Crow Lake (19 page)

“Any day,” Matt said. There was a pause, and then he said, “You could still go, you know.”

“Go where?” Luke said.

“Teachers’ college. I bet they’d still take you.”

There was a silence. Even from my position behind the door I could tell it was an ominous one.

Matt said, “All I’m saying is, if you’ve changed your mind it’s probably not too late. I bet they’d still take you. I could stay with the girls.”

The silence stretched out. Then Luke said, “Listen carefully, okay? I’m staying with the girls. And I don’t want to talk about it any more, ever. If we both live to be a million years old, I don’t want to mention the subject ever again.”

I waited, my skin tight with apprehension. But Matt didn’t reply and after a minute Luke said more calmly, “What’s the matter with your brain anyway? I thought you were supposed to be smart. There wouldn’t be enough money for me to go now even if I wanted to. That’s why you need a scholarship, remember?”

I remember my relief; there wasn’t going to be a quarrel. That was all that concerned me. The content of their talk didn’t worry me at all, because somehow, incredibly, in spite of a whole year’s worth of argument about whether or not Matt was “going,” it had never once occurred to me that he was actually going to
go
somewhere. I don’t know how I could have failed to realize it, but that is the case. I had no idea.

I don’t think anyone doubted that Matt would win a scholarship, but I don’t think even his teachers realized quite how well he would do. He wiped the board. He won everything going.

I remember the evening after the results came out. Supper was chaotic because people kept popping in to congratulate him, all of them beaming with pride that Crow Lake had produced such spectacular success.

Miss Carrington was the first. The high school must have notified her as soon as they got confirmation of the results, so she would have known almost as soon as Matt did. It had been several weeks since I’d seen her and I was a little shy of her and hung back a bit. I remember her laughing—all three of them laughing—and Matt looking pleased and embarrassed, and Luke thumping him, quite hard, on the shoulder. I remember watching them, not knowing quite what all the fuss was about but knowing that it meant that Matt was the cleverest person in the world, which I’d always known anyway, and feeling pleased that everyone else had finally realized it too. And still, incredibly, not having the least idea what the consequences would be.

I remember Matt phoning Aunt Annie. She’d have known that the results were due and would have instructed him to call. I don’t know what she said, but I remember Matt, red-faced, grinning into the phone.

I remember Marie Pye coming around. Matt got up abruptly when he saw her coming down the driveway and went out to meet her. I saw her smile that nervous smile of hers and say something to him which made him smile back. I remember other well-wishers, Reverend Mitchell among them, all wanting to shake Matt vigorously by the hand. The last to come was Dr. Christopherson, who’d somehow heard the news and had driven out all the way from town.

I can still see him standing in the kitchen with Bo and Molly waltzing around his feet, saying, “A magnificent achievement, Matt. Magnificent.”

And I remember him saying, “When do you leave? Beginning of September?”

And my bewilderment. I remember my bewilderment.

I said, “How long for?”

A hesitation. Then, gently, “A few years.”

“Don’t you like it here any more?”

“I love it here, Kate. This is home. And I’ll come back lots and lots. But I’ve got to go.”

“Will you come back every weekend?”

His face was strained, but I felt no pity for him.

“Not every weekend. It costs a lot of money to travel back and forth.”

A long silence, while I fought with the ache in my throat.

“Is it very far?”

“It’s about four hundred miles.”

An unimaginable distance.

He reached out and touched one of my braids. “Come here. I want to show you something.” Tears were rolling by then, but he didn’t comment on them. He took me to our parents’ bedroom and positioned me in front of the photograph of Great-Grandmother.

“Do you know who this is?”

I nodded. Of course I knew.

“She’s Dad’s grandmother. His father’s mother. She lived on a farm all her life. She never went to school. And she wanted to learn so badly. She wanted to know things, and understand things,
so badly,
Kate. She thought the world was just fascinating, and she wanted to know all about it. She was really clever, but it’s awfully hard to learn when you have hardly any time to study and you have no one to teach you. So she was determined that when she had children, every one of them would get a proper chance to learn.

“And they did. They all got through public school. But then they had to stop and go out to work to earn a living because they were really poor.

“Her youngest boy—our grandfather—he was the cleverest—he grew up and had six kids of his own. He was a farmer too, and still poor, but all his kids got through public school too, and then the older boys did the youngest’s share of the work so that he could go to high school. And that was Dad.”

