Crow Lake (8 page)

It’s only with hindsight that I’m able to say all this. I wasn’t aware of any of it at the time. I hadn’t thought in terms of our relationship growing or evolving—it had never occurred to me that that was necessary or even desirable. I was fatalistic; I thought that it would work or it wouldn’t, and there was very little I could do about it. Hoping for the best. I suppose it’s like driving with your eyes closed.

I didn’t know what to say to him. How to make him understand. I was very upset. I said, “Daniel, I’m just not good at … talking about that sort of thing. Love and so on. But it doesn’t mean I don’t feel it.”

“I know that. But it’s more than that, Kate.”

“What then?”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, “You could involve me in other aspects of your life. Other things that are important to you.”

He didn’t actually say, “You could introduce me to your family,” but I knew that was what he meant, or part of it. He meant that for starters I should take him home and introduce him to Luke and Bo. And to Matt.

The thing was, that was the one thing I couldn’t even imagine doing. I had no idea why. I still can hardly understand it. I knew that he would like them, I knew that they would like him, and yet I found the idea absolutely impossible to deal with. It was ridiculous. I told myself it was ridiculous.

He had turned down a side street and pulled over to the curb. I didn’t know how long we’d been there, the engine running, snow hissing down on the windshield.

I said to him, “I’ll try, Daniel. I’ll really try.”

He nodded. I wished that he would say something— say that he understood—but he did not; he put the car in gear and drove me home to my flat. And since then a month had passed and we had not referred to it. But it was there between us. It hadn’t gone away.

So I knew what he would feel, if he had seen the invitation from Matt. He would see it as the perfect opportunity, which of course it was.

He put the photograph of Simon down on the table, carefully, as if he guessed that it had some special significance for me. And because of his care I almost managed to invite him, right then. Almost managed to force myself to overcome whatever it was. But Matt was very much on my mind because of the dream, and suddenly I had a vivid mental image of the two of them meeting. Smiling and shaking hands. I saw it quite clearly; Matt inquiring about the trip, Daniel saying, “It was great. Nice scenery.” The two of them moving toward the house. Matt saying, “You’re at the university aren’t you? Microbiology, Kate was saying …” And all at once resentment welled up in me so strongly that it took my breath away. I looked down at the report in front of me, tasting bitterness like metal in my mouth.

“Kate?”

I looked up at him reluctantly. He was frowning at me, looking puzzled. Daniel Crane, youngest full professor in the zoology department, standing in the middle of my living room looking puzzled, because there was one detail in his life that wasn’t quite perfect.

I wanted to say, You have had it so easy. So
easy.
You may have worked hard, but luck has been with you all the way, and I bet you don’t even know it. You’re a clever man, I know that, I’m not denying that, but I have to say that compared to him, you’re nothing out of the ordinary. Not really. Not compared to Matt.

“Is something wrong?”

“No,” I said. “Why?”

“You look …”

I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. He picked up his coffee and sipped at it, still watching me. I thought, I can’t do it. I just can’t. If he’s seen it—well, too bad. So be it.

I said, “I’m nearly finished,” and went on with the marking.

chapter
NINE

Not long ago I attended a conference in Edmonton to give a paper on the effect of pesticides on the life of still-water ponds. It wasn’t a particularly brilliant conference but on the way back we flew very low over northern Ontario, and that in itself made the trip worthwhile. I was staggered by the vastness of it. The emptiness. We flew over miles and miles of nothing, of rocks and trees and lakes, beautiful and desolate and remote as the moon. And then below us I suddenly saw a thin grey-white line, weaving about in the middle of all that nothingness, finding its way around lakes and swamps and granite outcrops. And up ahead, as if it were a balloon and that fragile line a piece of string attached to it, a small clearing appeared at the side of a lake. There were fields marked out in the clearing, and a scattering of houses and several more grey-white lines knitting them all together. More or less at the centre, identifiable by its squat little spire and by the neat square of graveyard surrounding it, was the church, and beside that, in the middle of a battered patch of playground, the school.

