Wild Fell (5 page)

The towns they pass might as well be shell facades, their residents merely extras in a movie called
Our Drive Up North to the Cottage,
a
movie with annual sequels whose totality makes up a lifetime of holiday memories.

In 1960, the drowning deaths of Brenda Egan and Sean Schwartz tore Alvina apart and destroyed two families, each of which blamed the other’s child for inadvertently luring their own child to his or her death through irresponsibility, wantonness or malice. There was no peace for either side. The psychic wounds each sustained through their losses and their lack of forgiveness would fester for decades, never fully healing. The funerals had been on separate days, and a lifetime of grudges and feuds would spring from jaundiced notations of who in town attended which funeral, not to mention those traitors who attended both.

The tragedy briefly made newspapers across the country, though the story was a smaller and smaller news item the farther away from Georgian Bay it was written or told. After two days it had disappeared from the news altogether. The deaths of two teenagers in a town in northern Ontario no one had ever heard of weren’t going to hold anyone’s imagination for long.

In Alvina however, the fact that Sean had been found nude, washed up on the landing beach of Blackmore Island, lent a salacious note to the tale, one that ensured its longevity through gossip—at least behind the backs of anyone from the Egan or Schwartz families.

Had the girl been a secret slut in spite of her goody-goody veneer? Had the boy tried to rape her, drowning them both in the attempt? God only knew. Anything was possible. Besides, it happened out there, near
that place
.

The police had apparently searched Blackmore Island. The big house up there had been locked up tight and shuttered, and it looked like it had been so for a very long time. The grounds had been wild and overgrown. No one had been living there, and there was no evidence that anyone had lived there for decades, much less that either of the two had been on the island the night they died.

Still, nothing good had ever happened near
that place
. Not ever. It might not be a haunted island, but it sure was a goddamned unlucky one.

In 1962, Brenda Egan’s aunt, a martyr to the deepest possible grief over the loss of her niece, accidentally set herself on fire on Blackmore Island. Gossip had it that she had rowed out to the island to lay flowers there in Brenda’s memory, and had died trying to build a campfire to stay warm while she drank herself into a stupor.

The Egan family prevailed on the local newspaper not to print the details due to the grief they had already endured. The editor, a family man who had seen the gruesome media feeding frenzy that had resulted from the original tragedy, took pity on the Egan and Schwartz families and kept the story out of his newspaper, reporting the woman’s death only as a heart attack, thereby ensuring that most of the gossip would be stillborn, except for local word of mouth.

After a time, people in town stopped telling Brenda and Sean’s story, because it could only be gossip, and it seemed cruel to gloat about the deaths of anyone that young, no matter what they’d been up to out there in the dark when they were supposed to be watching the moonrise on the town beach.

Tom Egan died in 1972, and his wife, Edith, moved back to Selkirk, Manitoba where her people were from. The memories of what she had lost that terrible night were too much to bear alone.

John and Gladys Schwartz lived quietly in their house in Alvina. They kept Sean’s room as a shrine. Gladys dusted his wrestling trophies daily and never passed a photograph of her son without touching it. John never set foot in Alvina United Church again after Sean’s memorial service. He maintained that no god who’d seen fit to take his beautiful boy was worth more than the shit straight out of his arse, and wouldn’t get any worship from him, not in a hundred years of frosty Fridays in hell.

Gladys, on the other hand, became devout. She brought her grief to the Lord and laid it on his shoulders, putting her faith in the comforting notion that there was a plan that she didn’t understand yet, and that she would see Sean again someday.

They died within a year of each other, in 1990 and 1991 respectively.

By 1995, thirty years after the tragedy, the story had passed into children’s campfire lore, no more or less real than all the other stories about the haunted island “near here,” stories of drowned children, mysterious flickering lights in the water, sudden fires, dark ladies, covens of witches and devil worshippers, and so on.

By 2005, Brenda and Sean had become “the boy and the girl” who went skinny dipping after having sex in the woods and had met their deaths at the hands of demons, or a serial killer, depending which version was being told at any given time. Apparently, the house was still out there somewhere on that island, but there were tens of thousands of islands. It could be any one of them, assuming it even existed. Besides, it was almost spookier not to know. In town, no one remembered their names, which most of the old-time residents of Alvina would have said was just fine had anyone asked them. But no one ever did.

Life moved on, and it had all been so very long ago.

