Surfacing (4 page)

It was before I was born but I can remember it as clearly as if I saw it, and perhaps I did see it: I believe that an unborn baby has its eyes open and can look out through the walls of the mother’s stomach, like a frog in a jar.

CHAPTER FOUR

We unload our baggage while Evans idles the motor. When David has paid him he gives us an uninterested nod and backs the boat out, then turns it and swings around the point, the sound dwindling to a whine and fading as land and distance move between us. The lake jiggles against the shore, the waves subside, nothing remains but a faint iridescent film of gasoline, purple and pink and green. The space is quiet, the wind has gone down and the lake is flat, silver-white, it’s the first time all day (and for a long time, for years) we have been out of the reach of motors. My ears and body tingle, aftermath of the vibration, like feet taken out of roller-skates.

The others are standing aimlessly; they seem to be waiting for me to tell them what comes next. “We’ll take the things up,” I say. I warn them about the dock: it’s slippery with the drizzle, which is lighter now, almost a mist; also some of the boards may be soft and treacherous.

What I want to do is shout “Hello!” or “We’re here!” but I don’t, I don’t want to hear the absence.

I hoist a packsack and walk along the dock and onto the land and towards the cabin, following the path and climbing the steps set into the hillside, lengths of split cedar held in place by a stake pounded at each end. The house is built on a sand hill, part of a ridge left by the retreating glaciers; only a few inches of soil and a thin coating of trees hold it down. On the lake side the sand is exposed, raw, it’s been crumbling away: the stones and charcoal from the fireplace they used when they first lived here in tents have long since vanished and the edge trees fall gradually, several I remember upright are leaning now. Red pines, bark scaling, needles bunched on the top branches. A kingfisher is perched on one of them, making its staccato alarm-clock cry; they nest in the cliff, burrowing into the sand, it speeds up the erosion.

In front of the house the chicken-wire fence is still here, though one end is almost over the brink. They never dismantled it; even the dwarf swing is there, ropes frayed, sagging and blotched with weather. It wasn’t like them to keep something when it was no longer needed; perhaps they expected grandchildren, visiting here. He would have wanted a dynasty, like Paul’s, houses and descendants proliferating around him. The fence is a reproach, it points to my failure.

But I couldn’t have brought the child here, I never identified it as mine; I didn’t name it before it was born even, the way you’re supposed to. It was my husband’s, he imposed it on me, all the time it was growing in me I felt like an incubator. He measured everything he would let me eat, he was feeding it on me, he wanted a replica of himself; after it was born I was no more use. I couldn’t prove it though, he was clever: he kept saying he loved me.

The house is smaller, because (I realize) the trees around it have grown. It’s turned greyer in nine years too, like hair. The cedar logs are upright instead of horizontal, upright logs are shorter and easier for one man to handle. Cedar isn’t the best wood, it decays quickly. Once my father said “I didn’t build it to last forever” and I thought then, Why not? Why didn’t you?

I hope the door will be open but it’s padlocked, as Paul said he left it. I dig the keys he gave me out of my bag and approach warily: whatever I find inside will be a clue. What if he returned after Paul locked it and couldn’t get in? But there are other ways of getting in, he could have broken a window.

Joe and David are here now with the other packsacks and the beer. Anna is behind them with my case and the paper bag; she’s singing again, Mockingbird Hill.

I open the wooden door and the screen door inside it and scan the room cautiously, then step inside. Table covered with blue oilcloth, bench, another bench which is a wooden box built against the wall, sofa with metal frame and thin mattress, it folds out into a bed. That was where our mother used to be: all day she would lie unmoving, covered with a brown plaid blanket, her face bloodless and shrunken. We would talk in whispers, she looked so different and she didn’t hear if we spoke to her; but the next day she would be the same as she had always been. We came to have faith in her ability to recover, from anything; we ceased to take her illnesses seriously, they were only natural phases, like cocoons. When she died I was disappointed in her.

Nothing is out of place. Water drops fall on the roof, down from the trees.

They follow me inside. “Is this where you lived?” Joe asks. It’s unusual for him to ask me anything about myself: I can’t tell whether he’s pleased or discouraged. He goes over to the snowshoes on the wall and lifts one down, taking refuge in his hands.

