Crow Lake (4 page)

chapter
FOUR

Aunt Annie arrived two days after the funeral. You need to know about Aunt Annie; she played a part in what happened. She was my father’s eldest sister, a worthy descendant of Great-Grandmother Morrison, and equal to most tasks. It was the first time she had left the Gaspé, and although Luke and Matt had met her—our parents had taken them “home” for a visit once, when they were small—Bo and I never had.

She was many years older than my father, short where he had been tall, fat where he had been thin, and with a behind I’m glad I didn’t inherit, but she had something of him about her and she seemed familiar to me straight away. She was unmarried. My father’s mother had died some years previously, not long after Great-Grandmother in fact, and since then Aunt Annie had kept house for her father and brothers. I suppose the family might have chosen to send her simply because it was seen as women’s work and having no children she could most easily be spared, but I suspect there was a better reason than that. The message she had to deliver—the arrangements the family had made for us—was a painful one, and I imagine there weren’t many volunteers.

“I’m sorry to be so long in coming,” she said when Reverend Mitchell had presented her to us—since the accident we had no car and he had picked her up at the railway crossing for us—“but this country is just too big. Do you have a lavatory? I assume you have a lavatory. Kate, you look just like your mother, aren’t you the lucky one. And this is Bo. Hello, Bo.”

Bo regarded her stonily from Luke’s arms. Aunt Annie seemed unperturbed. She removed her hat, which was small and round and brown and did her no favours, and looked around for somewhere to put it. Everything was a mess, but she didn’t seem to notice. She put her hat down on the sideboard beside a plate with a dull white crescent of ham fat on it. Then she reached up and patted her hair.

“Do I look a fright? I feel a fright. Never mind. Show me the lavatory and then I can get started. I expect there’s lots to do.”

Her tone was cheerful and matter-of-fact, as if this were a regular visit and our parents just happened to be out of the room for the moment. But it seemed right that she should be like that. That was how they would have been. I decided that I liked her. I couldn’t think why Luke and Matt were looking so anxious.

“There we are,” she said a few minutes later, emerging from the bathroom. “Now then. What’s the time? Four o’clock. That’s fine. We all need to get to know each other, but I expect that will look after itself. What I think we should do now is sort out what needs doing most—cooking, cleaning, washing, that sort of thing. Reverend Mitchell says you’ve managed marvellously, but there must be things—”

She paused. Something in Luke’s and Matt’s expressions must have distracted her, because she didn’t finish her sentence. Instead, her tone a little less brisk and a little more gentle, she said, “I know we have matters to discuss, but I think we should leave all that for a day or two, don’t you? We’ll need to go through your father’s papers, and we’ll need to talk to his lawyer and the bank. Then we’ll know where we stand. There’s not much point in discussing things until then. Is that all right with you?”

They nodded, and both of them suddenly looked looser, as if they’d been holding their breath and now they had let it out.

So we had a couple of days of what I suppose you could call a honeymoon period, during which Aunt Annie restored order and gave Luke and Matt a chance to get their breath back. Laundry had been the biggest problem, so she started there, and then cleaned the house and discreetly disposed of our parents’ clothes and dealt with unanswered mail and unpaid bills. She was efficient and tactful and made no demands on our affections. I’m sure that under different circumstances we would have grown to love her.

On a Thursday, almost two weeks after the accident, she and Luke went up to town to see my father’s lawyer and the bank. Reverend Mitchell drove them up while Matt stayed with Bo and me.

We went down to the lake after they’d left. I wondered if Matt would suggest a swim, but instead, after standing for quite a few minutes watching Bo stomp around at the water’s edge, he said abruptly, “Why don’t we go back to the ponds?”

“What about Bo?” I said.

“She’ll come too. It’s time we educated her.”

“She’ll fall in,” I said anxiously. Unlike the lake, the ponds were steep-sided. I felt tragedy lurked around every corner now; I was afraid all the time. I went to bed with fear at night and woke up with it in the morning.

But Matt said, “Sure she’ll fall in, won’t you, Bo? That’s what ponds are for.”

