Crow Lake Read online

  So I hedged. I said, “I think I’ve already told you most of it.”

  “You’ve hardly told me anything. I know your name and I know you come from somewhere up north. I think that’s about it.”

  “What else do you want to know?”

  “Everything,” Daniel said. “Tell me everything.”

  “All at once?”

  “Start at the beginning. No, start before the beginning. Start with that place you come from.”

  “Crow Lake?”

  “Yes. What was it like growing up in Crow Lake?”

  “Fine,” I said. “It was fine.”

  Daniel waited. After a minute he said, “You’re a born storyteller, Kate. You really are.”

  “Well I don’t know what would interest you!”

  “Everything. How big was it? How many people? How big was the downtown? Was there a library? A Dairy Queen? A laundromat?”

  “Oh no,” I said. “No no. There was a store. There wasn’t a downtown. There was a store and a church. And a school. And the farms. Mostly just farms.”

  He was hunched over his coffee, trying to visualize it. Daniel is tall and thin and has a slight stoop from spending his life peering into microscopes. In the circumstances the name Crane is a bit unfortunate and you’d think his students would give him a hard time, but apparently not. He is reputed to be the best lecturer in the department. I have considered sneaking in to one of his lectures to see how he does it, but I’ve never had the nerve. When it comes to lecturing, I believe I am considered a bit dry.

  “Real old-world stuff,” he said.

  “It’s not old-world,” I said. “It’s still like that now, more or less. There are lots of places still like that. They’re not so isolated, because the roads are better and the cars are better. Struan is only twenty miles away. Twenty miles used to be a long way. Now it’s nothing. Except in the winter.”

  He was nodding, still trying to visualize. I said, “Haven’t you ever been up north?”

  He pondered. “Barrie. I’ve been to Barrie.”

  “Barrie! Good God, Daniel! Barrie’s not north!”

  I was quite shocked, to tell you the truth. He’s such an intelligent man, and he’s been everywhere. His childhood was spent packing and unpacking as one or other of his parents took up a year’s posting as “visiting professor” somewhere or other. He’s lived for a year in Boston and a year in Rome and a year in London and a year in Washington and a year in Edinburgh. And to find this enormous gap in his knowledge of his own country! It’s not as if he’s an Egyptologist and has spent his life crawling into tombs—he’s a microbiologist. A life scientist! A life scientist who’s never been out in his own backyard.

  I was shocked out of my normal reticence, I guess, because I started telling him all about Crow Lake, about how it was nothing at all, true wilderness, until the logging companies started to push their way north, and how they built a road all the way up to a little blue patch of water that they called Crow Lake, and how up that road in due course came three young men. Three stone-broke young men who were fed up with working on other men’s farms and wanted farms of their own. Between them they had three horses, an ox, a crosscut saw, and assorted other tools, and they pooled their resources and began to clear themselves some land. It was Crown land—they claimed fifty acres apiece—and because it was located smack in the middle of nowhere and the government wanted it settled, they got it free. They cleared an acre each, to begin with, and built rough log cabins, one for each of them. And then they went back, one at a time, down the road to New Liskeard, and found themselves wives, one for each of them. They brought their wives back to those cabins.

  “Four walls and a roof,” I said to Daniel. “A dirt floor. That’s all it would have been. Water, by bucket, from Crow River. That really was old-world stuff.”

  “What did they do about food? Before they could grow any?”

  “Brought it in by horse and wagon. Along with wood stoves and sinks and beds and everything else. A bit at a time. And they kept clearing the land, a bit at a time. Clearing the land took years. Generations. It’s still going on.”

  “And did they all make it? Did their farms take off?”

  “Oh yes. The soil’s not too bad up there. Not wonderful, but good enough. There’s a short growing season, of course.”

  “How long ago was all this?” Daniel said.

  I thought about it. “Three or four generations.” It hadn’t occurred to me before, but they would have been Great-Grandmother’s contemporaries, those three.