It wasn’t Crow Lake, but it might as well have been. I thought,
Home.

And then I thought,
Weren’t we brave!

I didn’t mean us in particular; I meant all those who dared to live remote from their fellows in such a vast and silent land.

Anyway, since then, when I think of home I often seem to see it from the air. I home in on it, so to speak, circling lower and lower so that more and more details become clear, until finally I see us, the four of us. Generally we seem to be in church, for some reason. There we are, two boys and two girls, sitting in a row, Bo not quite as well behaved as she would have been if our mother had been there, but not too bad, considering, and the rest of us quiet and attentive. It is possible that our clothes aren’t too clean and that our shoes aren’t polished, but I don’t get low enough to see that.

It is odd that I always see the four of us, because we were four only for the first year. After that Matt was no longer with us. But of course that was the most significant year. It seems to me that more happened in that year than in all the other years of my childhood put together.

Aunt Annie stayed with us until the middle of September. Having been brought forcibly to the conclusion that I might not survive the breakup of the family, she was obliged to accept Luke’s plan to give up his career in order to “bring up the girls.” She wasn’t happy about it, but there was no option, so she stayed until we were all safely settled into the new school year and then took her leave.

I remember taking her to the station in our new (old) car. There would have been no need to go all that way—we could have flagged down the train as it passed the Northern Side Road—but I suppose Matt and Luke felt that wasn’t a sufficiently dignified send-off. I remember the train, how huge it was and how black, and the way it panted in the heat like a dog. I remember how amazed by it Bo was. Luke was carrying her, and she kept taking his face in her hands and turning his head to look at it, insisting that he be amazed too.

Aunt Annie didn’t say goodbye. When the time came to board she said for the second time that she was appointing me letter-writer-in-chief and for the third time that we were to phone if there were problems, and then she climbed quite nimbly onto the box-step the conductor had put down for her and up into the train. We watched her make her way down inside the car, the conductor behind her carrying her bag. She sat down in a seat by the window and waved to us. It was a cheerful, childish wave, a folding and unfolding of the fingers. I remember it because both it and her smile contrasted oddly with the fact that there were tears running down her cheeks. Take no notice of the tears, her smile and her fingers said. So we took no notice of them, as if they were nothing to do with Aunt Annie, and waved gravely back.

I remember the drive home; all four of us sat in the front, Matt driving, Luke holding Bo on his lap, myself between them. No one said a word. When we turned into the driveway Luke looked across at Matt and said, “Here we are then.”

Matt said, “Yeah.”

“You okay about everything?”

“Sure.”

He looked worried though and not very happy.

And Luke? Luke looked fiercely happy. Luke looked like a man going gloriously into battle, knowing that God was on his side.

One other thing occurred that day; an incident unconnected to Aunt Annie’s departure. At the time none of us thought anything of it, and in fact it was a long time before I even thought of it again and longer still before I realized that it might have had some significance.

It took place in the evening, after supper, while Matt and I were doing the dishes and Luke was getting Bo ready for bed.

Aunt Annie had left the house in almost painfully good order. In the final days before her departure she had scoured every surface, washed every window, and laundered every scrap of material in the house from the curtains on down. No doubt she knew Luke well enough by then to know that this was the last contact with soap and water many of the items would ever have, but I imagine in her concern over us she was also making a bargain with God: if she did everything in her power to get us off to a good start, He would be obliged to do everything in His to make sure that we came to no harm. A bargain is a bargain.

So Matt and I were standing in our gleaming kitchen, washing our shining saucepans and drying them with tea towels which had been washed, boiled, starched, and ironed until they looked and felt like sheets of polished paper. Bo and Luke came in, Bo wearing preternaturally clean pyjamas and demanding a drink. Luke got her a glass of juice from the refrigerator, waited for her to drink it, and then picked her up and instructed her to say goodnight. He was being firm, letting her know right from the word go that now he was the boss, and Bo was in such good spirits at having—as she saw it—vanquished Aunt Annie that she let him think he was getting away with it.

