Crow Lake (3 page)

And myself clinging to Matt. I held on to his hand or his sleeve or the pocket of his jeans, anything that I could get hold of. I was seven, I should have been beyond such behaviour, but I couldn’t help myself. I remember him gently disengaging my fingers when he needed to go to the toilet, saying, “Just wait, Katie. Just give me a minute.” And myself standing at the closed bathroom door, asking, “Have you finished yet?” with a shaking voice.

I cannot imagine what those first days must have been like for Luke and Matt; the funeral arrangements and the phone calls, the visits of neighbours and the kindly meant offers of help, the practicalities of looking after Bo and me. The confusion and anxiety, to say nothing of the grief. And of course, nothing was said of the grief. We were our parents’ children, after all.

A number of the phone calls were from the Gaspé or Labrador, from various branches of the family. Those with no phone of their own called from a call-box in the nearest town, and you could hear the coins clanging into the box and then heavy breathing while whoever it was, unused to phones and certainly unused to long-distance calls in times of crisis, tried to work out what to say.

“It’s Uncle Jamie.” A windy bellow from the wastes of Labrador.

“Oh. Yes. Hello.” From Luke.

“I’m calling about your father and mother.” He had great lungs, Uncle Jamie. Luke was forced to hold the phone out from his ear and Matt and I could hear him from the other side of the room.

“Yes. Thank you.”

Painful whistling silence.

“Is that Luke I’m speaking to? The oldest one?”

“Yes. It’s Luke.”

More silence.

Luke, sounding more tired than embarrassed. “It’s nice of you to call, Uncle Jamie.”

“Aye. Well. Terrible thing, lad. Terrible thing.”

The main message seemed to be that we were not to worry about the future. The family was sorting things out and everything would be looked after. We weren’t to worry. Aunt Annie, one of my father’s three sisters, was coming and would be there as soon as she could, though it was unlikely to be in time for the funeral. Would we be all right on our own for a few days?

I was fortunate in being too young to understand the implications of those calls. All I knew was that they worried Luke and Matt; whichever one of them had taken the call would stand staring at the phone afterwards. Luke had the habit of running his hands through his hair when he was anxious, and in the days and weeks following the accident his hair looked like a well-ploughed field.

I remember being struck, suddenly, while watching him search through the chest of drawers in the room Bo and I shared, looking for something clean for Bo to wear, by the notion that I didn’t know Luke any more. He wasn’t the same person he had been a few days ago— the half-defiant, half-embarrassed boy who had scraped into teachers’ college—and I wasn’t sure who he was. I hadn’t been aware that people could change. But then, I hadn’t been aware that people could die. At least not people you loved and needed. Death in principle I had known about; death in practice—no. I hadn’t known that could happen.

The funeral service was held in the churchyard. Chairs had been brought out from the Sunday school and placed in neat rows beside the two open graves. We four children sat in the front row and tried to keep the chair legs from wobbling on the hard-baked earth. Or rather, three of us sat in a row; Bo sat on Luke’s lap with her thumb in her mouth.

I remember being very uncomfortable. It was extremely hot, and Luke and Matt had been consumed by the need to do everything properly, so we were all in our darkest clothes—in my case a winter skirt and jersey, in Bo’s a flannel dress from the previous year, much too small. The boys were in dark shirts and trousers. All four of us were shiny with sweat long before the service began.

All I can remember about the service itself is that I could hear several people snuffling and I couldn’t turn around to see who they were. I think I was protected from the reality of what was happening by disbelief. I could not believe that my mother and father were in those two boxes by the gravesides, and certainly I could not believe that if they were, people would lower them into the ground and heap earth onto them so that they could never again get out. I sat quietly between Luke and Matt, and then stood beside them, holding Matt’s hand, as the coffins were lowered into the ground. Matt held my hand very tight; I remember that.

