Crow Lake (2 page)

Sally McLean had slowed down when she got close to Luke and came to a halt a few feet away and stood there, her weight on one hip, drawing lines in the sand with her toe. She and Luke talked in low tones without looking at each other. I didn’t pay much attention. I’d buried Bo right up to her armpits and now I was making patterns on the mound with pebbles, and Bo was picking the pebbles out and poking them in again in the wrong places.

“Don’t, Bo,” I said. “I’m making a pattern.”

“Peas,” Bo said.

“No they’re not. They’re pebbles. They’re not to eat.” She put one in her mouth.

“Don’t!” I said. “Spit it out!”

“Idiot,” Matt said. He leaned over and squeezed Bo’s cheeks until her mouth popped open and then fished out the pebble. She snickered at him and stuck her thumb in her mouth and then took it out and looked at it. It was gooey with saliva and sand. “Beans,” she said, and stuck it in again.

“Now she’s got sand in her mouth,” I said.

“It won’t hurt her.”

He was watching Luke and Sally. Luke was still skipping stones but more carefully now, taking a long time to choose the flattest ones. Sally kept reaching up and smoothing back her hair. It was long and thick and a bright copper red, and the breeze off the lake kept lifting little strands of it and blowing them across her face. I thought the two of them were pretty boring, but Matt was watching them with the same thoughtful interest with which he studied the inhabitants of the ponds.

His interest interested me. I said, “Why’s she here? Where’s she going?”

He didn’t answer for a minute, and then he said, “Well, I suspect it has something to do with Luke.”

“What? What to do with Luke?”

He looked at me and narrowed his eyes. “I don’t actually
know.
Do you want me to guess?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. It’s only a guess, but everywhere Luke goes, there’s Sally. So I’m guessing she’s in love with him.”

“In
love
with
Luke?”

“Hard to believe, isn’t it? But females are very strange, Katie.”

“Is
Luke
in love with
her?”

“Dunno. I guess it’s possible.”

After a while Sally left and Luke wandered up from the shore, frowning deeply at the sand, and Matt raised his eyebrows at me in a warning way which meant that I would be wise to keep quiet on the subject of Sally McLean.

We unearthed Bo from her burial mound and brushed the sand off her and took her back to the house to get dressed. Then I took my bathing suit outside to hang it on the line, so I was the one to see the police car come down the drive.

You didn’t often see police cars in Crow Lake, and I was curious. I ran down to the driveway to look at it, and the policeman got out, and to my surprise so did Reverend Mitchell and Dr. Christopherson. Reverend Mitchell was our minister and his daughter Janie was my best friend. Dr. Christopherson lived in Struan, but he was our doctor—in fact the only doctor for about a hundred miles. I liked both of them. Dr. Christopherson had an Irish setter called Molly who could pick blueberries with her teeth and who came with him on his rounds. I skipped up to them and said, “Mum and Dad aren’t here right now. They went shopping. They went to get a suitcase for Luke, because he’s going to be a teacher.”

The policeman was standing by his car, looking intently at a small scratch on the fender. Reverend Mitchell looked at Dr. Christopherson and then back at me and said, “Is Luke here, Katherine? Or Matt?”

“They’re both here,” I said. “They’re getting changed. We’ve been for a swim.”

“We’d like a word with them. Could you tell them we’re here?”

“Okay,” I said, and then, remembering my manners, “Do you want to come in? Mum and Dad will be back about half past six.” I had a happy thought. “I could make you a cup of tea.”

“Thank you,” Reverend Mitchell said. “We’ll come in, but I don’t think … tea, thank you. Not right at the moment.”

I led them into the house and excused the noise Bo was making—she’d got all the pots and pans out of the bottom cupboard and was bashing about with them on the kitchen floor. They said it didn’t matter so I left them in the dining room while I went to get Luke and Matt. I brought them both back and they looked curiously at the two men—the policeman had stayed by his car—and said hi. And then I saw Matt’s face change. He’d been looking at Reverend Mitchell, and suddenly he didn’t look polite and curious any more. He looked afraid.

He said, “What?”

Dr. Christopherson said, “Kate, I wonder if you could go and see to Bo? Could you just … um … ?”