  “Are their families still there?”

  “Bits of them,” I said. “Frank Janie—he was one of the three—he had a big family, and they eventually got into dairy farming. They’re still going strong. Stanley Vernon was the second man. His farm was taken over somewhere along the way, but one of his daughters still lives there. Old Miss Vernon. She must be about a hundred.”

  “Do they still live in log cabins?”

  I looked at him to see if he was joking. It can be hard to tell with Daniel, and I wasn’t sure.

  “No, Daniel. No. They do not live in log cabins. They live in houses, like real people.”

  “That’s a shame. What happened to the cabins?”

  “They were probably used as sheds or barns once the houses were built. And then they probably rotted and fell down. This tends to happen with untreated wood, as you may know, being a biologist. All except Frank Janie’s, which was bought and taken away on the back of a truck to be part of a heritage site for the tourists, in New Liskeard.”

  “A heritage site,” Daniel said. He pondered some more, then shook his head. “How do you know all this? It’s incred-ible! Think of knowing the history of your whole community!”

  “There’s not that much to know,” I said. “You just kind of soak it up, I guess. Osmosis.”

  “How about the third guy? Is his family still there?”

  “Jackson Pye,” I said. I saw the farm as I said the name. The big grey-painted house, the large shambling barn, bits of farm machinery scattered about, the fields lying flat and yellow under the sun. The ponds, still and quiet, reflecting the hard blue sky.

  Daniel was waiting expectantly. I said, “The third man was Jackson Pye. The Pyes were our nearest neighbours, actually. But things didn’t work out too well for them, in the end.”

  Afterwards I found myself thinking about old Miss Vernon. About something she had told me, which I would much rather have left unremembered. Miss Vernon of the teeth and the long whiskery jaw, whose father had been one of those first three men. This was in my teens, when during the summers I helped Miss Vernon with her vegetable garden. She seemed about a hundred even then. She had arthritis and couldn’t do anything much, only sit on a kitchen chair which she had me bring outside so she could keep an eye on me. That was what she said, but really she just wanted company. She talked while I weeded. Despite what I said to Daniel there’s a limit to what you can learn by osmosis, and Miss Vernon is the source for most of what I know about Crow Lake.

  This day she was telling me about her childhood, about the games they played and the trouble they got into. She said that one day in early winter she and her brother and two of the Pye boys—Jackson Pye’s sons— were playing by the shore of the lake. The lake hadn’t been frozen long and all of them had been expressly forbidden to go out on it, but Norman Pye, who was older than the rest of them, said that it would be safe if they slid out on their bellies. So they did.

  “We thought it was exciting as all get out,” Miss Vernon said. “We could hear the ice cracking but it didn’t give, and we slid across it like seals. Oh, it was tremendous fun. The ice was clear as glass and you could see right to the bottom. All the stones lying there, brighter and more colorful than they ever are when you look through water. You could even see fish swimming about. And then all at once there was this loud crack and the whole sheet gave way, and there we were in the water. It was awful cold. But we were right near the sho
re so we just climbed out. But Norman wouldn’t go home. He said he’d be better off not.”

  She stopped there and started rattling her teeth about as she does, as if that were the end of the story. After a minute I said, “You mean he didn’t go home till he dried out?” I thought of him, teeth chattering, skin blue, trying to figure out how to keep from freezing while his clothes dried, afraid of the beating he’d get if his father found out. Being the eldest, he’d be in the most trouble.

  Miss Vernon said, “No, no. He didn’t go home at all.”

  “You mean ever?”

  “He reckoned he’d just head off down the road, and maybe a logging truck would pick him up. We didn’t see him again.”

  It haunted me afterwards. It kept coming back to me, throughout my teenage years. The image of that boy walking down the road. Flailing himself with his arms, his feet numb, boots stumbling on the frozen road. Darkness coming on. Snow drifting down.