Anna puts the groceries on the counter and wraps her arms around herself. “It must have been weird,” she says. “Cut off from everything like that.”

“No,” I say. To me it felt normal.

“Depends what you’re used to,” David says. “I think it’s neat.” But he’s not certain.

There are two other rooms and I open the doors quickly. A bed in each, shelves, clothes hanging on nails: jackets, raincoats, they were always left here. A grey hat, he had several of those. In the right-hand room is a map of the district, tacked to the wall. In the other are some pictures, watercolours, I recall now having painted them when I was twelve or thirteen; the fact that I’d forgotten about them is the only thing that makes me uneasy.

I go back to the livingroom. David has dropped his packsack on the floor and unfolded himself along the sofa. “Christ, am I wiped,” he says. “Somebody break me out a beer.” Anna brings him one and he pats her on the rear and says “That’s what I like, service.” She takes out cans for herself and us and we sit on the benches and drink it. Now that we’re no longer moving the cabin is chilly.

The right smell, cedar and wood stove and tar from the oakum stuffed between the logs to keep out the mice. I look up at the ceiling, the shelves: there’s a stack of papers beside the lamp, perhaps he was working on them just before whatever it was happened, before he left. There might be something for me, a note, a message, a will. I kept expecting that after my mother died, word of some kind, not money but an object, a token. For a while I went twice a day to the post office box which was the only one of my addresses I’d given them; but nothing arrived, maybe she didn’t have time.

No dirty dishes, no clothing strewn around, no evidence. It doesn’t feel like a house that’s been lived in all winter.

“What time is it?” I ask David. He holds up his watch: it’s almost five. It will be up to me to organize dinner, since in a way this is my place, they are my guests.

There’s kindling in the box behind the stove and a few pieces of white birch; the disease hasn’t yet hit this part of the country. I find the matches and kneel in front of the stove, I’ve almost forgotten how to do this but after three or four matches I get it lit.

I take the round enamelled bowl down from its hook and the big knife. They watch me: none of them asks me where I’m going, though Joe seems worried. Perhaps he’s been expecting me to have hysterics and he’s anxious because I’m not having any. “I’m going to the garden,” I say to reassure them. They know where that is, they could see it from the lake coming in.

Grass is growing up in the path and in front of the gate; the weeds are a month tall. Ordinarily I would spend a few hours pulling them out, but it isn’t worth it, we’ll be here only two days.

Frogs hop everywhere out of my way, they like it here; it’s close to the lake, damp, my canvas shoes are soaked through. I pick some of the leaf lettuce that hasn’t flowered and turned bitter, then I pull up an onion, sliding the loose brown outer skin off from the bulb, white and eye-like.

The garden’s been rearranged: before there were scarlet runners up one side of the fence. The blossoms were redder than anything else in the garden, the hummingbirds went into them, hovering, their wings a blur. The beans that were left too long would yellow after the first frost and split open. Inside were pebbles, purple-black and frightening. I knew that if I could get some of them and keep them for myself I would be all-powerful; but later when I was tall enough and could finally reach to pick them it didn’t work. Just as well, I think, as I had no idea what I would do with the power once I got it; if I’d turned out like the others with power I would have been evil.

I go to the carrot row and pull up a carrot but they haven’t been thinned properly, it’s forked and stubby. I cut off the onion leaves and the carrot top and throw them on the compost heap, then put the things in the bowl and start back towards the gate, adding up the time, growing time, in my head. In the middle of June he was here surely, it can’t be longer than that.

Anna is outside the fence, she’s come to look for me. “Where’s the can?” she says. “I’m about to burst.”

I take her to the beginning of the trail and point her along it.

“Are you okay?” she says.

“Sure,” I say; the question surprises me.

“I’m sorry he wasn’t here,” she says mournfully, gazing at me out of her round green eyes as though it’s her grief, her catastrophe.

“It’s all right,” I tell her, comforting her, “just keep going along the path and you’ll find it, though it’s quite a distance,” I laugh, “don’t get lost.”

I carry the bowl down to the dock and wash the vegetables in the lake. Below me in the water there’s a leech, the good kind with red dots on the back, undulating along like a streamer held at one end and shaken. The bad kind is mottled grey and yellow. It was my brother who made up these moral distinctions, at some point he became obsessed with them, he must have picked them up from the war. There had to be a good kind and a bad kind of everything.