And this is how legends begin in small northern towns on the edge of places other people only drive through on their way to somewhere else: with a scream in the dark, and half a century passed in waiting.

Plume moths remove remembering.

Their feathery snowtouch on the eyelids

sifts out thought and will,

leavens facts until they rise

into the air and pop

into oblivion.

Moths’ delicate footprints

on the skin, invisible

as sorrows, chase away

longing and desire, chase

knowledge of things.

Of self, of trees and acorns,

glass jars, death and daisies,

gazelles and geodes.

All of it, gone.

—Sandra Kasturi, from “Moth & Memory”

“I will relate to you, my friend, the whole history, from the beginning to—nearly—the end.”

—Diana Maria Mulock, “M. Anastasius” (1857)

I want to teach you about fear.

I want to tell you a ghost story. It’s not a ghost story like any ghost story you’ve ever heard. It’s
my
ghost story, and it’s true. It happened here in the house on Blackmore Island called Wild Fell, in the inland village of Alvina, Ontario on the shores of Devil’s Lake. Like any ghost story, it involves the bridges between the past and the present and who, or rather
what
, uses them to cross from the world of the living into the world of the dead.

But I’m getting ahead of my story. I did say the bridge is between the past and the present. Although I’ll tell you this story in the present, I would be remiss if I didn’t start with the past—specifically
my
past. Time is, or ought to be, linear. Sometimes it’s anything
but
linear, which brings us back to ghosts.

Still, one thing at a time, right?

By the time he was gone, my father, a gentle, loving man with a fierce intellect and great wit, had already been gone for a very long time. He had forgotten everything about what had made him my father in the first place. He didn’t know himself and he didn’t know me. The erasing had been the hardest part for me to watch, harder even than the sure knowledge that he was going to die, and that it would be soon, if not quickly.

My father had always been my memory, the keeper of our family’s history, his own past, and even my past. The memories of any child, while vivid, are always subject to the subtle twist and eddy of time and emotional caprice. Which is in part to say, while I believe I remember everything about my childhood, I can only remember from the inside out. The actual events may have been something other than what I remember.

My name is Jameson Browning. In the summer of 1971, when I was nine I went to Camp Manitou, the summer camp deep in rural eastern Ontario where edges of towns yielded to woods and marshes and rolling farmland hills.

I hadn’t wanted to go at all. I deeply distrusted boys of my own age, all of whom had proven themselves to be coarse and rough and prone to noise and force. It would be tempting for anyone reading this to imagine a socially isolated, lonely boy with no friends—a loner not so much by choice, but by ostracism or social ineptitude. But the conjured image would be an inaccurate one. I wasn’t a lonely boy at all, not by any stretch, though I did indeed love to be alone.

I loved to read. I loved to be outside by myself, especially in the greenbelt near our house, whose trees, in places, were almost dense enough to be considered a small forest and which had a stream running through it.

I had friends, two little girls. One was real, and lived three doors down in a house that looked very much like mine, indeed like everyone else’s in our mid-century neighbourhood of elm-shaded, sidewalked streets and neatly tended lawns. The house in Ottawa in which I grew up was a classic 1960s-era suburban one on a tree-lined street, with four floors and a long, low roofline. On the top floor of the house were my parents’ bedroom and bathroom, and my father’s study. On the main floor were a spacious living room, the dining room, and the kitchen. One floor below that were my bedroom and a guest bedroom I can only ever recall my grandmother using, once, on a visit before she died in 1969. My bathroom, with the cowboys-and-Indians wallpaper, was a short flight of stairs down in the basement, next to the recreation room and the laundry room.

The other girl lived in the wood-framed full-length mirror bolted to the wall in my bedroom. The place
she
dwelt was indistinctly bordered by my imagination and by the infinite possibilities of the worlds-upon-worlds inside the reflected glass.

The real girl’s name was Hank Brevard—well, her
actual
name was Lucinda, and she was a tomboy who was as much of a loner as I was. Her father was away a great deal on business and her mother didn’t seem to like her very much, and was always at her to “act more ladylike.” Hank had short black hair she’d chopped herself, which had earned her a two-week grounding, during which time she’d not been allowed to spend time with me—which she’d found ways to do anyway, sneaking out of her bedroom window while her mother was watching television.

