Eye Lake (13 page)

‘“Hey there, Clarence,” we said, kind of sheepish. “How's she going?”

‘And he turns his head around like he isn't even surprised to see us and says, “Hi there, boys. You've come a long ways up river today.” He doesn't even stop his sawing.

‘“Just looking for new fishing spots,” I told him.

‘“Well,” he says, stopping his sawing for a second and rubbing a few hundred of the bugs off his neck, “I'll be honest with you boys. I've tried this stretch myself and I've never had much luck at all. One or two at most. Hardly bigger than minnows.” Which, as you well know, is what every fisherman tells you if he's got his own eye on a spot and wants to keep it to himself.

‘“I hear they're catching a ton down by the narrows on the other side of town,” he says. “Can barely get their hooks in the water before they get bitten – that's what they been telling me.”

‘And Jake and me stood there for a moment or two longer until we started to get the feeling Clarence didn't want us around, like we were a couple of those bugs and he was trying to brush us off. He wasn't being unfriendly or nothing like that: he just looked like a man who had a hell of a lot to do.

‘That was a month or so after the picnic and we didn't think much of it at the time. We didn't even get around to asking what he was doing. He was chopping wood. There was nothing special about a man chopping wood in Crooked River, especially one who had a whole hotel to keep heated. He'd found himself a good stand of tall red pines there by the river. It was only afterwards it occurred to us that usually you wouldn't cut good lumber like that for burning. And besides, in Crooked River terms that was a hell of a long ways to go to get firewood.

‘And then, of course, there was his correspondence.'

‘His correspondence,' Virgil said. ‘With who? About what?'

‘Well,' Jim said, ‘it was easy enough to figure some of that out
afterwards, the same as everything else, but at the time we didn't have much of a clue. All we knew was that every Friday afternoon, at five minutes to five on the button, Clarence would walk the twenty feet from the front step of his hotel to Schieder's store and hand Schieder a letter and the money for a stamp. The highway didn't reach us then so all our mail came and went by train five o'clock Friday. There was always quite a bustle around Schieder's at that time, with everyone coming to send or collect their mail. One of the railroad men would bring the sack of incoming mail from the train to Schieder's, and Jake, who used to help out in the store, would take the sack of outgoing mail over to the train. It was a real social occasion, with everyone hovering about the store waiting to see if they'd got something and, if they had, oftentimes reading it then and there and sharing their news with others. The mail was a big deal back then. We didn't have no
TV
and there was only two radios in town, so whatever news you had of the world came in that sack.

‘Clarence treated the occasion different from everyone else though. For a start, it was only twenty feet for him to walk but he got real dressed up for the journey. He'd wear his Sunday finest – a black suit, polished shoes, a hat … hell, even his buttons were polished. You'd see them glinting like pieces of silver as he walked across the dirt of the road. It was as if whoever he was sending his letter to would know just what he looked like when he sent it. And when he got to the store he wouldn't say anything, only nod politely at the people grouped outside who said hello to him, and he'd look so serious and determined and solemn that when he got near the door they'd sort of open a path through for him, like the parting of the Red Sea. Then he'd hand his letter – always just the one letter – over the counter to Schieder, as if he were trusting him with a nugget of gold.

‘Schieder must've known where those letters were going – he must've seen the address on them – but being responsible for the post back then was like being a doctor or lawyer, as though you'd
taken one of them oaths of secrecy. Where something got sent was strictly between you and the postmaster. So Schieder never spoke to nobody about Clarence's letters and Clarence never spoke to nobody about them neither. And when he got one back – which he didn't get that regular, not as regular as he sent them – every month or two maybe, often less – he didn't open it there and then like most other folks did, but would put it carefully in the inside pocket of his suit jacket and walk slow and steady back to the hotel, as if he wasn't in much of a hurry to read it at all. Not that that fooled anybody: every week, after he'd handed over his letter, he'd go wait quietly in the corner of the store for the time it took for the train to arrive and Jake to bring back the mail sack and everybody else to get their mail, rubbing his hands together while he waited like he was nervous, until there was just him left.

‘“Is there something for me?” he'd ask then. And if Schieder said no he'd pause a second and ask, “Are you sure?” And Schieder, being polite, would hold open the empty sack for him to look.'