I cook the hamburgers and we eat and I wash the dishes in the chipped dishpan, Anna drying; then it’s almost dark. I lift the bedding out from the wall bench and make up our bed, Anna can do theirs. He must have been sleeping in the main room, on the sofa.

They aren’t used to going to bed as soon as it’s dark though, and neither am I any more. I’m afraid they’ll be bored because there’s no T
.V.
or anything, I search for entertainments. A box of dominoes, a deck of cards, those were under the folded blankets. There are a lot of paperbacks on the shelves in the bedrooms, detective novels mostly, recreational reading. Beside them are the technical books on trees and the other reference books,
Edible Plants and Shoots, Tying the Dry Fly, The Common Mushrooms, Log Cabin Construction, A Field Guide to the Birds, Exploring Your Camera
, he believed that with the proper guide books you could do everything yourself; and his cache of serious books: the King James Bible which he said he enjoyed for its literary qualities, a complete Robert Burns, Boswell’s
Life
, Thompson’s
Seasons
, selections from Goldsmith and Cowper. He admired what he called the eighteenth century rationalists: he thought of them as men who had avoided the corruptions of the Industrial Revolution and learned the secret of the golden mean, the balanced life, he was sure they all practised organic farming. It astounded me to discover much later, in fact my husband told me, that Burns was an alcoholic, Cowper a madman, Doctor Johnson a manic-depressive and Goldsmith a pauper. There was something wrong with Thompson also; “escapist” was the term he used. After that I liked them better, they weren’t paragons any more.

“I’ll light the lamp,” I say, “and we can read.”

But David says “Naaa, why read when you can do that in the city?” He’s twiddling the dial on his transistor radio; he can’t pick up anything but static and a wail that might be music, wavering in and out, and a tiny insect voice whispering in French. “Shit,” he says, “I wish I could get the scores.” He means baseball, he’s a fan.

“We could play bridge,” I say, but no one wants to.

After a while David says “Well children, time to break out the grass.” He opens his packsack and gropes around inside, and Anna says “What a dumb place to put them, it’s the first place they’d look.”

“Up your ass,” David says, smiling at her, “that’s where they’d look first, they grab a good thing when they see one. Don’t worry, baby, I know what I’m doing.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” Anna says.

We go outside and down to the dock and sit on the damp wood, watching the sunset, smoking a little. The clouds to the west are yellow and grey, fading, and in the clear sky southeast of us the moon is rising.

“This is great,” David says, “it’s better than in the city. If we could only kick out the fascist pig Yanks and the capitalists this would be a neat country. But then, who would be left?”

“Oh Christ,” Anna says, “don’t get going on that.”

“How?” I say. “How would you kick them out?”

“Organize the beavers,” David says, “chew them to pieces, it’s the only way. This Yank stockbroker is going along Bay Street and the beavers ambush him, drop on him from a telephone pole, chomp chomp and it’s all over. You heard about the latest national flag? Nine beavers pissing on a frog.”

It’s old and shoddy but I laugh anyway. A little beer, a little pot, some jokes, a little political chitchat, the golden mean; we’re the new bourgeoisie, this might as well be a Rec Room. Still I’m glad they’re with me, I wouldn’t want to be here alone; at any moment the loss, vacancy, will overtake me, they ward it off.

“Do you realize,” David says, “that this country is founded on the bodies of dead animals? Dead fish, dead seals, and historically dead beavers, the beaver is to this country what the black man is to the United States. Not only that, in New York it’s now a dirty word, beaver. I think that’s very significant.” He sits up and glares at me through the semi-darkness.

“We aren’t your students,” Anna says, “lie down.” His head rests in her lap, she’s stroking his forehead, I can see her hand moving back and forth. They’ve been married nine years, Anna told me, they must have got married about the same time I did; but she’s older than I am. They must have some special method, formula, some knowledge I missed out on; or maybe he was the wrong person. I thought it would happen without my doing anything about it, I’d turn into part of a couple, two people linked together and balancing each other, like the wooden man and woman in the barometer house at Paul’s. It was good at first but he changed after I married him, he married me, we committed that paper act. I still don’t see why signing a name should make any difference but he began to expect things, he wanted to be pleased. We should have kept sleeping together and left it at that.