He sat down on the end of our parents’ bed. For a minute or two he just looked at me, and maybe because I’d been looking at Great-Grandmother I noticed how much his eyes were like hers. His eyes and his mouth.

He said, “I’ve got a chance to go even further, Kate. I’ve got a chance to learn things Great-Grandmother never even dreamed of. I’ve got to go. Do you see?”

The thing is—and it shows how well he taught me, during our years together—I did see. I saw that he had to go.

He said, “Look, I want to tell you something, okay? I’ve got a plan. I haven’t told anyone else, and I don’t want you to tell anyone. It’ll be our secret. Okay? Promise?”

I nodded.

“When I finish university, if I’ve done really well I’ll be able to get a good job and earn lots of money. And then I’ll pay for you to go to university too. And when
you’ve
done, the
two
of us will pay for Bo and Luke to go. That’s my plan. What do you think?”

What did I think? I thought I would probably die from losing him, but that if I did not, it would almost be worth having lived, to be part of such a glorious plan.

part
FIVE

chapter
TWENTY

Daniel said, “You realize this is my first experience of real uncharted wilderness. I’ve flown over it before but I’ve never been
in
it.”

I said, “It’s been charted for at least a hundred years. If you look, you’ll notice we’re on a road.”

“A track,” Daniel said cheerfully. “A mere track.”

It isn’t a track, it’s a paved road. And even before it was paved it was a perfectly decent road, a bit boggy in the spring, a bit dusty in the summer, snowed in from time to time in the winter, but otherwise just fine. Daniel was loving it though. As far as he was concerned, this was The Real Thing, this was Nature In The Raw. Daniel knows as much about the great outdoors as your average Toronto taxi driver.

I had no classes on Friday afternoons and he had only one tutorial which ended at eleven, so we’d set off as soon as he finished. It’s a four-hundred-mile trip, and while it no longer seems an unimaginable distance it is still a good long drive.

The weather was good, a fine clear April day. The sprawl of Toronto gave way quite quickly to fields, and then the soil got thinner and fields gave way to meadows bounded by trees, with the rounded grey shapes of granite breaking the surface here and there like whales. And then the whales began to take over, and the meadows were merely rough patches of grass between the rocks.

We reached cottage country by two. After Huntsville the traffic thinned out, and from North Bay onward we had the road to ourselves. It’s paved all the way to Struan now. It is only when you turn off to Crow Lake that the tarmac runs out and the forest closes in and you really start to feel you’re going back in time.

Up ahead there was a clutch of scrubby white pines growing close to the road. I slowed down and pulled over.

“Again?” Daniel said.

“Afraid so.”

I got out of the car and picked my way through the underbrush to the pines. They were growing in a shallow dip between bare ribs of granite; around them tough wiry blueberry bushes fought with the grasses and the mosses and the lichens, all of them struggling for foot room. In some places there is so little topsoil you wouldn’t think it was worth the effort of trying to grow, but they manage. They thrive, in fact. They find every crack, every crevice, every crumb of soil, and send out their tough little roots and dig in, and cling on, and hoard every dropped leaf, every twig, every grain of sand or dust that’s blown their way, and gradually, gradually build up enough soil around themselves to support their offspring. And so it goes on, down the centuries. I forget, when I’m away, how much I love this landscape. I squatted down behind the scant shelter of the pines, flapping my hands behind me to fend off the blackflies, and peed into a brilliant green pillow of moss, and ached with love for it.

“You okay?” Daniel said when I got back to the car. “Want me to drive for a bit?”

“I’m okay.”

I was tense, that was all.

It was the previous Tuesday that I’d had my little crisis of confidence in the lecture hall. I’d been in a bit of a state afterwards and for the next couple of nights I hadn’t slept well. On the Thursday I’d had another class, and though it had gone all right—no flashbacks, no drying up midsentence, a reasonable question-and-answer session at the end—I was exhausted afterwards. I’d returned to my lab intending to work, but my concentration was gone. Matt kept coming back to me. An image of him, standing by the pond. I went into my office and sat down at my desk and stared out the window at the Toronto skyline. It was raining. Dull grey Toronto rain. I thought, Something’s wrong with me. Maybe I’m sick.