“She’s afraid I’ll just cut it again if she makes me grow it long,” Hank said with satisfaction when her hair started to grow back, ragged as a chrysanthemum. “She’s letting me keep it short as long as I promise to let her take me to her hairdresser when it needs trimming.”

Hank could cycle faster than any boy I knew, and she liked to catch tadpoles in the spring with me in the creek. When she’d asked me to call her by a boy’s name, I readily agreed. It seemed a very small concession for friendship, especially in light of the fact that she looked like a “Hank” and not remotely like a “Lucinda,” and we quickly became inseparable. We spent hours together building tree forts. In the spring, we caught tadpoles. In the fall, we threw ourselves into piles of leaves. In the winter, we tracked small animals by their prints in the snow, or pretended to be Arctic explorers.

We had no secrets from each other, except for the one I kept: I never told Hank about Amanda, the little girl who lived in my mirror, the little girl who had my face and spoke in my voice, but who was someone else entirely.

When I was seven years old, I’d begun speaking to my reflection in the mirror the way some children made up imaginary playmates. I named my reflection Mirror Pal and began to think of it as a separate entity.

I told Mirror Pal about my days at school, my teachers, the games I played at recess. When my mother was angry with me—and she was angry with me a lot—I told Mirror Pal about that, too. I spoke back to myself, pretending that my own voice was Mirror Pal’s voice, giving the response I wanted and needed at any given time. For instance, if I brought home a drawing with a gold star on it and my parents told me how good it was, Mirror Pal rejoiced with me. If I was sad, Mirror Pal was always sympathetic and agreeable that I was the aggrieved party, no matter the circumstances.

It was a lighthearted game of imagination and mental magic of the most innocent and childlike sort. At least until Amanda appeared a year later, when Terry Dodds stole my new red bike and had the accident.

I had learned to ride a bike the previous year on a battered and rust-veined green Roadmaster cruiser of my father’s that had been stored in my grandparents’ garage at the time of my grandmother’s death. In addition to its sentimental value, my father thought it was the perfect bike to teach me to ride. Learning to ride a bike is usually a painful process for any child, but my sense of balance was remarkably bad. In the beginning, my father held the bike as I pedalled, keeping me steady, running beside me as I wobbled along the sidewalks of our neighbourhood.

The first time he let go of the seat, I crashed badly, skinning both knees. I burst into tears. The pain from my kneecaps was like fire. They were bloody and there were tiny bits of dirt and concrete dust in them. My father held me and let me cry against his shirt. Then, gently, he insisted I get back up on the bike.

“It’s important, Jamie. You need to get back up now. I’ll clean off your cuts and put some Bactine on them when we get home, but right now you need to climb back up and pedal.”

I sniffled. “Why? I don’t want to. It hurts, Daddy. My knees sting. Look,” I added with dramatic flourish. “They’re
bleeding
.”

“Because you need to show the bike that it didn’t win, Jamie. That’s why.” His face was grave, that deeply serious expression he always had when he was imparting something vitally important. He rubbed the bridge of his nose where the horn-rimmed glasses he wore always left a red mark. “If we go home now, it will have beaten you. You need to get back up on the seat. You don’t need to go far, but you need to make sure that the last thing you remember about today isn’t that you fell down, it’s that you got back up again. That’s what we do when bad things happen to us.”

I stuck out my bottom lip. “I don’t want to.”

Without replying, he lifted me up and put me solidly back on the seat and told me to pedal. Which, of course I did, hating it, but with him walking slowly behind me, holding onto the seat with one hand so I didn’t fall, and steadying me with the other. The sidewalk ahead swam in my vision like I was underwater, but as the tears dried, the path in front of me cleared as sure as the pressure of my father’s hand on the small of my back. This became our routine over that week, every evening after dinner. In short order, I graduated to him running behind me holding lightly onto the end of the seat.

Every night, I told Mirror Pal about my progress. Mirror Pal confessed that he wasn’t sure I would ever learn to ride a bike, and agreed with me that it seemed like a stupid skill to need to master. He also agreed with me, though, that attaining this skill was necessary so I could ride with Hank anytime I wanted, even if the process would probably kill me.

Then, one day, I had pedalled down the half-length of our street before I realized that he was no longer holding on at all. I looked backwards without falling over and saw that my father was clapping, and doing a little dance because that barrier was down, never to rise again, and the bike hadn’t won.

