Surface Rights

by Melissa Hardy

  A screened-in porch, fully half the cottage’s frontage in length, peered out towards the lake through hooded, mesh eyes. The trim was white — the porch, the windows, the lintels. The doors and shutters had been painted a dark green. The shutters on those windows facing the water were always closed against the wind, which boiled up from the cauldron of the lake with some fury during storms, while the remainder of the windows, those that looked out over the more quiescent forest, remained unshuttered throughout the winter. In front of the cottage extended a lawn of sorts, ending in a semi-circular cobble beach. Beyond the cottage lay the two-slip boathouse and next to that a dock set on cribs — logs spiked together into crude boxes into which large rocks had been dumped. These gave the foundation weight and stability and made it less susceptible to manipulation by ice over winter. At the very end of the dock was a weather-beaten Muskoka chair turned toward the south; her father would sit out there in the evening, using battered binoculars to watch loons feed on ciscoes or moose munch salty water lilies.

  Enough space had been cleared on the near side of the cottage to park up to four vehicles. Verna pulled up next to the LeSabre, got out, and opened the back door for Jude, who promptly bolted.

  “No! Shit! Wait! Jude! Jude!” she screamed. But it was too late. The Lab flung himself into the lake with abandon and paddled joyfully about, gulping water.

  Carmen remained in her car with the window rolled down. She laughed uproariously — “Ha! Ha!” — and smacked the outside of the car door with her hand.

  “Damn it all!” Verna cried. “Shit! Now I have to spend the night with a wet dog!”

  “There are worse things to spend the night with than a wet dog,” Carmen pointed out, then, “Well, I’m out of here.”

  Verna remembered her manners. “Thanks, Carmen. For showing me the way and all. About the other … I’ll be in touch.”

  “Hey! No problema,” Carmen assured her. “But remember what I said, Verna. Give it some time. Never make a hasty decision, particularly when it comes to real estate. That’s my philosophy and I’ve been in this business for thirty years.” With that she threw her car into reverse and executed a wide turn.

  “Thanks again!” Verna watched as the Buick trundled down the laneway and out of sight. She continued to stare at the gap in the forest into which the car had disappeared, postponing that moment when she would have to turn around and climb the stairs to the porch, and, all by herself now, only her, negotiate this mausoleum of memories, this repository of her past. There’s no help for it, Verna, she told herself. No one is going to rescue you. No one is going to do it for you. Because there is no one. Just you. And you’ve got to go in. Otherwise, what was the point of coming all this way? She closed her eyes and first summoned, then organized her meagre ration of resolve. She turned around and, steeling herself, climbed the four stone steps that led from the parking area to the patch of lawn, then up the couple of steps leading to the door of the screened-in porch, her heart thudding dully and her throat constricted. She took as deep a breath as she could manage, then opened the door and stepped inside.

  The porch was as she remembered, though more confined, darker, and damper. It gave off an acrid smell that reminded her of hummus. The furnishings were the same sagging wicker furniture that had always been there — the Bar Harbor Triple Cross set and the two Heywood rockers, the colour of wet wood. Clay pots in which the spines of long-dead ferns languished. On her way to the front door she accidentally kicked over an old Eight O’Clock coffee tin filled with cigarette butts and rusty, standing water — that must have dated to Fern’s tenure of the cottage, she thought, stepping around the mess. Between bouts of colon-cleansing and various gradations of vegetarianism, Fern had chain-smoked, as if working herself up to the next ordeal of healthy living. She had been very particular when it came to brands, Verna remembered — she made a point of smoking only Virginia Slims, Ultra Lights — “You’ve come a long way, baby!” Its marketing evidently spoke to her, assuring her that she was making progress, that things were going well. Verna had never smoked. She despised smokers as weak. She drank instead. “Ne quid nimis,” their father had always enjoined. “‘All things in moderation’,” but neither Fern nor Verna had ever proven capable of much restraint.

  Verna fished in her pocket for the ring of keys she had taken that morning from the rack beside the door to the breezeway of the Indian Crescent house. With unsteady hands, she tried first one, then another, but it was the third key that slid easily into the keyhole. “Three’s the charm!” That’s what Donald would have said. He had had a saying for everything. It had been both endearing and irritating. Damn him, she thought, as tears once again picked at her eyes.