But I knew I wasn’t sick. The old expression “sick at heart” came to me, and with it a memory of Mrs. Stanovich weeping into the kitchen sink, telling the Lord that she dared say He must have His reasons but that it still made her just sick. “Just
sick.
Sick at heart,” she’d said fiercely, determined that He should know. I don’t think it was about us, that particular time. I think Mrs. Tadworth’s grandson had died of some childhood ailment that people didn’t usually die of.

I watched the rain leaking down the window, small snail-trails of light. It seemed that nowadays all I did was think of home. It was getting me nowhere. I thought, You should pull yourself together. Sort out what the problem is and work it out. Solving problems is supposed to be what you’re good at.

Though I don’t have much experience of solving problems I can’t even put a name to.

At that point there was a hesitant tap at the door and I turned and saw one of my second-year students, Fiona deJong, framed in the doorway. Normally a student in the doorway is a sight that fills me with unreasoning impatience, but at the moment any distraction seemed worth having, so I asked what I could do for her. She’s a pale girl, not very attractive, with limp, mousy hair. From what I’ve seen of her in class I’d guess she doesn’t socialize much, but she is one of the few students of mine for whom, academically speaking, there is some hope, and her work depresses me less than most.

She said, “Could I … talk with you for a minute, Dr. Morrison?”

“Sure,” I said. “Come in, Fiona. Have a seat.” I nodded at the chair against the wall and, still hesitant, she went and sat down.

Some of my colleagues, mainly female, complain that they are endlessly interrupted by students—again mainly female—coming to ask their advice on subjects totally unrelated to their studies. Personal problems and so on. I don’t suffer much from that sort of interruption. Perhaps I don’t look the sympathetic type. I guess I’m not the sympathetic type. Sympathy and empathy are linked, after all. So I was expecting Fiona’s problem to be related to her work and I was surprised and rather alarmed when I saw that her mouth was trembling.

I cleared my throat. After a minute, when things didn’t seem to be improving, I said very calmly, “What’s the problem, Fiona?”

She was staring into her lap, obviously battling to collect herself, and I suddenly thought, Oh God. She’s pregnant.

I can’t deal with that sort of thing. The university has its own counselling service staffed by qualified psychologists who have experience in such matters and who know what to say.

I said quickly, “If it’s a personal thing, Fiona … if it isn’t connected to your work, then I may not be the best person …”

She looked up. “It is connected to my work. It’s— well, I just wanted to tell you that I’m leaving. I’ve decided it’s the best thing to do. But I just wanted to tell you. Because I’ve really enjoyed your course and everything, so I wanted you to know.”

I stared at her. As well as surprise, I was conscious of a small flicker of pleasure. Here was a student telling me that she had actually enjoyed my course.

I said, “Leaving? You mean leaving university? Or changing to another course?”

“Leaving university. It’s, well, it’s difficult to explain, but basically, I don’t think I want to go on.”

I blinked at her. “But you’re doing very well. What—what do you see as being the problem?”

So she told me what she saw as being the problem, and it was nothing to do with being pregnant. She told me that she came from a small farm in Quebec. She described it to me, but she didn’t need to; I could see it perfectly well. I could practically see the pattern on the blue and white china on the kitchen table.

She was one of five children, the only one interested in learning. She had won a scholarship to university. Her father had been both astonished and annoyed when she said she was taking it up. He couldn’t see what good a degree would do her. A waste of time, he said, and a waste of money. Her mother was proud of her, but mystified. Why would she want to leave home? Her brothers and sisters thought she was weird anyway, so their opinion remained unchanged. Her boyfriend tried to understand. She looked at me entreatingly when she told me that. She wanted me to like him, to admire him for trying.

The problem was that she was growing away from all of them. When she went home now, none of them knew what to say to her. Her father joked acidly about how brainy she was. He called her Miss Fiona deJong, B.A., B.B., B. Whatever. Her mother, whom she had been close to, was shy with her now. Afraid to talk to her because she had nothing intelligent to say.

Her boyfriend was angry a lot of the time. He tried not to be, but he was. He saw condescension where there wasn’t any. He saw disdain, when in fact she admired him. He had left school at sixteen. When he was eighteen his father had had a stroke, and since then he’d been running the farm more or less single-handed. He was kind, she said, and as intelligent in his own way as any of the boys in the course, and about a hundred times more mature, but he did not believe she thought that. He didn’t say so, but she was sure that secretly he thought that if she really loved him, she would give up the course and come home and marry him.

