Eye Lake (8 page)

Wolf Men and Circus Bears

A
fter leaving Gracie and Mr. Haney at the museum, I walked out towards where the tracks crossed the highway by the town sign. I was headed for the road to Eye Lake, but at the last minute I turned off towards the road to the old Red Rock mine site instead. I guess I was thinking things and wanted some peace and quiet, and these days there's nowhere more peaceful and quiet than the old mine site. There's nowhere more quiet than places that were loud once: it's a special kind of quiet, like the one in the basement of number one O'Callaghan Street.

I passed through the side of town where they'd built all the new houses for the mine workers – or at least they'd been new fifty years ago when they built them. Now they weren't in such good shape. Lots of them had lost their paint and boards and been patched up with insulation panels with the plastic wrapping still on them. Some hadn't been patched up at all and were tumbling down where they stood. There was broken-down machinery and upside-down boats and busted snowmobiles in most of the gardens, and dogs that'd turned as dirty and mean as dump cats. When I got to the Red Rock road I was glad. It wasn't hardly ever used anymore and there was fireweed growing high on the sides and a line of grass and bushes sprouting up along the middle. There used to be a trunk line connecting the mine to the main railroad and you could still just about follow it through the fireweed – the big wooden ties slowly splintering in the grass, the tracks turned orange-red with rust, and here and there the piles of iron ore pellets that'd spilled out of the rail cars once. The dirt on the road was almost the same orange-red as the rails and the pellets and the dust that still blew through town sometimes.

As you got closer to the site the road split, forking to the left and right, following where the shores of the lake used to be. On the right side, where the eastern shore had been, you could see a kind of hollow in the land, meandering off into bush, where the Crooked River used to run. It was dotted with stunted jack pines and stones and piles of muddy gravel and sand from where they'd dumped the dredged silt from the bottom of the lake; there was a little stream running through it, which I didn't really remember being there before. To the left, where the western shore used to be, there was a great tear in the land, sheer and straight and full of huge, jagged boulders, where they'd blasted a rock cut and drained the lake's waters. There were pictures on the wall of our school, before and after ones, that showed what they'd done. In the ‘before' one, the Crooked River had flowed through the bush to the east and into Red Rock Lake before flowing out of it and snaking and bending on its course through the middle of town. In the ‘after' one there was a dam about two miles to the east and a big loop that went around through the bush to the north of Red Rock Lake, before joining the old course of the river again just before it reached town. This was the diversion. In the ‘before' picture there was only green and a meandering ribbon of blue to the east. In the middle was a big patch of blue that said
Red Rock Lake
. In the ‘after' picture there was a big patch of blue to the east and a big rusty red one in the middle.
Red Rock Mine
, it said on the red patch.
Eye Lake
, it said on the blue one.

I passed by where the mine buildings had been once; they were mostly gone but there were two still standing. They were made of corrugated iron and there were holes in them everywhere from where people used them for shooting practice. Beside them were wide, shallow pools of reddish water where not even a single bird sat on the surface or flew above. You couldn't feel a breeze or flutter of wind anywhere – it was like nature had stopped breathing or something, like its lungs were full of holes like everything else here was. And the biggest hole of all was Red Rock Lake.

I walked off the road where it forked, heading across to where the south shore had been. The ground was sandy here. It had been a beach once, before I was born. At its edge it fell away sharply into a great open pit.

All around the jagged edges of the pit you could see where the shore had been sandy or rocky once – it jutted in and out where the headlands and bays and fingers had been, and here and there islands stood up like pillars. Below them, on the pit's steep, sheer sides, were the layers that had been left, naked, when they took away the water. They went from grey-black to brown to orange to red, like some kind of giant knickerbocker glory. On the lake's old bed, bushes of balsam and poplar had started to grow since the trucks and diggers had stopped, and pools of water had settled around them. The pools and the churned earth were the colour of old blood, and looked deeper than I'd seen them before. Over to my right I could see a steady trickle of water tumbling over the edge of the pit.