My parents presented me with a brand new Schwinn for my eighth birthday. It was gleaming ruby red and chrome silver. It had a metallic gold banana seat and hi-rise bars, just like the ones the big kids rode as they swept by the front of our house on their way to school like alien gods of coolness from some other planet.

And now, I had one. I was going to be cool, too, just like the big kids. My joy knew no bounds.

Hank (who had learned to ride a bike at five) and I spent the next week exploring the length and breadth of our neighbourhood, which looked somehow completely different from this new vantage point of two-wheeler independence. We barrelled down the greenbelt hills and along the wooded paths by the creek. I’d been forbidden to cross Dearborn Road because of the traffic, so Hank showed me a way to approach the greenbelt from the rear, via the safe streets I was allowed on. We were the same age, but sometimes it was like Hank was older. She was already more like a boy than I could ever imagine being. If that made me the
girl
in our friendship, it wouldn’t have bothered either of us—if we’d thought of it that way, which we never did.

Two weeks after my birthday, Hank and I decided to have an adventure.

We rode our bikes as far as we could before stopping. We may have gone as far as three or four miles out of the neighbourhood but it’s hard to tell. It certainly seemed like that, or even farther. I had a very clear sense of being way outside the bounds of what my parents would have thought of as an acceptable distance at that age. Still, it was exhilarating. We’d packed a lunch we’d made ourselves, in secret: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cheese, cookies, and some candy. No fruits or vegetables—and not by accident, either. It was our adventure and it was, in every sense, outside the bounds of adult authority.

We stopped for lunch in a field and ate under the branches of an ancient oak tree. In the near distance, we saw the edge of one of the new subdivisions that were cropping up all over the city. They were different in every way from our neighbourhood, which was old and established. I imagined that the people living there must be just as different.

I was lying on the ground with my eyes closed, enjoying the sun on my face, well satiated after stuffing our faces with sandwiches and the cookies, when Hank said, “Look, here come some big kids. They don’t look like nice big kids, either.”

Three older boys, larger by far than Hank and me, were making their way across the field toward us. Rather than walk, they
lumbered.
They reminded me of a pack of cartoon jackals.

“Hey kid, nice bike,” the largest one said. “It’s too big for you. I want it. Give it to me.”

“You can’t have it, it’s mine. I got it for my birthday. My mom and dad bought it for me.” This was greeted with coarse guffaws from the three boys. Again I thought of cartoon predators.

The one who addressed me first—the one I would later learn was Terry Dodds—mimicked me. “‘You can’t have it, I got it for my birthday!’ Waaah, waaah, waaah, baby. What are you going to do if I just . . . take it?” He reached down and picked up my Schwinn as though it were a plastic model. “Huh? How ya gonna stop me?”

Hank shouted, “Leave him alone! It’s his bike! Why don’t you pick on someone your own size, you . . . you
asshole
?” There was a moment of stunned silence at the use of this word by an eight-year-old girl, but they laughed again.

Terry jeered at Hank. “Are you a boy or a girl? You look like a boy. If you’re a boy, let’s fight. If you’re a girl, then your pal is even more of a sissy for letting a girl fight for him.” He turned back to me. “Huh, kid? Are you a sissy? You gonna let this little girl do all your fighting for you, or are you going to come and be a man and take this bike away from me? Because otherwise, I’m gonna take it. And if it’s too small for me, I’m gonna give it to my kid brother. He needs a bike. That okay with you, kid?” he taunted me. “Huh?” Terry grinned at his friends. “I guess it’s all right with him. He didn’t say I couldn’t, did he?”

“Nope,” they chorused. “He didn’t say you couldn’t.”

“Yes I did! I did say you couldn’t. It’s
my bike
!”

“Too late,” Terry taunted. He climbed on the bike, which was ridiculously small for him—and which made him look even more like some sort of monster astride it—then did a quick, jerky circle on it. “Yep, this’ll be okay. See you later, kid. Come on guys, let’s get out of here.”

Hank, who had been standing next to me, fists flexed at her side, abruptly jumped on Terry’s back and began to punch him. She even managed to land a few major blows, blows that made him cry out in pain. He shoved her to the ground. She jumped up and went for him again, shouting a strangled war cry that she had probably picked up from a Saturday afternoon adventure film on television. He shoved her down on the ground again, and this time he put his finger in Hank’s face and wagged it.