Then it was over, except that it wasn’t, because everyone in the village had to pay their respects to us. Most of them didn’t actually say anything, they just filed past and nodded at us or patted Bo’s head, but still it took a long time. I stood beside Matt. A couple of times he looked down at me and smiled, though his smile was just a white line. Bo was very well behaved, even though she was beet red with the heat. Luke held her, and she leaned her head against his shoulder and watched everybody around her thumb.

Sally McLean was one of the first to come up. She was one of the ones who’d been crying—you could see by her face. She didn’t look at Matt or me but she turned her tear-stained face to Luke and said, “I’m so sorry, Luke,” in a broken whisper.

Luke said, “Thanks.”

She looked at him, her mouth quivering with sympathy, but then her parents stepped up so she didn’t say anything else. Mr. and Mrs. McLean were small, shy, quiet people, nothing at all like their daughter. Mr. McLean cleared his throat but didn’t actually say anything. Mrs. McLean smiled unhappily at all of us. Then Mr. McLean cleared his throat again and said to Sally, “We’d better be getting along now, Sal,” but she just gave him a reproachful look and stayed where she was.

Calvin Pye came up next, herding his wife and kids before him. Calvin Pye was the farmer Matt and Luke worked for in the summers, and he was a bitter-looking man. He had a scared-looking wife called Alice whom my mother had felt sorry for. I’d never been quite sure why. She’d just said, “That poor woman,” from time to time.

She’d been sorry for the children too. The eldest child was Marie, who’d been in Matt’s class at high school until the year before, when she’d left to help at home, and the youngest was Rosie, who was seven and in my class. The boy, Laurie, was fourteen, and should have been in high school, but he’d missed so much school due to having to work on the farm that he was never going to make it out of grade eight. Both the girls were pale and nervous-looking like their mother, but Laurie was the spitting image of Mr. Pye. He had the same lean, bony face and the same dark, furious eyes.

Mr. Pye said, “We’re sorry for your loss,” and Mrs. Pye said, “Yes.” Rosie and I looked at each other. Rosie looked as if she’d been crying, but she always looked like that. Laurie stared at the ground. I think Marie wanted to say something to Matt, but Mr. Pye herded them all away.

Miss Carrington came up. She was my teacher and had taught both Luke and Matt. The public school had only one room, so she taught everybody until they went to the high school in town or left to work on their fathers’ farms. She was young and quite nice, but very strict, and I was a bit afraid of her. She said, “Well, Luke. Matt. Kate.” Her voice was unsteady and she didn’t say anything else, just gave us a rather shaky smile and patted Bo’s foot.

Dr. Christopherson and his wife were next, and then four men I didn’t know who turned out to be from my father’s bank, and then, in ones and twos and whole families, all the people I had known since the day I was born, all looking upset and saying, “Anything we can do …” to Luke and Matt.

Sally McLean was still standing as near to Luke as she could. She looked at the ground as people paid their respects and every now and then stepped closer to Luke and whispered something. Once I heard her say, “Would you like me to hold your little sister?” and Luke said, “No,” and tightened his grip on Bo. After a minute he said, “Thank you, but she’s fine.”

Mrs. Stanovich was one of the last to come up, and I remember what she said very clearly. She’d been crying too, and still was. She was a large soft lady who looked as if she didn’t have any bones and who talked to the Lord all day, not just during grace and prayers like the rest of us. Matt had said once that she was as mad as a hatter like all the Evangelicals, and my parents had banished him from the dining room for a whole month. If he’d just said she was mad as a hatter he might have got away with it. It was disparaging her religion that got him into trouble. Religious tolerance was a family creed and you defied it at your peril.

Anyway, she came up to us and looked from one to the other, tears rolling down her cheeks. We didn’t know where to look. Mr. Stanovich, who was known as Gabby because he never said a word, nodded at Luke and Matt and headed speedily back to his truck. To my alarm, Mrs. Stanovich suddenly pulled me into her huge bosom and said, “Katherine, sweetie, great will be the joy in Heaven this day. Your parents, bless their dear souls, have gone to join our Lord, and the Heavenly Host will
rejoice
to welcome them. It’s hard, my lamb, but think how happy our Lord will be!”