‘I guess it must have been her,' Virgil said.

‘I don't see who else it could've been, Virgil. He didn't have any correspondence before that picnic, not that I knew of. And he sure didn't fancy himself up and walk to Schieder's store every Friday afternoon.'

‘So that piece of paper, the one you saw her put in his hand that day on the platform, it must've been an address.'

‘It must have,' Jim agreed.

‘And he never said what was in those letters.'

‘He never said a word about them. But they must've promised something to him because he kept turning up like clockwork at Schieder's store five-to-five every Friday afternoon and he kept trekking out there into the bush every day too. By the fall when Jake and me went back up the river to check for fishing spots we found he'd cut down a good part of that red pine stand already. It was plain to us then he was building something.'

‘But you didn't know what.'

‘No, we didn't know what. I guess we figured maybe he was building a new hotel or something. It didn't seem that promising a spot, out there in the middle of nowhere, but hell, he'd sure got it right the first time! I guess we figured he knew something we didn't, like they were going to put in a highway out there or something. Oh, and there was another thing I almost forgot. He didn't play his fiddle again that whole summer. In fact he didn't play it for a good long while after.'

‘How long?'

‘A good few years, I reckon,' Jim said.

‘And how long was he out there building for?'

‘Fifteen years. About the same time he didn't play his fiddle for, now I come to think of it.'

‘Jesus,' Virgil said. ‘Fifteen years! He spent fifteen years building it! And the letters? Was he still getting the letters that whole time?'

‘He was still getting some the first few years. They kind of trailed off slowly after that – you know, one every six months and then one every year – so nobody really noticed exactly when they stopped coming altogether. But he still kept on sending his as regular as clockwork. And each time he went in to send them he'd wait just the same as before until everybody else had collected their mail, and then he'd ask Schieder, “Is there something for me? Are you sure?” And when Schieder died he'd ask his son – who was running the store then – the exact same thing.'

‘And when did you know what it was?' Virgil asked.

‘Well, after about ten years it already looked like no building we'd ever seen before. The whole thing was made of logs, red pine logs, and it was three storeys high. There was a high wide door at the front and who knows how many rooms inside – we could just see the windows, and there were plenty of them, cut out of the wood. God knows how he did it, Virgil! God knows how he stuck at it! Those logs were real big and he cut and hauled and hoisted every one of them himself, with just a block and tackle. He built it
with his bare hands and his sweat and nothing else – with no architect or plans to work with either, just a picture he had in his head, I reckon. Of course he'd built the hotel himself too, but that was different. He'd seen what he was going to build beforehand with the hotel, you could tell; he must've looked at other places and copied them. And once he'd done the foundations, he'd had boards and nails and cut timber brought down the river for him to work with. He had that hotel up and finished in a year. There's all the difference in the world between putting up a frame and nailing on boards, and hauling twenty-foot logs and notching them and hoisting them into place one by one by one until they're three storeys high, thirty feet high. All the difference in the world! And you could tell that too: there were a bunch of buildings that looked the same as that hotel but there were none that looked anything like this one. And it wasn't even finished yet.'

‘Of course, the tower,' said Virgil. ‘There was still the tower?'

‘That's right,' Jim said. ‘There was still the tower, or the turret – call it what you will. He started on that after ten years. It was built onto the left of the building – as you went upriver – and every time you went up that way to look it'd be a little higher. Because by now me and Jake and other folks from town weren't even pretending to find new fishing spots: we were going there to look at Clarence's tower and how it was getting on. We'd bring back reports when we returned to town. “How high?” people would ask. Ten feet it was in the first year, then twenty in the second, then thirty in the third – the same height as the building's roof – until at last it was almost forty feet by the fifth year and he stopped after that. It was finished then.'

‘And you knew what it was then?'

‘When that tower thing was done we had a pretty good idea. It was a castle, or what Clarence guessed one would look like. We started calling it Clarence's castle. And for those of us who'd been at the picnic that day it wasn't so hard to put the two and two of it together. As soon as he'd finished the tower he cleared a field in
front of his castle, right down to the banks of the river, and started seeding it with grass and flowers. It was clear as day then, Virgil. It was his version of that castle on the banks of the Danube. It was how he'd imagined it. And he'd built it for her! He'd built it for her and it was a damn sight more real than the one he'd heard about that day fifteen years before. I wish you could've seen it, Virgil. It was really something.'