Fiona stopped talking and sat looking at me, her face full of mute appeal. I tried to think what to say.

Finally I said, “Fiona, how old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

Twenty-one. “Don’t you think you’re … a little young to be making decisions like this?”

“But I have to make it. I mean, either way it’s a decision, isn’t it?”

“But you’ve completed two years of your degree. You’re halfway there. If you give up now, those years are wasted. Surely at this stage the sensible thing would be to finish your course, and then—then you’d be in a better position to make the other decisions.”

She looked at her lap. She said, “I just don’t think it’s worth it.”

“You said you were enjoying the course.”

“Yes, but—”

“You also said your mother is proud of you. I’m sure your father is too. He may not understand what you’re doing, but I’m sure that deep down he will be proud that you’ve done so well. And your brothers and sisters too, though probably they wouldn’t want to show it. And as for your boyfriend … don’t you think that if he really cared for you he wouldn’t want you to give up something so important? Something that can make such a difference to your life?”

She was silent, staring at her lap.

I said, “I understand what you’re feeling, I come from a background that is not all that dissimilar to yours, but I assure you, it has been worth it. The pleasure, the satisfaction—”

Something dropped into her lap. A tear. Tears were rolling slowly down her cheeks. I looked away, out of the door, into the ordered chaos of my lab. I thought, That was a pack of lies. You do not understand what she’s feeling. You do not come from a similar background. The fact that there were fields and trees around does not make it similar. And anyway what are you doing, trying to convince her to make the decision you would have made? She came to tell you that she was leaving, not to ask your advice. She came out of politeness.

She’d found a tissue in her jacket pocket and was mopping herself up.

I said, “I’m sorry. Just forget what I said.”

She said, her voice muffled by the tissue, “That’s okay. I know you’re probably right.”

“I’m probably wrong.”

She needed another tissue. I got up and searched through the pockets of my coat and found one for her.

“Thanks,” she said, and blew her nose. “I’ve been thinking about it and thinking about it and now I just get such a headache that I can’t think at all.”

I nodded. That at least was a feeling we shared. After a minute I said, “Would you do something for me?”

She looked uncertain.

“Would you go and talk to someone at the counselling service? I don’t think they’ll try to persuade you one way or the other. I think they’ll just help you to think it through, so that you’re sure in your own mind.”

She agreed to do that, and a couple of minutes later, more or less composed, she left.

When she had gone I turned my chair back to the window and resumed my study of the rain. I thought about her brothers and sisters, who had always thought her “weird,” and I thought about Luke’s and Matt’s pride in my achievements. No, we did not come from similar backgrounds. No one had ever suggested that I should not go as far as I could. It had been expected of me, and I had been encouraged every step of the way.

And I had never regretted it. Not for one moment. Not even now. Because now, thinking about it again, I saw that whatever my little “crisis” and my current problems were caused by, they were not caused by my work. That was a red herring. I might not be a very good teacher, but Daniel was right, I wasn’t all that much worse than most. And I was very good at research. We were making a contribution, my little invertebrates and I.

I thought about Fiona. Her fear of growing away from her family. Was that the problem? My conscious mind said that I was prepared to pay that price, but perhaps my unconscious mind did not agree.

But I hadn’t grown away from them. Not from Luke and Bo, anyway. There was a temporary split, during my undergraduate years, but now I was as close to them, emotionally, as I would have been if I’d stayed in Crow Lake. We didn’t have a great deal in common, but we were close for all that.

Matt, then.

I thought of Matt, and there was … a moment of truth, I suppose. Fiona was afraid of leaving her family and her boyfriend behind and the truth was, she probably would. Her boyfriend might well be intelligent “in his own way,” but his way was not hers.

Matt’s way was mine. It should have been impossible to leave Matt behind.

This crisis I was going through, not to mention the ache which I seemed to have carried around with me for most of my life—of course they were to do with him. How could it be otherwise? Everything I now was, I owed to him. All the years of watching him, learning from him, coming to share his passion—how could I not be affected by the way things had turned out? He had wanted his chance so badly and deserved it so much, and through his own fault—that was the worst of it— through his own fault he had thrown it away.

I sat at my desk, listening to the hum of the university behind me, aching with the pity of it all. I had imagined, once upon a time, that we would always be together. The two of us, forever side by side, staring into the pond. His plan—that absurd, naive, glorious plan. Childishness. Things change. Everyone has to grow up.