was barefoot. I always was. Ahead of us the bleached road disappeared into a shimmering mirage garlanded by those summer flowers, lush bushes and trees. There was blue chicory four feet high, in a long procession as if it had been intentionally planted on both margins, and behind the chicory on the lake side a bank of tiger lilies grew in the drainage ditch. Past the tiger lilies was a thick bed of alfalfa and everywhere, milkweeds, already in flower, already home to hundreds of striped black and yellow and white caterpillars eating their leaves, immune to the poisons that protect milkweed from almost all other insects, starting their evolution into Monarch butterflies that in a few weeks would fill the air around the cottage.

  We walked past colonies of goldenrod, taller than I, the yellow buds about to open, a sign that August was shortly upon them. Then black-eyed Susans. They annoyed me. I thought they were the most beautiful of all the wildflowers along the road but their stems were so tough I could never collect them.

  Beyond the drainage ditch in the shade of the trees that lined the road were the chokecherries that had caught my eye.

  ‘There. Look. Chokecherries. There might be snakes here,’ I said, and we stopped for my uncle to see what snakes ate.

  He looked at the chokecherries then cupped his small hands on both sides of his tiny chin.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘That’s what I call bittersweet nightshade and you’re absolutely right, those berries are poisonous.’ He bent down and picked a flower. ‘You see these blue flowers with their backward-pointing petals around those yellow beaks? Those flowers turn into red berries, what you call chokecherries.’

  For a while we just stood there on the side of the road doing nothing much, listening to the silence, and pretty soon we could hear the flies and insects talking to each other, first a few, then dozens. Lis
tening harder I heard millions, filling the hot air with waves of energy.

  ‘Why did God make so many insects?’ I asked, and my uncle didn’t immediately answer. He looked out, over the field to the lake, his brow furrowed.

  ‘Why did he?’ I asked again.

  ‘I don’t know why,’ my uncle answered.

  ‘When will you?’

  ‘I need to sit down,’ Uncle Reub said and we sat in the shade on two granite boulders. My uncle picked up a rough pebble of pink granite and white quartz. He spat on it and rubbed it and it was much prettier.

  ‘If you cover it in corn oil it will be pretty all summer,’ Uncle said then he continued.

  ‘Your mother believes in a white-haired God who lives beyond the clouds. She believes that God made these flowers and all those insects and that he controls every single thing that happens in this world. She believes that each year, on the Day of Atonement, he decides who will live and who will die. Not just which people will live or die but which insect will buzz with life and what flowers will survive and blossom.’

  ‘Don’t you believe that too?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t yet know,’ my uncle replied.

  I didn’t like that answer. I’d heard my uncle say things like that before.

  ‘Well, if you don’t yet know, what do you believe in right now?’ I demanded, my voice sterner than I wanted it to be.

  My uncle paused once more, then turned to me and with mischief in his eyes said, ‘I believe in fine-looking women. I have seen women whose smiles shine with such light I’ve been unable to move. I’ve seen women who are so stunningly beautiful I thought I’d faint. When I see women like that I can believe in God.’

  ‘Well, I believe in God,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I dream I’m with God in heaven on the clouds and I can fall from the sky but I’m not scared because I’m with God. I like that feeling.’

  ‘When do you have that dream?’ Uncle asked.

  ‘If I concentrate on having it, it doesn’t happen. I have to wait for it to happen. Then I fall and glide through the air as long as I want wherever I want and see the whole lake and the cottages. I see where the big fish are in the lake and where to go swimming. I see the weeds and know I shouldn’t go swimming there. I even see boats that have sunk but there are never any dead people in them.’

  ‘Brucie, when I was a boy I kept a diary. Every day, either in the morning or at night I wrote down my thoughts, not what I did or where I went but what I was thinking about. What you think about is very interesting. Have you ever thought about writing it down?’

  I thought that I loved the heat but my uncle didn’t. As I thought that thought, I watched Uncle Reub take his large cotton handkerchief from his back pocket, tie knots in all corners and lay it on his head.

  ‘Edgar Ten Fingers told me what he believes in. He says that anything that has a birth – a fly, a flower, a snake, you and me – must also have a death. Your spirit doesn’t have a birth so your spirit never dies. He says that the rock is the grandfather of all things, the earth is the grandmother of all things and the sun gives motion and life to all things. He says the warmth of the sun entered the bosom of grandmother earth and she produced all the insects and animals and flowers and trees. I like how he thinks.’

  ‘What happens after you die then?’ I asked and again my uncle was slow to answer.

  ‘Your mother thinks you go to a place that’s new and bright, where everyone understands each other, and everyone and everything that ever died before is waiting. Everything is open and ready to be explored. Everything is spacious and there aren’t any mysteries. That’s what she believes.’

  ‘But, Uncle Reub, what do you believe?’ I asked.

  My uncle got up and turned away. He said nothing and I wondered if he didn’t want to tell me what he believed in because I wasn’t yet a grown-up. Then he turned back to me. He spoke quietly and seriously. ‘It’s more important for you to understand how your mother feels. To her you and Robert are the centre of the universe and that’s the way it should be. She thinks in the end everything will be better.’