‘I have seen it. I've seen it in a picture, Virgil told him. He had a picture taken.'

‘I never knew he kept that, said Jim. Well, I'm glad you got something, Virgil. I'd like to see that picture again one day myself, to remind me of it. It really was something. And it was only there that one summer.'

‘Again?' said Virgil.

‘It was me that took it,' said Jim.

Snow Creatures

T
he world didn't end that winter after George said it would. It was a bad winter though, bad enough to make you think what the end of the world might look like if it did come. The snow that fell on Halloween was just the first of a whole pile of it that fell through November and December. Almost every day it fell, until everywhere was covered in heavy blankets of it. It settled thick on the roofs of the houses and the sidewalks and the ice of the river. It covered the baseball field and the roundhouse and the gravel pit. It covered everywhere and everything. Outside the museum, the steam train looked like a snow sculpture and the mining drill was barely a lump in the blanket, like the princess's pea. You couldn't see where our garden was or the planks from the old hotel, only a path dug out to the road through banks that got steeper and steeper every day. On Main Street the hillbilly's smile had gone – there were just a few rows of dirty grey teeth and the white spaces of the empty lots and, beyond, the black-and-white gums of the woods. Every branch on every tree was bowed down under the snow and sometimes the only thing you could hear was clumps of it falling to the ground. It got so high by the end of December it was like the whole town was becoming invisible, like there were no roads, no houses, nothing, and everyone had to shovel furiously to show it was still there. And then after Christmas it stopped and the real cold arrived.

Even for us who were all used to the cold, it was bad. I remember how it hurt my lungs when I breathed and froze the hair on my head and the inside of my nostrils. Virgil never stopped hauling logs down to the basement for the wood stove, and at night the basement sounds got mixed up with sounds of cracking and groaning outside my window as everything froze harder and
harder. Nana always used to leave breadcrumbs out in the garden in the winter to feed the birds, but this winter they went quiet and still on the branches of the crabapple tree and didn't fly down to eat the crumbs. After a day or so we realized they'd been frozen solid on the tree. We left them there till spring – their songless beaks half open, their feathers covered in a layer of clear ice like they were sculptures carved out of crystal.

Two loggers, Johnny Lewicki and Ed McKinnon, went through the ice of Eye Lake that winter and drowned. Their bodies were never recovered. Virgil and some other men went out to search for them, and after they found the hole in the ice where they'd gone through – there'd been an air pocket that'd made it weak – Virgil went to pay a visit to the Earl and found him lying frozen to death in his bed. You couldn't tell how long he'd been lying like that, Virgil said. It could have been hours or days or weeks. His blankets were as stiff and frosted white as birch bark.

I thought of him lying there, staring up from his bed the same as Johnny Lewicki and Ed McKinnon were staring up from the bed of Eye Lake, with his little round glasses covered in snowflakes and egg like I remembered them being, until he became a watcher just the same as Johnny and Ed had become.

The beginning of the second week of January was my birthday, two days after Billy's. Billy had a big party for his. Most of the kids from school came, except George. Brenda made a huge cake and Buddy bought a pile of presents from Thunder Bay. There was a bike and a model plane with batteries that meant it actually flew and a baseball glove and a bunch of other stuff. We couldn't go outside to play because of the cold and Billy had a tantrum because the other kids kept trying to use his new presents, so we all had to go home early.

I didn't have a party for mine. I never usually did and that suited me just fine. I didn't much like being reminded of the forty below and the cord being wrapped around my neck and all that. And
besides, this was always the worst time of year for my dad and his circle of tempers and so we never made a fuss about me being born.

This year it was especially bad because it was forty below most days and on my birthday it was almost fifty below with the wind. Dad didn't get out of bed at all. Virgil told me he wasn't feeling well and gave me a new fishing reel he said Dad had got me before, when he wasn't feeling as bad. Nana had made me a cake with candles on it and then Virgil said he had a surprise for me.