I went out to the kitchen. Bo wasn’t doing anything wrong but I picked her up and carried her outside. She was getting big but I could still just carry her. I took her back down to the beach. The mosquitoes were starting to come out but I stayed there anyway, even when Bo began to rage at me, because I was afraid of the expression on Matt’s face and I didn’t want to know what had caused it.

After a long time, half an hour at least, Matt and Luke came down to the beach. I didn’t look at them. Luke picked Bo up and carried her down to the water’s edge and began to walk along the shore with her. Matt sat down beside me, and when Luke and Bo were a long way down the curve of the shore he told me that our parents had been killed when their car was hit by a fully loaded logging truck whose brakes failed as it was coming down Honister Hill.

I remember being terrified that he would cry. His voice was shaking, and he was struggling very hard with himself, and I remember being rigid with fear, not daring to look at him, scarcely daring to breathe. As if that would be the worst thing; much worse than this incomprehensible thing he was telling me. As if for Matt to cry was the one unthinkable thing.

chapter
TWO

Memories. I’m not in favour of them, by and large. Not that there aren’t some good ones, but on the whole I’d like to put them in an airtight cupboard and close the door. And in fact, until a couple of months ago I’d managed to do that quite successfully for some years. I had a life to live, after all. I had my work, and I had Daniel, and between them they took up a lot of time and energy. It’s true that things hadn’t been going too well in either department for a while, but I didn’t think to connect that with “the past.” I did genuinely feel, up until a couple of months ago, that I’d put all that behind me. I felt that I was doing fine.

And then, back in February, I found a letter from Matt waiting for me when I got home from work one Friday evening. I saw the writing and instantly I saw Matt—you know how handwriting conjures up the person. And also instantly I got the same old ache, centred more or less midchest, a heavy, dull pain, like mourning. In all those years it hadn’t lessened a bit.

I opened the envelope as I climbed the stairs, clutching my bag full of lab reports under my arm. It turned out not to be a proper letter after all. It was a card from Simon, Matt’s son, inviting me to his eighteenth birthday party at the end of April. Attached to it was a scribbled note from Matt saying, “You have to come, Kate!! No excuses!!!” A total of five exclamation marks. And then a tactful P.S.: “Bring someone if you want to.”

Behind the note was a photograph. It was of Simon, but at first I thought it was Matt. Matt at eighteen. They’re absurdly alike. And naturally that triggered a whole raft of memories of that disastrous year and its slow-moving chain of events. And that in turn took me back to the tale of Great-Grandmother Morrison and her book rest. Poor old Great-Grandmother. The photograph of her hangs in my bedroom now. I took it with me when I left home. No one seemed to miss it.

I put my bag down on the table in my living-cum-dining room and sat down to read the invitation again. I would go, of course. Simon is a very nice boy, and I am his aunt, after all. Luke and Bo would be there—it would be a family reunion and I am in favour of family reunions. Of course I would go. There was a conference in Montreal that weekend which I had already arranged to attend, but I wasn’t giving a paper so I could cancel that. And I had no classes on Friday afternoons, so I could leave straight after lunch. Get on Highway 400 and head north. It’s a four-hundred-mile trip, still a long haul, though the roads are paved most of the way now. It’s only for the last hour or so, when you fork off the main road, heading west, that the paving runs out and the forest closes in and you really feel you’re going back in time.

As for “bringing someone”—no. Daniel would love to go, Daniel is consumed by curiosity about my family and would be simply
delighted
to go, and his fascination and enthusiasm would be altogether more than I could cope with. No, I would not invite Daniel.

I looked at the photograph, seeing Simon, seeing Matt, knowing how it would be. Fine, really. Everything would be fine. The party itself would be loud and cheerful, the food would be terrific, we’d all laugh a lot and crack jokes at one another’s expense. Luke and Matt and Bo and I would talk about old times, though only specific old times. Certain things would be left out and certain names wouldn’t come up. Calvin Pye, for instance. His name wouldn’t be mentioned. Or Laurie Pye’s, come to that.

I would give Simon a very expensive present to demonstrate both my affection for him, which is genuine, and my continued commitment to the family.

On Sunday afternoon, when the time came for me to leave, Matt would come out with me to my car. He’d say, “Somehow we never got time to talk,” and I’d say, “I know. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?”