  Verna turned the key and pushed open the door. Wood swollen with damp, it stuck a little. She peered in. The sun had yet to sink, but its slanting rays could not penetrate shutters drawn tight against the rigors of the past winter. It was dark and smelled musty, close, but alive somehow, as though the house were not a concoction of stick and stone and mud, but some large, hibernating creature curled in on itself. This was not the first time such a notion had occurred to her. As a child entering the closed-up house for the first time after the long winter, she remembered understanding somehow that it was a kind of inchoate being — asleep, but on the verge of waking. The idea had been terrifying, but also compelling. To think such things had been irresistible to Verna; indeed, she could not not think them. “Verna is a fanciful child,” her grandmother had said once — the twins had just turned six when Frieda, lightly dusted with confectioner’s sugar, slipped first into a diabetic coma and then out some existential back door to what was referred to in the Macoun family as, “The Other Side.” Although Verna could barely assemble enough fragments of memory to compose an image of the old woman in her mind, she could remember this observation on her part, which Frieda had made in the same way she might have said, “Verna is a tiresome child,” or, “she has always been so difficult.” (On the subject of Fern, Frieda had this to say: “Fern is such a sunny child,” which led Verna to conclude that she herself was not so sunny and that this was not a good thing.)

  Verna fumbled for the light switch, relieved to see the light come on. She had thought far enough ahead to get the electricity turned back on before making the trip. Orange candle-shaped bulbs screwed into bracket fixtures wobbled on, bathing the wide hall that bisected the house with nervous, yellow light. She glanced to her right — to the living room, pine-panelled, with a big window that looked out over the lake when it was not shuttered up. A card table and chairs had been pulled up underneath the window, but the focal point of the room was an imposing river-stone fireplace that extended all the way from the pegged oak floor to the wood-lined ceiling. Huddled before its soot-stained hearth were a lumpy sofa and two armchairs slip-covered in dark green corduroy, the ribbed fabric worn shiny in spots by the assorted rumps of three generations of Macouns. She crossed to the sofa and fingered the corner of a black, loden green-and-navy-blue afghan — just one of the many fruits of Frieda’s lifelong love affair with the crochet hook. Both the cottage and the Indian Crescent house were littered with afghans, tea cozies, wash cloths, bizarre holiday decorations, and pot holders worked in quad rosettes and six-pointed stars and granny stitch in Red Heart acrylic yarn purchased at Woolworth’s and favoured for its washability; its texture — something like that of cotton candy — had always set Verna’s teeth on edge. Opposite the window was the door to what they had always called “the study,” first George’s, then Donald’s, and directly over that door’s lintel, a woebegone-looking, moth-eaten moose head. Someone at the Bureau of Mines had shot the moose while on a hunting trip in the Soo and had its head mounted. When his wife, a robust vegetarian, refused to have it in her house, he gave it to George. The moose’s antlers measured an impressive sixty inches across. George had figured the moose’s age to have been between ten and twelve years old when he took the bullet. She and Fern had named it Bullwinkle, of course
, after the cartoon character.

  At the sight of Bullwinkle, a light went on in Verna’s head. Dad’s Scotch, she remembered. Macallan Highland single malt. His favourite; George’s too, father and son. Verna checked her wristwatch — nearly six o’clock. The cocktail hour had been underway for close to an hour. What was she waiting for? As it was, she was going to have to play catch-up. She crossed to the study, switched on the light, and quickly scanned the small room: floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with moldering books and old magazines — decades of dog-eared copies of National Geographic and Life and Maclean’s and boxes of maps folded and stacked; the big oak desk piled high with papers; and, there, right in its accustomed position on the credenza, the Bohemian lead crystal decanter, coated with dust and flanked by two wide-bowled, tulip-lipped Scotch glasses. From within its fortress of crystal the single malt winked a golden eye at her. “Howdy!” it said in a voice that only Verna could hear.