‘You've got a visitor,' he said as I was getting ready to blow out the candles. And when he opened the porch door George was standing there, wrapped up in about a hundred scarves and hats as if he were a present or something. I couldn't see what was so special about George coming to visit, but he'd hardly been allowed out for months and I hadn't seen him since Halloween, so I guess it was sort of special.

After we'd eaten the cake, Virgil and Nana went into the living room and I showed George my new reel. Without his hats and scarves on he looked the same colour as everything outside did, as if he were a snow creature and was meant to be that colour for camouflage. And for a moment I thought maybe this was the weather he was meant for and he only looked different and strange when the snow wasn't there, like the rabbits who got their winter coats too early in the year so you could see them standing out in the bush with their fur white against the grey and brown and pale green colours of the fall, thinking they were invisible when they weren't. I asked him where he'd been and why he hadn't been out.

‘I
have
been out,' he said, puffing up his skinny chest. ‘I've been out
lots
of times.'

I told him I hadn't seen him.

‘That's because they're secret,' he said.

‘What's secret?'

‘The
expeditions
,' he said.

He told me him and his dad went out twice a week sometimes. They walked along the frozen river to where the underground
place was, carrying cans and stuff in their pockets.

‘It's important we don't look too conspicuous. That it's not too obvious,' he said. ‘We use snowshoes and everything, like real polar explorers,' he added proudly.

I didn't think there was anything special about wearing snowshoes but I didn't say nothing because he looked so pleased with himself.

‘Dad says it's important that everything's prepared,' he said.

I didn't bother asking for what because I knew he'd start talking about the end of the world again and I didn't want him to talk about that. I didn't want him to say how maybe I could go to the underground place with them, and then for me to think about Nana and Virgil and Dad left behind in the end of the world and then to feel mad about that and mad with George, like I had before. I just wanted him to come to the door with his new exhibits and for us to go to the railroad bridge and fish with bobbers and all that old stuff. I must've been quiet for a while thinking that because then he asked me, all worried, ‘You haven't told anyone, have you?'

‘No,' I said.

‘You have to promise, Eli. You have to swear on your … You have to swear on something really important!'

‘I won't tell nobody,' I said. I just wanted everything to be like it was before.

‘Dad made me take an oath,' he said, ‘which is a really important promise. I can't even tell my mom.'

‘I promise I won't tell nobody.'

It was okay then and George got onto talking about other stuff. He said he'd read in a special edition of one of his
National Geographic
s about these explorers who'd travelled north of us, up into the Hudson Bay and beyond, near the North Pole, looking for a way to sail around the world and things like that. He was really excited about it. He told me about how there was nobody but Eskimos up there and polar bears and huge fields of ice that went on and on for miles and miles. He told me about giant
icebergs and days that lasted through the whole night, when the sun never set and the light never went away. He told me about how some of the explorers had never come back and how they'd found empty ships frozen in the ice and old bones hidden beneath the snow. He was excited in the same way he got excited when Mrs. Arnold told us about Clarence stepping out of his canoe that first time – like he was imagining himself there in a place that was fresh and new and full of exhibits.

When I looked outside through the window at where it was fifty below I reckoned we were already plenty north enough. But I didn't say nothing about it and was glad I didn't, because when he left and I watched him walk down the path dug out of the drifts in our garden, beneath the crabapple tree where the frozen birds still stood on the branches, he looked right there somehow, like I'd thought before, like he fitted into this world of ice and snow. And I could picture him there in the north, beneath the sun that never set, in the light that never changed, walking through the white fields, past the icebergs, like it was his home.

After the end of January George had two homes. Gracie moved out of their place to a house near the museum. She didn't want to live with Mr. McKenzie anymore.

‘I've had enough,' I heard her telling Virgil one day in our kitchen, while Nana was making porridge on the stove. ‘I can't go on like this.'

So during the week George didn't live over the road, he lived with Gracie, and I never got to see him. On the weekends he came back to stay with his dad – except I hardly ever saw him then neither, because George was still kept inside, behind the tall fence, or else they were out on their expeditions, I guessed. It was okay though. When I did see him, George said he was finishing with his home-schooling in the spring and coming back to normal school. His allergies were better, he said. And I was a bit sad then because I remembered we wouldn't be in the same class anymore on account of the cord being wrapped around my neck.