“Say goodnight to the galley slaves,” Luke said.

Bo was looking out of the window. She turned her head and beamed obediently at Matt and me, but then she pointed out into the dusk and said, “Dat man!”

It was just getting dark. We had the lights on in the kitchen, but you could still make out the shapes of individual trees. And if you looked hard you could also see a dark shape standing far enough back that it almost merged into the woods which seemed to draw in around the house at night. We all looked out and the shadow moved, slid a little farther back.

Matt frowned. “Looks like Laurie Pye.”

Luke nodded. He went to the door and opened it and called, “Hey, Laurie!”

The shadow hesitated, and then came slowly forward. Luke shifted Bo to his other arm and held the door open. “How’re you doin’, Laurie? Come on in.”

Laurie stopped a few feet from the door. “Naw,” he said. “It’s okay.”

“Come in,” Luke repeated. “Come have a glass of juice or something. What can we do for you?”

Matt and I had come to the door too and Laurie looked briefly at us, dark eyes just flicking over us. He shook his head and said, “Naw, it’s okay. It doesn’t matter.” And he turned and left.

That was all.

We watched him fade back into the woods. Matt and Luke looked at each other. Luke let the door close gently.

“Odd,” Matt said.

“You think something’s wrong?”

“No idea.”

We thought no more about it. Matt and I went back to the dishes, and Luke put Bo to bed, and that was that.

Looking back, I think he must have come hoping to talk to either Luke or Matt. I can’t think what else he could have come for. He knew both of them better than almost anyone outside his own family—they’d been working side by side with him in his father’s fields for years— and if he trusted anyone, he probably trusted them.

Against that, I can’t actually imagine Laurie Pye talking to anyone. I can’t see that stark white face, those disturbing eyes, and imagine him uttering the words that he must have so badly needed to say.

The only other possibility I can think of is that he came almost accidentally. He’d gone out for a walk and suddenly found himself outside our house—though even that suggests that, consciously or unconsciously, he was looking for someone to talk to.

Whatever the reason, he stood outside in the gradually increasing darkness, looking in. Watching. I can imagine how it looked to him. The stress and anxiety Matt and Luke were still labouring under, Bo’s vulnerability, my own still-traumatized state—none of that would have been visible to him. What he would have seen was the clean, orderly house, the quiet, cheerful domestic scene, the four of us getting on with our lives, helping each other, the eldest carrying the youngest in his arms. It must have looked idyllic. It must have made the idea of coming in and talking about what was going on in his own home seem impossible, completely out of the question. If Bo had been screaming or Matt and Luke arguing or even if we hadn’t all been together in that shining kitchen, it might have been possible. He’d just picked a bad night.

No jobs turned up in town that would take Luke for the peculiar hours he wanted to work, but he got himself a job working at the McLeans’ store. I have my doubts, thinking about it now, that Mr. and Mrs. McLean really needed help. They’d been running the store for twenty years and had always managed just fine. Still, they let on that they could use Luke for a couple of hours a day, and it didn’t occur to any of us that perhaps it was another act of charity.

They were a strange family. Strange individually and stranger still as a family group. If you took any group of children and set them on one side of a room and any group of parents and set them on the other and then were told to match them up, Sally would have been positively the last child you matched with Mr. and Mrs. McLean. For a start, they were small and mousy, both of them, while Sally was quite tall and had that startling hair. Then there was the fact that Mr. and Mrs. McLean were famous for being shy, while Sally, particularly in her teens, was famous for being the reverse. Her body language, for example; the way she stood, pelvis forward, breasts lifted, chin delicately raised—I am sure that was not a language Mrs. McLean ever spoke, or Mr. McLean ever understood.