She smiled at me through her tears and squeezed me again. Her bosom smelled of talcum powder and sweat. I’ll never forget it. Talcum powder and sweat, and the idea that up in heaven they were rejoicing that my parents were dead.

Poor Lily Stanovich. I know she was genuinely grief-stricken by our parents’ death. But that memory of her is the clearest one I have of their funeral, and to be honest I still resent that, even after all this time. I’d have liked a pleasanter memory, that’s all. I’d have liked a clear strong picture of the four of us, standing very close together, supporting each other. But every time I get it fixed in my mind, in wallows Lily Stanovich, bosom to the fore, and smothers it in tears.

chapter
THREE

It was a long time before I told Daniel much about my family. When we first started going out we exchanged bits of personal information, as you do, but it was all very general. I think I told him that my parents had died when I was young but that I had other family up north and went to visit them sometimes. It was hardly more detailed than that.

I knew quite a bit about Daniel’s background because a lot of his background was in the foreground, so to speak, right there at the university. Daniel is Professor Crane of the zoology department. His father is Professor Crane of the history department. His mother is Professor Crane of the fine art department. It’s a little Crane dynasty. Or as I learned later, it’s a small subsection of a large Crane dynasty. Daniel’s forebears roamed the cultural capitals of Europe before emigrating to Canada. They were doctors or astronomers or historians or musicians, each of them without doubt eminent in his field. Against all that, Great-Grandmother Morrison’s little handmade book rest seemed a bit pathetic, and I kept it under wraps.

But Daniel is a curious man. He shares with Matt— and it is the only thing they share, don’t get the idea that in Daniel I have chosen a replacement for Matt—a curiosity which extends to almost everything. One evening when we’d been going out for a couple of weeks he said, “So tell me the story of your life, Kate Morrison.”

As I say, this was at the beginning of our relationship. I didn’t know it at the time, but that little request from Daniel was the beginning of what was going to be a problem between us, a problem which I described to myself as Daniel asking more of me than I could give, and which Daniel described to me as my shutting him out of my life.

I am not from a background where people talk about problems in their relationships. If someone does or says something that upsets you, you don’t say so. Maybe it’s another Presbyterian thing; if the Eleventh Commandment is Thou Shalt Not Emote, the Twelfth is Thou Shalt Not Admit to Being Upset, and when it becomes evident to the whole world that you are upset, Thou Shalt on No Account Explain Why. No, you swallow your feelings, force them down inside yourself, where they can feed and grow and swell and expand until you explode, unforgivably, to the utter bewilderment of whoever it was who upset you. In Daniel’s family there is vastly more shouting and accusing and slamming of doors but far less bewilderment, because people say why.

So I did not, in the months to come, say to Daniel that sometimes he made me feel that he would like to put my life and everything in it on one of his little glass slides and slide me, like some poor hapless microbe, under his microscope, where he could study my very soul. But he did say to me, quietly but very seriously, that he felt that I was not willing to give him very much of myself. That there was a barrier somewhere, which he could feel but not identify, and that he was finding it a real problem.

All that was in the future, however, on this particular night; our relationship was still very young and very exciting. We were in a deli at the time. Neon strip lights and yellow plastic tables on spindly metal legs, a constant clatter from the kitchen. Reuben sandwiches and coleslaw and excellent coffee, and this little request: Tell me the story of your life.

I couldn’t figure out at the time why I felt such a resistance to the idea. Partly I guess I’m just not given to soul-baring. I never was the sort of teenager who sat on friends’ beds, whispering and giggling and exchanging secrets behind cupped hands. And I’ve always thought there was something a bit distasteful about laying your family out in front of a relative stranger, sacrificing their privacy on the altar of the getting-to-know-you ritual of dating. But I now think that most of my reluctance was due to the fact that the story of my life is all bound up with the story of Matt’s life, and there was no way I was going to dissect that over a cup of coffee with anyone, far less someone as successful as Daniel Crane.