I sat down on the sandy ground that used to be a beach and tried to do my thinking.

I was trying to think about what Gracie had said, about parts of me being like a fingerprint of Clarence and of parts of him being like a fingerprint of me. I figured it meant that wherever he was I was kind of there too. And if he wasn't the remains in the police station, if he was still going around and around in the Bermuda Triangle, then a piece of me was there with him, wherever
there
was. It was like there was a hole inside me too, one where bits of me kept falling into. And then I couldn't think about it anymore and put my hands into the sand and started thinking about a picnic instead.

Sometimes, during summer evenings at number one O'Callaghan Street, one of the old-timers like Jim Clement or Jake Ottertale would drop by to have a glass of whiskey with Virgil before they
went on to the Red Rock Inn. They'd sit out in the porch and talk, and sometimes, if that's where I was going to be sleeping that night, I'd get to stay up until they left. And so I'd listen as their voices murmured slow and mellow and husky against the hum of the mosquitoes beyond the screens and the trains gently creaking and shifting in their beds. They talked a lot about the old days, the days before the diversion and the mine, the days before Virgil even – when the Pioneer Hotel was still standing and Crooked River was still just a handful of railroad men and their families and the men working lumber. Sometimes they'd come over all wistful about it. ‘But those days are gone,' they'd say. And then they'd look sad for a second or two, as though they were surprised almost, as though they'd only just noticed they were. ‘It was another world then,' they'd say, ‘but it's gone now. Yes, it's long, long gone.'

Every summer back then in the long-gone days they'd have a picnic out on the south shore of Red Rock Lake – right where I was sitting, nearly. Pretty much the whole township went, as well as some of the Indian families who lived nearby. They'd set out first thing in the morning, carrying cobs of corn and guns and fishing rods, and when they got to the lake the women would dig pits in the sand and start fires and some of the men would head out in canoes to fish, while the others would go back into the woods to search for game to shoot. There was one picnic that was especially famous: the one where the wolf man and the circus guy came. It was Jim who told Virgil about that. Jim, with his quiet, chuckling smile and the thin red veins criss-crossing his nose. I missed him being about. He was part of my own long-gone days now.

The wolf man came from Minneapolis. He'd been in Crooked River for a week and was trying to kill wolves, except he wasn't using a gun or anything – he was using an axe and a suit made out of nails – and he wasn't having much luck. They've got a photo of him in the museum, with his suit on and his axe in his hands. The suit was made of leather and the nails were shoved through it so they stuck out all over like porcupine quills. Jim would get to
chuckling whenever he mentioned him. ‘Who knows what made him come here,' he'd say. ‘Who knows why people do what they do.' The wolf man told everyone who'd listen that he was planning to make a living off all the pelts he was going to get, but he'd never even seen a wolf, Jim said, and he wasn't going to neither in that getup. People had funny ideas about the north woods back then, he said. All sorts of funny ideas. Jim was just a boy himself and used to follow him into the woods and do wolf howls and make him run in circles through the bush holding his axe up ready, with sweat pouring down his face and mosquitoes buzzing around his head and his hands full of holes where he'd tried to swat them and hit the nails on his suit instead.

The circus guy arrived on a night train two days before the picnic. Jim said he'd seen him step out of the caboose, wearing a sharp suit and a hat, followed by a woman who was wearing a fur coat, even though it was summer. They walked together down the street to Clarence's hotel and Jim ran over to where the caboose man was leaning against his caboose, smoking a cigarette and waiting for the train to be loaded with coal and water.

‘Where they from?' Jim asked. They weren't used to men in sharp suits getting off in Crooked River.

‘From Chicago,' the caboose man replied.

‘Is he a gangster?' Jim asked excitedly. The caboose man chuckled to himself.

‘Well, sonny, if he's a gangster he ain't been too forthcoming about it. He says he owns a circus. But then again,' he said with a wink, ‘he says that there woman is his sister, too.'