  She crossed to the credenza and let her fingers fall lightly onto the decanter’s stopper. How Donald had sung the praises of his father’s Scotch. Its sweetness and its complex flavour, how it had matured in carefully selected, hand-crafted oak casks, but casks with a difference, casks that had held rich, rare sherries for at least three years before being shipped from Spain to Macallan’s Speyside distillery in Scotland. “It’s the interaction between spirit and wood that does it,” Donald had told the twins, swirling his glass and sniffing the whisky, adding a few drops of water, then sniffing it again. He had made a ceremony out of everything.

  Tears leaked from Verna’s eyes. Ridiculous, she chided herself. It’s just bloody Scotch. Bloody, expensive Scotch. She dabbed at her eyes with a wad of tissues, took a glass, and gave it a perfunctory wipe on the tail of her Black Watch flannel shirt. She poured herself two fingers of the whisky and wandered back through the living room and into the shadowy hall, where she paused to lean against the varnished wainscotting and hold the glass to the wobbly light — the Scotch glimmered a rich mahogany. She took a sip and rolled it around in her mouth like a marble, coating it. Then another.

  Now this, she thought, eyeing it, is a proper drink. A man’s drink. Verna was proud that she drank like a man and not like a girl, which was to say, not like Fern. Fern had drunk (and never hesitated to mix) blush Zinfandels and strawberry wine and Jell-O shooters and B-52s and mini Baileys and Peach Schnapps and pails of Welch’s grape juice mixed with vodka. Sweet drinks that made her giddy, then hurl. She had been one of those girls who became one of those women who could be counted on to throw up and/or faint at the slightest provocation — an excitable woman with unstable equilibrium. Verna shook her head. What a child, she thought. Never taking the probable consequences of her actions into account. Always surprised by completely predictable disasters.

  She peered into the glass. No more Scotch. How did that happen? Never mind, she consoled herself. Plenty where that came from. Well, not plenty, but some.

  She checked her wristwatch. It was six o’clock.

  Verna returned to the study and poured herself another two fingers. Maybe I should add some water, she thought. That’s what Dad always did. Something about releasing the flavors, the aromas …

  She headed for the kitchen. The board-and-batten walls painted a butter cream, the floor of buckled linoleum a counterpane of white and brick red squares, the bead-board cabinets with water-glass cabinet door inserts, and the big, roughly finished pine trestle table, a new refrigerator since she had last been at the cottage and maybe a new stove … otherwise pretty much as she remembered. Right down to the fire-engine-red wall-mounted rotary telephone by the back door. Verna crossed over to the old farmhouse sink and turned the tap. The faucet coughed dryly and emitted a slender drool of rusty water. Damn, she realized. The water’s shut off. Of course, it’s shut off. Dad always shut it off at the end of the season. She would have to turn it back on. But how? And where was the valve, anyway? And how would she recognize it if she saw it? Some time before, her father had given her sketchy instructions on how to open the cottage in the event of his demise — instructions that might possibly have included the shutting off and turning on of water, that she did not now recall. That and a scrap of paper on which he had written the name and phone number of the Ojibway handyman from the nearby reserve — Lionel Madahbee. She was to contract with him to affect any needed repairs. “You keep an eye on Lionel,” her father had warned her. “He’s melancholy.”

  Melancholy? What had he meant by that?

  Turning on the water is a job for Lionel, she decided.

  Woof! Woof!

  Verna jumped, slopping Scotch onto her jeans.

  Woof!

  “Jude!” Verna gasped. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! What a start you gave me! Where are you?”

  Woof!

  The sound came from out back.

  Verna set the remains of her drink on the counter, crossed to the door to the back porch, and unlocked it. Jude hurled himself through the aperture, planted all four paws on the floor, and shook, beginning with his head and ears and vibrating all the way down to the tip of his black tail. Muddy water splattered everywhere.

  “Jude!” Verna backed up in an unsuccessful attempt to stay dry.

  Jude barked joyously and bounded off toward the hall. He galloped up the stairs, still barking.

  “Yuck!” Turning, Verna opened one drawer, then another, looking for a tea towel to mop up the water and mud. Upstairs she could hear Jude running up and down the hallway. What in hell is he doing? Then she realized what he was doing. He was looking for Donald.

  Shit.

  Verna slammed her eyes shut and squeezed back the tears. “Enough with the waterworks!” she scolded herself. Locating a tea towel she wiped first herself, then the floor. Jude continued to tear up and down the upstairs hall, yelping.