He carried Bo through the woods on his shoulders, the same way he had carried me all those years ago. We did not talk. We never said much on these excursions, but there was a difference in the silence this time. Back then, it had been because there was no need to talk; now it was because our minds were full of things we couldn’t say.

It was the first time we had been back to the ponds since our parents’ death, and when I saw them again, when we slid down the bank to the first of them, I felt my spirits rise in spite of everything. The first one was “our” pond, not just because it was the closest but because on one side there was a shelf four or five feet wide where the water was less than three feet deep. The water was clear and warm, and many of the pond dwellers congregated there, and of course you could see right to the bottom.

Bo gazed around from her perch on Matt’s shoulders. “Dat!” she said, pointing at the water.

“You should see what’s in it, Bo,” I said. “We’ll tell you the names of everything.”

I lay down on my stomach, as I always did, and peered in. Tadpoles which had been hugging the edges of the pond swarmed away as my shadow fell over them and then gradually wriggled back. They were well developed, their hind legs fully formed, their tails short and stubby. We had watched them grow, Matt and I, as we did every year, from the very first day they began to move inside the tiny clear globes of their eggs.

Sticklebacks were drifting aimlessly about. The breeding season was over so it was hard to tell the males and the females apart. When they were breeding the males were very beautiful, with red underparts and silvery scales on their backs and brilliant blue eyes. Matt had told me—it had been in the spring, just a few months ago, though it seemed to be in another lifetime—that the male sticklebacks did all the work. They made the nests and courted the females and fanned the nests to keep the eggs supplied with oxygen. Once the eggs had hatched it was the males who guarded them. If a baby strayed from the group, the father sucked it into his mouth and spat it back into the pack.

“What do the females do?” I’d asked him.

“Oh, laze around. Go to tea parties. Gossip with their friends. You know what females are like.”

“No, but
really
Matt. What do they do?”

“I don’t know. Eat a lot, probably. Probably they need to recover their strength after producing all those eggs.”

He’d been lying beside me then, his chin on the back of his hands, gazing into the water, and all that had been on our minds was this small world lying so still before us.

I looked around at him now. He was standing a few feet back from the pond, staring at it in the way you stare at something you’re not really seeing. Bo was craning forward on his shoulders. “Down!” she said.

I said, “Aren’t you coming to look?”

“Sure.”

He set Bo down and she staggered to the water’s edge. Matt said, “Lie down, Bo. Lie down like Kate and watch the fish.”

Bo looked at me. She squatted down beside me. She was wearing a little blue dress and her diaper hung down beneath it, so when she squatted it bunched up on the ground and made her look as if she had an enormous behind.

“Luke’s not very good at diapers,” I said. Aunt Annie had offered to take over the task of changing Bo, but Bo would have none of it, so that was one job Luke and Matt still shared.

Matt said, “I did that diaper, thank you, and I’m proud of it.”

He smiled at me, but when I looked at his eyes there was no laughter there. I saw suddenly that there was no happiness in him now. No
real
happiness; just a show, for my sake. I turned my head quickly away from him and stared hard into the water. The fear and dread lying inside of me rose up like a river, like a flood. I stared into the pond and pressed everything down hard.

After a minute Matt lay down beside Bo, so that she was between us. He said, “Look at the fish, Bo.” He pointed at the water and Bo looked at his finger. “No, look in the water. See the fish?”

Bo said, “Ooooh!” She stood up and jumped up and down, yelling with excitement, and the fish vanished as if they had never been. She stopped jumping and stared into the water. She looked at Matt in disbelief.

“You scared them all away,” Matt said.

“No fish!” she said. She was incredulous and grief-stricken, and her face caved in and the tears started to roll.

“Cut it out, Bo. Just stay still and they’ll come back.”

She looked at him doubtfully and stuck her thumb in, but then squatted down again. After a minute, while Matt talked to her to keep her still, a small stickleback drifted toward us.

“There he is,” Matt whispered.

And Bo leapt up in excitement, stepped on the dangling tail of her diaper, and fell in.