  He paused once more, again looked towards the lake and the cottage and now without turning back to me, he continued. ‘In my life I’ve wandered into a dark forest and your mother is like an angel helping me out of it. I believe in her. That’s what I believe in, Bruce. In people like your mother.’

  My uncle slowly turned back towards me and now he was smiling as if he had won the Irish Sweepstakes. A car passed and the driver as always waved, an acknowledgement that we inhabited that empty land together if only for the summer.

  ‘Are you thirsty?’ Uncle Reub asked.

  I was. We got up and continued walking. Bridgenorth was still almost half an hour away.

  It seemed to me that Mr Everett always herded his cattle along that road for no particular reason and there they were ahead of us, swaying their enormous bellies, swishing their dung-covered tails, covered in flies. All were heading in the same direction, but now Uncle Reub and I walked carefully, avoiding the fresh cowpats. The cows turned up the long track that separated Mr Everett’s verandaed stone farmhouse from his big red barn, but one hung back by the road grazing on chicory, cow thistles and dandelions. It raised its head and gave a short snort as we walked past.

  ‘Cows have the most beautiful eyes, don’t you think?’ Uncle asked and without waiting for an answer continued. ‘Don’t you think Grace’s eyes are like a cow’s eyes?’

  I had never thought about it that way but without saying so I agreed.

  In Bridgenorth we stopped at the bait store across from the gas station, the only place in the village where we could get lunch. We both had grilled cheese sandwiches. Uncle had a ginger ale to drink and I an Orange Crush. My uncle needed that food and drink. The day had become hotter and his feet in his city shoes were hurting. We started back towards the cottage, past the summer cabins at Holiday Haven, past the green corn fields, past pastures with the smell of sweet hay, past the milk churns that were now on the roadside outside Mr Everett’s farm. I really wanted to go into his barn, to see him milking his cows but I was scared of him so I didn’t mention it to my uncle.

  Nearing the cottage, it seemed to me that the sunflowers had turned their heads. Before lunch they faced the road. Now in the afternoon, they were looking straight down the road, right at my uncle and me. By August everything else on that road from Bridgenorth turned brown and died but I already knew that those dead flowers were patient. They waited silently and with resignation in their roots until the next year when they would burst into life as they had earlier this year, like a living rainbow along the asphalt road.

  ‘The sunflowers follow the sun. They really do,’ Uncle said. I wasn’t surprised that my uncle knew what I was thinking.

  ‘But they don’t have muscles. How do they?’ I asked.

  ‘No one yet knows,’ my uncle replied, ‘although one day someone will, then we’ll all know. Edgar told me he knows. He told me that once upon a time there was a boy who fell in love with the sun. Each day he would sit in a field, just like this one by the lake and watch the sun take its journey across the sky, from this side of the lake at dawn to the other side of the lake at dusk. The Oglala Sioux named the boy Sun Gazer.

  ‘Brucie, you know what happens, don’t you, if you stare at the sun? First it damages the retinas in your eyes but if you keep staring at it, it destroys them and that’s what happened to Sun Gazer. He gradually went blind.

  ‘Even when he was blind, he still loved that sun so much he sat in that field and guided by the penetrating heat of its rays on his face he followed the sun on its daily arc through the sky, from east to west.

  ‘But in late August, when the heat had gone at night and the air had a chill, he became depressed, and dejected, and lost interest in life. He became sad and weak, and one day his tribe found the boy collapsed in that field, facing the west. And as the sun disappeared over the hills across the lake the very last spark of life left Sun Ga
zer and he was no more.

  ‘That night the Oglala Sioux buried him at that spot and when they returned the next day to visit the grave they saw that a tall graceful flower had sprung from the mound and that the head of that golden flower bent gently towards the ground.

  ‘They all gathered together that day, and in memory of young Sun Gazer they stayed from dawn until dusk and as they sat and showed their respect to the young boy they saw that the head of the flower followed the sun across the sky.’

  I felt tears well in my eyes but I didn’t say anything. The road started its incline up to the Nichols farm, and as we silently passed the black-eyed Susans that I thought were so beautiful, Uncle took his Indian knife from his pocket and, one at a time, being very selective, he cut over thirty stems.

  ‘We can give these to your mother,’ he said, then added, ‘why not give some to Grace?’

  THE WRECK

  On a blustery, sunny Sunday, near the end of July, Mr Muskratt came paddling down the lake straight to our dock. Not stopping anywhere. There were whitecaps on the lake. It was too rough for anything but the big boats. He never visited on Sundays so it was exciting to see him there – paddling into the waves, so low in his canoe he looked like a beaver. He docked his canoe and in his expressionless way asked me, ‘Your father here?’ which he was.

  The two men spoke for a minute then my father went into the boathouse, started the motor and backed his boat out. They tied the bowline of the canoe to the stern of the boat and were about to leave when I asked, ‘Can I come?’ and unexpectedly it was Mr Muskratt who replied, ‘Yep.’

  I liked Mr Muskratt. He wasn’t complicated. He was just who he was. Every Friday he paddled his canoe down the lake from the Reservation, stopping at each dock, waiting to see if anyone came out to buy his fish. He never called out ‘Hello’ or ‘Fish for sale’. If no one noticed him he just paddled on to the next dock, then the next until finally he reached our dock. After that he’d turn around and paddle back up the lake to his home.