So I hedged. I said, “I think I’ve already told you most of it.”

“You’ve hardly told me anything. I know your name and I know you come from somewhere up north. I think that’s about it.”

“What else do you want to know?”

“Everything,” Daniel said. “Tell me everything.”

“All at once?”

“Start at the beginning. No, start before the beginning. Start with that place you come from.”

“Crow Lake?”

“Yes. What was it like growing up in Crow Lake?”

“Fine,” I said. “It was fine.”

Daniel waited. After a minute he said, “You’re a born storyteller, Kate. You really are.”

“Well I don’t know what would interest you!”

“Everything. How big was it? How many people? How big was the downtown? Was there a library? A Dairy Queen? A laundromat?”

“Oh no,” I said. “No no. There was a store. There wasn’t a downtown. There was a store and a church. And a school. And the farms. Mostly just farms.”

He was hunched over his coffee, trying to visualize it. Daniel is tall and thin and has a slight stoop from spending his life peering into microscopes. In the circumstances the name Crane is a bit unfortunate and you’d think his students would give him a hard time, but apparently not. He is reputed to be the best lecturer in the department. I have considered sneaking in to one of his lectures to see how he does it, but I’ve never had the nerve. When it comes to lecturing, I believe I am considered a bit dry.

“Real old-world stuff,” he said.

“It’s not old-world,” I said. “It’s still like that now, more or less. There are lots of places still like that. They’re not so isolated, because the roads are better and the cars are better. Struan is only twenty miles away. Twenty miles used to be a long way. Now it’s nothing. Except in the winter.”

He was nodding, still trying to visualize. I said, “Haven’t you ever been up north?”

He pondered. “Barrie. I’ve been to Barrie.”

“Barrie! Good God, Daniel! Barrie’s not north!”

I was quite shocked, to tell you the truth. He’s such an intelligent man, and he’s been everywhere. His childhood was spent packing and unpacking as one or other of his parents took up a year’s posting as “visiting professor” somewhere or other. He’s lived for a year in Boston and a year in Rome and a year in London and a year in Washington and a year in Edinburgh. And to find this enormous gap in his knowledge of his own country! It’s not as if he’s an Egyptologist and has spent his life crawling into tombs—he’s a microbiologist. A life scientist! A life scientist who’s never been out in his own backyard.

I was shocked out of my normal reticence, I guess, because I started telling him all about Crow Lake, about how it was nothing at all, true wilderness, until the logging companies started to push their way north, and how they built a road all the way up to a little blue patch of water that they called Crow Lake, and how up that road in due course came three young men. Three stone-broke young men who were fed up with working on other men’s farms and wanted farms of their own. Between them they had three horses, an ox, a crosscut saw, and assorted other tools, and they pooled their resources and began to clear themselves some land. It was Crown land—they claimed fifty acres apiece—and because it was located smack in the middle of nowhere and the government wanted it settled, they got it free. They cleared an acre each, to begin with, and built rough log cabins, one for each of them. And then they went back, one at a time, down the road to New Liskeard, and found themselves wives, one for each of them. They brought their wives back to those cabins.

“Four walls and a roof,” I said to Daniel. “A dirt floor. That’s all it would have been. Water, by bucket, from Crow River. That really was old-world stuff.”

“What did they do about food? Before they could grow any?”

“Brought it in by horse and wagon. Along with wood stoves and sinks and beds and everything else. A bit at a time. And they kept clearing the land, a bit at a time. Clearing the land took years. Generations. It’s still going on.”

“And did they all make it? Did their farms take off?”

“Oh yes. The soil’s not too bad up there. Not wonderful, but good enough. There’s a short growing season, of course.”

“How long ago was all this?” Daniel said.

I thought about it. “Three or four generations.” It hadn’t occurred to me before, but they would have been Great-Grandmother’s contemporaries, those three.