  What haunted me most of all was the thought that three generations back, there was a Pye son who was prepared to risk freezing to death rather than face his father.

  chapter

  FOUR

  Aunt Annie arrived two days after the funeral. You need to know about Aunt Annie; she played a part in what happened. She was my father’s eldest sister, a worthy descendant of Great-Grandmother Morrison, and equal to most tasks. It was the first time she had left the Gaspé, and although Luke and Matt had met her—our parents had taken them “home” for a visit once, when they were small—Bo and I never had.

  She was many years older than my father, short where he had been tall, fat where he had been thin, and with a behind I’m glad I didn’t inherit, but she had something of him about her and she seemed familiar to me straight away. She was unmarried. My father’s mother had died some years previously, not long after Great-Grandmother in fact, and since then Aunt Annie had kept house for her father and brothers. I suppose the family might have chosen to send her simply because it was seen as women’s work and having no children she could most easily be spared, but I suspect there was a better reason than that. The message she had to deliver—the arrangements the family had made for us—was a painful one, and I imagine there weren’t many volunteers.

  “I’m sorry to be so long in coming,” she said when Reverend Mitchell had presented her to us—since the accident we had no car and he had picked her up at the railway crossing for us—“but this country is just too big. Do you have a lavatory? I assume you have a lavatory. Kate, you look just like your mother, aren’t you the lucky one. And this is Bo. Hello, Bo.”

  Bo regarded her stonily from Luke’s arms. Aunt Annie seemed unperturbed. She removed her hat, which was small and round and brown and did her no favours, and looked around for somewhere to put it. Everything was a mess, but she didn’t seem to notice. She put her hat down on the sideboard beside a plate with a dull white crescent of ham fat on it. Then she reached up and patted her hair.

  “Do I look a fright? I feel a fright. Never mind. Show me the lavatory and then I can get started. I expect there’s lots to do.”

  Her tone was cheerful and matter-of-fact, as if this were a regular visit and our parents just happened to be out of the room for the moment. But it seemed right that she should be like that. That was how they would have been. I decided that I liked her. I couldn’t think why Luke and Matt were looking so anxious.

  “There we are,” she said a few minutes later, emerging from the bathroom. “Now then. What’s the time? Four o’clock. That’s fine. We all need to get to know each other, but I expect that will look after itself. What I think we should do now is sort out what needs doing most—cooking, cleaning, washing, that sort of thing. Reverend Mitchell says you’ve managed marvellously, but there must be things—”

  She paused. Something in Luke’s and Matt’s expressions must have distracted her, because she didn’t finish her sentence. Instead, her tone a little less brisk and a little more gentle, she said, “I know we have matters to discuss, but I think we should leave all that for a day or two, don’t you? We’ll need to go through your father’s papers, and we’ll need to talk to his lawyer and the bank. Then we’ll know where we stand. There’s not much point in discussing things until then. Is that all right with you?”

  They nodded, and both of them suddenly looked looser, as if they’d been holding their breath and now they had let it out.

  So we had a couple of days of what I suppose you could call a honeymoon period, during which Aunt Annie restored order and gave Luke and Matt a chance to get their breath back. Laundry had been the biggest problem, so she started there, and then cleaned the house and discreetly disposed of our parents’ clothes and dealt with unanswered mail and unpaid bills. She was efficient and tactful and made no demands on our affections. I’m sure that under different circumstances we would have grown to love her.

  On a Thursday, almost two weeks after the accident, she and Luke went up to town to see my father’s lawyer and the bank. Reverend Mitchell drove them up while Matt stayed with Bo and me.

  We went down to the lake after they’d left. I wondered if Matt would suggest a swim, but instead, after standing for quite a few minutes watching Bo stomp around at the water’s edge, he said abruptly, “Why don’t we go back to the ponds?”

  “What about Bo?” I said.

  “She’ll come too. It’s time we educated her.”