The first good look anybody got at them was the next day at lunch, in the dining room of the hotel. The man was still wearing his suit but the woman had changed out of her fur coat and was wearing a white silk blouse and a long black skirt and a black hat. There were pearls hanging from her ears, almost as white as her skin, and her lips were redder than any woman's in town. Usually all the people who stayed in the hotel sat together at one long
wooden table for lunch and helped themselves from two big bowls that sat on either end of it. (Mostly it was rabbit stew, said Jim; Clarence used to pay him a few dollars a week to snare them.) But on that day Clarence had had a separate table set for the man and his sister. ‘Because there's a lady present,' he informed the dining room when all of them at the long table saw the separate table. And he cooked a chicken for them too, said Jim – so he must have reckoned it was a real special occasion.

All through lunch Clarence made a fuss of them. He didn't have much in the hotel kitchen – just what would do for the rail and lumber men – but what he did have he brought out. ‘Perhaps you'd like a few oranges for dessert?' he asked, and over at the long table the men's eyes popped out some. He sure kept them hid, a few of them mumbled.

The man in the suit talked loudly all through his lunch, as if he were speaking to an audience. He told Clarence how they'd come from Europe with the circus as children, him and his sister. He hinted that they'd come from high-born blood but tragic circumstances had led to their father and mother's early death and they'd been cheated out of their inheritance. He stopped for a minute when he got to the part about the tragic circumstances and pulled a white handkerchief from his breast pocket and began dabbing his eyes with it. His sister put her hand across the table and clasped his. ‘What a bucket of moonshine he was selling,' Jim said. ‘And nobody in the Pioneer Hotel was buying a drop of it.'

‘Except my father,' Virgil said.

‘I don't think he was buying into it either,' Jim said. ‘With respect to you and your mother, Virgil, I think it was her he was buying into. Or not even that. It was the idea of her – if you get my meaning right. Crooked River was a rough-and-ready place the wrong side of nowhere and we didn't get so many women visitors. And we got even fewer who wore silk and lipstick. Your father must've thought she was just about the finest lady who'd ever set foot in his hotel.'
‘Why were they even here?' Virgil asked.

‘Well,' Jim said, ‘when Clarence finally got around to asking, the man replied they needed a bear – for their circus. The old one had died and they needed a cub, a living cub, to get trained and take its place. “So how might a man go about getting himself one of those in these parts?” the man asked, loudly enough for the whole room to hear.

‘“How much you willing to pay for it?” one of the railroad men at the long table asked.

‘“Fifty American dollars,” he said.

‘“You best come to the picnic tomorrow, then,” the man told him.'

‘The next morning they set off, most of the township, on the narrow track that led to Red Rock Lake. Clarence led the way, with the circus man and his sister on either side of him. Then there was the Rooney family and Mr. Scheider, who owned the store; and Jake's mom and dad and Joe Gordon, who was a trapper too; and then … ' (Here, Jim would go through a bunch of names, some of them that were still used in town and some that weren't, nodding to himself as he went along, as if by remembering them he was putting the whole long-gone day of the picnic and that world back together, piece by piece, person by person. And even though he never said nothing about anyone going in any particular order, I knew from the pictures and stuff in the museum they were going Crooked River 1, 2, 3, 4 … )

‘I was lingering right at the back,' Jim chuckled. ‘The wolf man had tagged along in his suit and Jake and some of the Indian boys were sneaking through the bush on either side of track, calling out to him like wolves. He must've thought them woods was just full of them.

‘When they got to the beach the women started digging out the firepits and some of the men set out in canoes to catch lake
trout and walleyes, while the others went off to shoot partridge and whatever else they could find. Meanwhile, two of the railroad men, Jake's father, the wolf man, and two of the Indian boys stayed behind on the beach with Clarence and the circus man. His sister had sat herself down beneath an umbrella – a parasol she called it – and begun wrapping herself and her silk shirt in a plain cotton sheet. “These flies,” she kept saying. “These damn flies.”