I’d look at him, and he’d look back out of Great-Grandmother Morrison’s steady grey eyes, and I’d have to look away. And partway home I would discover that I was crying, and I’d spend the next month trying to figure out why.

It keeps coming back to Great-Grandmother.

With no trouble at all I can call up an image of her and Matt, deep in conversation. Great-Grandmother is sitting very straight in a high-backed chair and Matt is sitting opposite her. He is listening attentively to what she says, nodding when he agrees with her, politely waiting to put his own case when he does not. He is respectful but he isn’t cowed by her, and she knows it and is pleased. I can see it in her eyes.

Strange, isn’t it? Because of course they never actually met. Great-Grandmother lived to a ripe old age, but even so, by the time Matt appeared on the scene she was long gone. She never visited us—never left the shores of the Gaspé—but nonetheless, when I was a child I had the impression that she was “with us,” in some mysterious way. She was a powerful enough influence, heaven knows; she might as well have been in the next room. As for her and Matt—I think I sensed from early on that there was a link of some kind between them, though I couldn’t have told you what it was.

My father used to tell stories about her—far more than about his own mother—most of them illustrating some high moral principle. Unfortunately he wasn’t much of a storyteller, and the tales were longer on message than they were on suspense. There was the one about the Protestants and the Catholics, for instance, about the friction between them within the community, which led to battles between rival gangs of boys. But the sides weren’t evenly matched—there were more Protestants than Catholics—so Great-Grandmother decreed that her sons must fight “on the other side,” in order to even things up. Fair play was what we were meant to glean from that one. No battle scenes, no blood and glory, just the lesson: fair play.

And then there was Great-Grandmother’s famous devotion to education—the subject that made Luke’s eyes glaze over. All fourteen of her children finished elementary school, which was almost unheard of in those days. Homework came before farm work—never mind that every mouthful of food had to be wrung from the land. Education was her dream of dreams, a passion so strong it was almost a disease, and she infected not only her own children with it but generations of little Morrisons yet unborn.

In his references to her our father made her sound like a paragon: fair-minded, kindly, and wise as Solomon—a description I had some difficulty reconciling with her photograph. In the photograph she looks like a battle-axe, pure and simple. You can see at a glance why there are no stories about her children misbehaving.

And where was her husband, our great-grandfather, in all this? Out in the fields, I suppose. Someone had to be.

But we all knew she was a remarkable woman; not even our father’s lack of storytelling skills could disguise that. I remember Matt asking once what books she had propped on that book rest of hers, apart from the Bible, of course. He wanted to know if they were novels— Charles Dickens maybe, or Jane Austen. But our father said no. Fiction didn’t interest her, not even great fiction. She didn’t want to “escape” from the real world, she wanted to know about it. She had books on geology, on plant life, on the solar system; there was one called
The Vestiges of Creation,
over which he remembered her tutting and shaking her head, which discussed the geological formation of the world. It pre-dated Darwin, but like him was not in complete accord with the teachings of the Bible. It was a sign of how greatly she revered knowledge, our father said, that although it troubled her, she did not forbid her children or grandchildren to read it.

Much of what was in the books must have been completely beyond her—she had never had a day’s schooling in her life—but still she read them, and struggled to understand. I was impressed by that, even as a child. Now I find it touching as well. That hunger for knowledge, that determination in the face of so much grinding labour—I do find it both admirable and sad. Great-Grandmother was a born scholar, in a time and place where the term was unknown.

But she had her successes. I’ve no doubt our father was the apple of her eye, because it was through him that she finally saw her dream of getting her family educated and off the land begin to come true. He was the youngest son of her youngest son; his brothers did his share of the farm work so that he could finish high school—the first member of the family to do so. When the celebrations were over (he was at the top of the class in every subject; I can imagine Great-Grandmother, her face grim with suppressed pride, presiding over the feast), they packed a hacksack for him—clean socks, a handkerchief, a bar of soap, and his high school certificate—and sent him out into the world to better himself.

He headed west and south, travelling from town to town, taking work where he could find it, always following the wide blue path of the St. Lawrence. When he reached Toronto he stopped for a bit, but he didn’t stay long. Maybe the city alarmed him—all the people, all the noise—though my memory of him is not of someone easily alarmed. More likely he found city life frivolous and lacking in purpose. That fits in better with what I know about him.