  “She’ll fall in,” I said anxiously. Unlike the lake, the ponds were steep-sided. I felt tragedy lurked around every corner now; I was afraid all the time. I went to bed with fear at night and woke up with it in the morning.

  But Matt said, “Sure she’ll fall in, won’t you, Bo? That’s what ponds are for.”

  He carried Bo through the woods on his shoulders, the same way he had carried me all those years ago. We did not talk. We never said much on these excursions, but there was a difference in the silence this time. Back then, it had been because there was no need to talk; now it was because our minds were full of things we couldn’t say.

  It was the first time we had been back to the ponds since our parents’ death, and when I saw them again, when we slid down the bank to the first of them, I felt my spirits rise in spite of everything. The first one was “our” pond, not just because it was the closest but because on one side there was a shelf four or five feet wide where the water was less than three feet deep. The water was clear and warm, and many of the pond dwellers congregated there, and of course you could see right to the bottom.

  Bo gazed around from her perch on Matt’s shoulders. “Dat!” she said, pointing at the water.

  “You should see what’s in it, Bo,” I said. “We’ll tell you the names of everything.”

  I lay down on my stomach, as I always did, and peered in. Tadpoles which had been hugging the edges of the pond swarmed away as my shadow fell over them and then gradually wriggled back. They were well developed, their hind legs fully formed, their tails short and stubby. We had watched them grow, Matt and I, as we did every year, from the very first day they began to move inside the tiny clear globes of their eggs.

  Sticklebacks were drifting aimlessly about. The breeding season was over so it was hard to tell the males and the females apart. When they were breeding the males were very beautiful, with red underparts and silvery scales on their backs and brilliant blue eyes. Matt had told me—it had been in the spring, just a few months ago, though it seemed to be in another lifetime—that the male sticklebacks did all the work. They made the nests and courted the females and fanned the nests to keep the eggs supplied with oxygen. Once the eggs had hatched it was the males who guarded them. If a baby strayed from the group, the father sucked it into his mouth and spat it back into the pack.

  “What do the females do?” I’d asked him.

  “Oh, laze around. Go to tea parties. Gossip with their friends. You know what females are like.”

  “No, but really Matt. What do they do?”

  “I don’t know. Eat a lot, p
robably. Probably they need to recover their strength after producing all those eggs.”

  He’d been lying beside me then, his chin on the back of his hands, gazing into the water, and all that had been on our minds was this small world lying so still before us.

  I looked around at him now. He was standing a few feet back from the pond, staring at it in the way you stare at something you’re not really seeing. Bo was craning forward on his shoulders. “Down!” she said.

  I said, “Aren’t you coming to look?”

  “Sure.”

  He set Bo down and she staggered to the water’s edge. Matt said, “Lie down, Bo. Lie down like Kate and watch the fish.”

  Bo looked at me. She squatted down beside me. She was wearing a little blue dress and her diaper hung down beneath it, so when she squatted it bunched up on the ground and made her look as if she had an enormous behind.

  “Luke’s not very good at diapers,” I said. Aunt Annie had offered to take over the task of changing Bo, but Bo would have none of it, so that was one job Luke and Matt still shared.

  Matt said, “I did that diaper, thank you, and I’m proud of it.”

  He smiled at me, but when I looked at his eyes there was no laughter there. I saw suddenly that there was no happiness in him now. No real happiness; just a show, for my sake. I turned my head quickly away from him and stared hard into the water. The fear and dread lying inside of me rose up like a river, like a flood. I stared into the pond and pressed everything down hard.

  After a minute Matt lay down beside Bo, so that she was between us. He said, “Look at the fish, Bo.” He pointed at the water and Bo looked at his finger. “No, look in the water. See the fish?”

  Bo said, “Ooooh!” She stood up and jumped up and down, yelling with excitement, and the fish vanished as if they had never been. She stopped jumping and stared into the water. She looked at Matt in disbelief.