  “Jude! Hey, Jude! Come down! He’s not there, Jude! He’s in the car!” Then, when there was no response, “Jude! Suppertime! Kibble! Chow! Come on, now. You know you love it!”

  The sound of claws clicking down the stairs. Jude stood in the door to the kitchen, his black fur shining with lake water. He looked disappointed, but hopeful.

  “Let’s go out to the car and bring your food in,” she told him. “And Sister’s vodka.”

  Did I really just refer to myself as the dog’s sister? She thought. Because that’s what Donald had always done. “Tell Sister it’s time for school.” “Tell Sister she has to wear socks.”

  She went onto the back porch and past the woodpile to the Volvo. Opening the trunk, she retrieved Jude’s dishes and the bag of Iams. It was then that she noticed the two big bottles of water tucked into the trunk’s right-hand back corner, part of what looked to be a sort of emergency road kit that Donald had assembled — a couple of rolled-up Hudson’s Bay blankets, assorted bungee cords, a ball of string, a sheathed buck knife, jumper cables, flares, and a big red Canadian Tire flashlight. She shook her head. Semper paratus, she thought, removing the bottles of water from the car and setting them on the ground. Still, it means I don’t have to wait until Lionel comes to have water. This should do us until morning, maybe longer.

  She grabbed the bag of dog food and one of the containers of water and carried them into the house. She came back for Jude’s dishes, which she set on the floor in the kitchen. She poured water from the container into one and kibble from the bag into the other.

  “Oh, boy,” she said. “Dog food again!” That’s what Donald had always said when he fed his various dogs. “Jude!” she objected. “You’re drooling on my foot!”

  Jude tore into his food while Verna returned to the car and brought back the evening’s necessities — her overnight bag, the other container of water, the bag of ice, a bottle of Russian Prince, and one of diet tonic water.

  She removed two empty ice trays from the freezer — the old-fashioned tin kind with the lever — setting them on the counter, then thrust the bag of ice into the freezer along with the bottle of vodka. “Remind me to mak
e ice in the morning,” she told Jude, who was noisily lapping up water from his bowl. She put the bottle of diet tonic in the refrigerator, went to the study, and retrieved the decanter, which was still more or less full. More or less. She poured herself another drink and splashed some water from the bottle into it.

  Between sips and trailed by Jude, she made trips to the car. First to get her suitcase, next the grocery bag of food, and the other bottle of Russian Prince. Then a book of crossword puzzles and the previous Saturday’s Globe and Mail, followed by the dog’s leash, a bag of rawhide strips and another of pigs’ ears. Finally the three cardboard boxes that had ridden shotgun on the passenger seat of the Volvo — the remains. No. The cre-mains. The boxes containing her father and sister’s ashes she brought into the kitchen and set on the counter. Bob’s she placed on the back porch next to the woodpile.

  “Remember Bob?” she asked Jude. “Fussy, old, self-satisfied, full-of-himself Bob? Oh, you know — the reason I could never have a dog, the one who didn’t like dogs. You, for example. The one who didn’t like you.”

  Jude’s face sagged.

  “Oh, don’t look so worried,” Verna reassured him. “He didn’t like me, either. Toward the end. No, before that. Of course, I didn’t like him much, either. Actually, if you want to know the truth, I hated him. Maybe it’ll rain on you,” she told Bob’s ashes. “Maybe a raccoon will come to scatter your ashes. Maybe a bear will come along and paw your box to smithereens. Maybe a fox will see you and try to drag you to its hole. Good luck with that, you two-timing bastard!”

  Rummaging about in the bag of groceries she retrieved a microwaveable President’s Choice chicken curry and peeled back its lid — dinner. She set it on the counter next to Fern and Donald’s ashes.

  It was then that she noticed her drink was gone. “That won’t do!” she informed Jude and poured herself another, bigger this time. “I never did like Scotch,” she said. “It always seemed so complicated, so rule-bound. Slow down, take your time, savour it. As if to do otherwise would be to blaspheme. As if it were some sort of religion with, you know, followers. No. Not a religion. A cult. That’s what it is. A cult.”