“Are their families still there?”

“Bits of them,” I said. “Frank Janie—he was one of the three—he had a big family, and they eventually got into dairy farming. They’re still going strong. Stanley Vernon was the second man. His farm was taken over somewhere along the way, but one of his daughters still lives there. Old Miss Vernon. She must be about a hundred.”

“Do they still live in log cabins?”

I looked at him to see if he was joking. It can be hard to tell with Daniel, and I wasn’t sure.

“No, Daniel. No. They do not live in log cabins. They live in houses, like real people.”

“That’s a shame. What happened to the cabins?”

“They were probably used as sheds or barns once the houses were built. And then they probably rotted and fell down. This tends to happen with untreated wood, as you may know, being a biologist. All except Frank Janie’s, which was bought and taken away on the back of a truck to be part of a heritage site for the tourists, in New Liskeard.”

“A heritage site,” Daniel said. He pondered some more, then shook his head. “How do you know all this? It’s incred-ible! Think of knowing the history of your whole community!”

“There’s not that much to know,” I said. “You just kind of soak it up, I guess. Osmosis.”

“How about the third guy? Is his family still there?”

“Jackson Pye,” I said. I saw the farm as I said the name. The big grey-painted house, the large shambling barn, bits of farm machinery scattered about, the fields lying flat and yellow under the sun. The ponds, still and quiet, reflecting the hard blue sky.

Daniel was waiting expectantly. I said, “The third man was Jackson Pye. The Pyes were our nearest neighbours, actually. But things didn’t work out too well for them, in the end.”

Afterwards I found myself thinking about old Miss Vernon. About something she had told me, which I would much rather have left unremembered. Miss Vernon of the teeth and the long whiskery jaw, whose father had been one of those first three men. This was in my teens, when during the summers I helped Miss Vernon with her vegetable garden. She seemed about a hundred even then. She had arthritis and couldn’t do anything much, only sit on a kitchen chair which she had me bring outside so she could keep an eye on me. That was what she said, but really she just wanted company. She talked while I weeded. Despite what I said to Daniel there’s a limit to what you can learn by osmosis, and Miss Vernon is the source for most of what I know about Crow Lake.

This day she was telling me about her childhood, about the games they played and the trouble they got into. She said that one day in early winter she and her brother and two of the Pye boys—Jackson Pye’s sons— were playing by the shore of the lake. The lake hadn’t been frozen long and all of them had been expressly forbidden to go out on it, but Norman Pye, who was older than the rest of them, said that it would be safe if they slid out on their bellies. So they did.

“We thought it was exciting as all get out,” Miss Vernon said. “We could hear the ice cracking but it didn’t give, and we slid across it like seals. Oh, it was tremendous fun. The ice was clear as glass and you could see right to the bottom. All the stones lying there, brighter and more colorful than they ever are when you look through water. You could even see fish swimming about. And then all at once there was this loud crack and the whole sheet gave way, and there we were in the water. It was awful cold. But we were right near the shore so we just climbed out. But Norman wouldn’t go home. He said he’d be better off not.”

She stopped there and started rattling her teeth about as she does, as if that were the end of the story. After a minute I said, “You mean he didn’t go home till he dried out?” I thought of him, teeth chattering, skin blue, trying to figure out how to keep from freezing while his clothes dried, afraid of the beating he’d get if his father found out. Being the eldest, he’d be in the most trouble.

Miss Vernon said, “No, no. He didn’t go home at all.”

“You mean ever?”

“He reckoned he’d just head off down the road, and maybe a logging truck would pick him up. We didn’t see him again.”

It haunted me afterwards. It kept coming back to me, throughout my teenage years. The image of that boy walking down the road. Flailing himself with his arms, his feet numb, boots stumbling on the frozen road. Darkness coming on. Snow drifting down.

What haunted me most of all was the thought that three generations back, there was a Pye son who was prepared to risk freezing to death rather than face his father.