When he set off again, he headed north and a bit west, away from so-called civilization, and by the time he was twenty-three he was settled in Crow Lake, which was much the same sort of community as the one he’d left a thousand miles behind.

When I was old enough to think about such things, it seemed to me that my father’s family must have been disappointed that he had settled in such a place when they had sacrificed so much to launch him out into the world. It was a while before I realized that they would have approved of his choice. They would have known that in spite of the location there were huge differences in his new life. He had a job in a bank in Struan and wore a suit to work and owned a car and built a low, cool, tree-shaded house out by the lake, away from the dust and the flies of the farmyards. In the living room of his house he had a bookcase full of books, and rarer still, he had the leisure time to read them. If he had settled in a farming community it was because he felt at home with the values he found there. The point was, he had a choice. That was what they had won for him.

The bank gave my father two weeks annual leave (the first holiday anyone in his family had ever had), and a year after settling in Crow Lake he used that leave to go back to the Gaspé and propose to his childhood sweetheart. She was a girl from a neighbouring farm and had a good solid Scottish background like his own. She must have had a sense of adventure as well, because she said yes and came back to Crow Lake as his bride. There is one photograph of them, taken on their wedding day. They are standing at the entrance to a little church on the shores of the Gaspé; two tall, strong, big-boned, fair-haired, serious-minded people, who could as easily have passed for brother and sister as husband and wife. You can tell they’re serious-minded by their smiles: honest, direct, but essentially serious. They don’t think their life will be easy—neither of them has been brought up to expect that—but they think they are capable of taking it on. They will give it their best shot.

The two of them travelled back to Crow Lake together and set up their home, and in due course produced four children: two boys, Luke and Matt, and then, after a ten-year gap and presumably much deliberation, two girls: myself (Katherine, known as Kate) and Elizabeth, known as Bo.

Did they love us? Of course. Did they say so? Of course not. Actually, that’s not quite true—my mother did say she loved me once. I had done something wrong—it was a spell when I was always doing something wrong— and she was cross with me and wouldn’t speak to me for what felt like days, though it was probably only hours. And finally, in fear, I said to her, “Mummy, do you love me?” And she looked at me in surprise, and then said simply, “To distraction.” I didn’t know what “to distraction” meant, on one level, but on another level I did know, and was reassured. I am still reassured.

At some stage, probably quite early on, our father banged a nail into the wall of the bedroom he shared with our mother and hung upon it the picture of Great-Grandmother Morrison, and we all grew up knowing about her dreams and being aware of her gaze. As far as I was concerned it wasn’t an entirely comfortable experience. I was always convinced that she disapproved of us all, with just one exception. I could tell by her expression that she thought Luke was lazy and I was a dreamer and Bo was so strong-willed she’d be nothing but trouble the whole of her life. It seemed to me that the only time those fierce old eyes showed any sign of softening was when Matt walked into the room. Then her expression would change, and you could see what she was thinking. She was thinking, That one. He’s the one.

I find it hard to remember much of what happened in the days immediately following the accident. Most of my memories seem to be merely images, caught in time like a photograph. The living room, for example—I remember what a mess it was. We all slept in there the first night; probably Bo wouldn’t settle or I couldn’t get to sleep, and in the end Luke and Matt brought Bo’s cot and three mattresses into the living room.

I have an image of myself lying awake, staring at the darkness. I kept trying to sleep and sleep would not come and time would not pass. I knew that Luke and Matt were awake too, but for some reason I was afraid to talk to them, so the night went on forever.

Other things seemed to happen over and over but I’m not sure, looking back, if that was only in my mind. I can still see Luke standing at the front door, holding Bo in one arm and with his free hand accepting a large covered dish from someone. I know that happened, but in my memory he spent practically the whole of the first few days in that pose. Though that could have been true—every wife, every mother, every maiden aunt in the community must have set her lips and started cooking as soon as she heard the news. Potato salad figured largely. And cooked hams. Also nourishing stews, though it was far too hot to eat them. Every time you went out the front door, you tripped over a quart basket of peas or a vat of stewed rhubarb.

And Luke holding Bo. Did he really carry her for every waking moment of those first days? Because that’s how I remember it. I suppose she was affected by the atmosphere in the house and was missing our mother and cried if he put her down.