On the way back along the railway tracks, we met Marie Pye, carrying a bag of groceries in each arm. The Pyes’ farm was back beyond the gravel pits—in fact, the land the pits were on belonged to them—and the tracks were a shorter route to the McLeans’ store than the road. Matt slowed down as she came toward us, and Marie did likewise, and then she stopped and let us come up.

“Hi, Marie,” Matt said, shifting Bo a little on his shoulders.

“Hi,” Marie said nervously. She glanced past us in the direction of the farm as if she expected her father to come raging up the path from the gravel pits to tell her off. My mother had said once that Marie was the only normal member of that whole sorry family, but she looked just as twitchy as the rest of them to me. She was big-boned and strong-looking, but pale, with a halo of fine pale hair and wide anxious eyes. She and Matt must have known each other quite well—or at least for quite a long time. Marie was a year older, but Matt had skipped a grade, so they’d been in the same class at school. And they’d have seen each other, if only from a distance, when he was working for her father.

This was the first time they’d met since the funeral though, and neither of them seemed to know what to say. I couldn’t see why they needed to say anything. I was tired and wanted to go home.

“Bo’s been fishing,” Matt said at last, jerking his head back against Bo’s belly.

Marie looked at Bo, who was soaking wet and covered in pond weed, and smiled uncertainly. Then she looked back at Matt, and flushed, and said all in a hurry, “I—I was really sorry about your parents.”

“Yeah,” Matt said. “Thanks.”

“Do you … do you know what you’re going to do? What’s going to happen?”

“Not yet. We should find out—” He stopped, and though I wasn’t looking at him, I knew that he had nodded at me.

“Oh,” Marie said. “Anyway, I’m really sorry.”

We stood for a minute more, and then Marie looked at Bo and me and smiled vaguely.

“Well, bye,” she said.

We walked on. I thought, What’s going to happen? Is something else going to happen? What didn’t he know yet? What’s going to happen? Something so bad that he wouldn’t talk about it in front of me.

We came to the path which led from the tracks down into the woods. Once we were there, protected by the dark privacy of the trees, I tried to ask him. I opened my mouth, but the need not to know was greater than the need to know, and I couldn’t say anything. Then the paralysis of my brain affected my feet and I came to a halt. Matt turned and looked at me.

“Got something in your shoe?”

I said, “What did she mean?” and my breath came out in little jerks.

“Who?”

“Marie. When she asked you what was going to happen. What did she mean?”

He didn’t reply for a minute. Bo was examining his hair, lifting long strands of it straight out from his head and crooning over it. His shirt was as wet and pond-weedy as she was.

I said, “What did she—” and then all at once I was crying, standing there, straight and still with my arms at my sides. Matt put Bo down and knelt and took my shoulders.

“Katie! Katie, what is it?”

“What did she mean? What’s going to happen? What did she mean?”

“Katie, it’s going to be all right. We’ll be looked after. Aunt Annie is arranging it.”

“Then what did she
mean?
You said you didn’t know yet. What don’t you know?”

He took a deep breath, then let it out. “The thing is, Katie, we won’t be able to stay here. We’ll have to go and live with the family.”

“Isn’t Aunt Annie coming to live with us?”

“No. She can’t. She has her parents to look after, and she works on the farm. She’s too busy.”

“Who then? Who are we going to?”

“I don’t know yet. That’s what I don’t know. But whoever it is, it will be all right. They’ll be nice. The whole family is nice.”

“I want to live here. I don’t want to leave here. I want Luke and you to look after us. Why can’t Luke and you look after us?”

“It costs money to look after people, Kate. We wouldn’t have any money to live on. Look, you mustn’t worry. It’ll be all right. That’s why Aunt Annie is here. To arrange things. It’ll be all right. You’ll see.”

Luke and Aunt Annie got back from town just after five. Aunt Annie asked us to come and sit down in the living room, which we did, all but Luke, who stood looking out of the window at the lake. Aunt Annie sat very straight in her chair and told us the following:

That our father had left some money, but not much.

That from the lawyer’s office she had made a number of phone calls to the rest of the family, and it had been agreed that Luke should go to teachers’ college as planned. It would use up most of the money, but everyone felt that it was what our parents would have wished.