The other thing they were famous for was loving children. They would stand together behind the long dark counter that ran half the length of the store and if a child walked in, those shy smiles would change to beams of purest pleasure. They should have had a dozen of their own, but Sally was their only one. They must have been well into their forties when she arrived—they were quite elderly compared to other parents I knew. I imagine they “tried” for years, and for years nothing happened, and then in the way of such things, long after they’d accepted that it was God’s will that they be childless, along came Sally. A surprise, as they say. And I imagine she continued to surprise them, too.

So, Luke went to work for Mr. and Mrs. McLean. I don’t remember what I thought of the arrangement. I imagine I didn’t think about it much. I liked the store, though, or had liked it in the old days, when I had accompanied my mother on her weekly shopping expeditions. It was a big old barn of a building, made of unfinished planking and lined with rough wooden shelves, and it was crammed to the rafters with everything you could think of: fruit and vegetables in quart or bushel baskets, sliced bread, tins of beans, packets of raisins, pitchforks, soap, knitting wool, mousetraps, rubber boots, long johns, toilet paper, rolling pins, shotgun cartridges, writing paper, Ex-Lax. My mother would give me part of her list (with the items printed very neatly so that I could read them), and I would wander up and down the aisles until I found whatever it was, and put it in my basket. Frequently my mother and I would pass each other, and we would both smile, and she would ask me how I was making out or if I had happened to notice raisins, say, or tinned peaches, on my travels. When we had both gathered our purchases we would take them up to the counter, where Mr. McLean would put them in bags for us while Mrs. McLean wrote down the prices in thick black pencil, both of them beaming at me all the while.

I love the memories of those expeditions. They are among the few I have of the two of us alone together.

Now Luke was installed behind the counter too, though beaming wasn’t something that came naturally to him. His hours were Monday to Friday from four in the afternoon, when Matt got home from school, until the store closed at six. On Monday evenings he worked later, driving the McLeans’ truck into town to pick up the week’s supplies and then stacking the shelves.

Sometimes Sally went with him on those trips. In the light of what transpired later, I expect she sat closer to him than was necessary and steadied herself, when they lurched over bumps and into potholes, by placing a hand on his thigh. What Luke felt about that I can only guess at. All the usual things, no doubt, plus the confusion that came from an awareness of his circumstances.

On Saturdays he worked mornings at Calvin Pye’s farm and Matt worked afternoons. As far as I know, nothing further was said about Laurie’s strange appearance at our door. Calvin could have used Luke six days a week, but Luke was restricted by his determination to look after Bo and me himself. More than one neighbour had offered to take us for a few hours each afternoon, but neither he nor Matt wanted that. Bo had taken against strangers in a big way, and I was giving them cause for concern as well. Apparently I was still very withdrawn, and they felt the less disruption I had to deal with the better.

Matt’s idea of babysitting, of course, was to take Bo and me back to the ponds, and as long as the fine weather lasted—and it lasted well into October that year—we went almost every afternoon. I recommend it, by the way—pond watching—as therapy. There is something about water, even if you have no particular interest in the life forms within it. It is the medium we came from, after all. We were all rocked by water at our beginnings.

The only fly in the ointment of those afternoons, as far as I was concerned, was that we often met Marie Pye on our way back. I was always tired by that stage, and hungry, and ready to go home, and I would circle around Matt, kicking impatiently at the railroad ties while he and Marie chatted. I couldn’t think what they had to talk about that they couldn’t talk about on Saturdays when Matt was at the farm. Both of them were weighed down, Marie with shopping, Matt with Bo sitting like a sandbag on his shoulders; you would have thought both of them would want to get home as quickly as possible. And yet there they stood, shifting about under their loads, talking about things that didn’t matter. Minutes would drag by and I would dig holes in the dust with my shoe and chew my finger fretfully. Finally Matt would say, “Guess I’d better go,” and Marie would say, “Yes,” and they’d continue talking for another ten minutes.