Surface Rights

by Melissa Hardy

  “Who was that total perv?”

  “I have no idea.” Verna slipped on the bathrobe and tied the sash around her waist. It had never occurred to her that she and Romy might not be perfectly safe in a house five kilometres from the nearest other human habitation, surrounded by dense northern Ontario woods … or even that they might not be alone. The realization that they were not was not a comforting one. “What did he look like?”

  “I don’t know. Flannel shirt. Baseball cap. This gingery beard.”

  “Gingery? You mean red?”

  “Gingery — kind of an orange red.”

  “How old was he?”

  “How should I know? Old. Not as old as you, but old.” She shivered. “He gave me the willies!”

  “Yeah, well …” Me, too, thought Verna.

  They looked on with relief as Winonah rolled from her car and trundled across the lawn in their direction. Verna stepped off the dock onto the lawn. “Are we glad to see you!” she told the round little woman.

  Winonah looked wary. “Why?”

  “We saw a strange man in the bush!” Romy exclaimed breathlessly.

  Winonah snorted. “Welcome to my life!”

  “No, really! We did! Over there! Through these binoculars” She pointed towards the lake’s opposite shore. “And Auntie Verna was naked!”

  Verna flushed. “I was skinny-dipping, okay. I didn’t know there was a guy in the woods.”

  “Ack! Ack! Ahhhh-ack!”

  Winonah glanced at Jude. “What’s with him? Trying to cough up a kidney?”

  “Granddaughter!” A shrill caw from the Impala. “Granddaughter! Come over here and help me out!” The Impala’s passenger side door creaked open and a wooden walking stick emerged from it and waved in the air like the rattle of an eastern Massasauga.

  “It’s my no’okomiss,” Winonah explained. “Just a minute! I’m coming!” Crossing around the front of the car to the passenger’s side, she pried the walking stick away from its brandisher, leaned it against the side of the car, then bent down. A scuffle ensued, at the end of which she resurfaced with a tiny wizened nut of an old woman — no more than four feet ten inches tall — with patchy white hair and a pronounced dowager’s hump. The crone was clad in a faded calico duster held together with two buttons and a series of safety pins — its colour was indeterminate — grey or toast or mauve. Over this she wore a stretched-out-of-shape formerly yellow cardigan of the sort affected by Mr. Rogers. She looked like a cantankerous apple doll. Grabbing the walking stick from Winonah, she stumped bow-legged up to Verna and stared fixedly up at her with eyes as bright and as fierce as a ferret. “Uh?” she grunted.

  Verna was at a loss as to how to respond. “Uh … hello,” she stammered. “Winonah’s granny … we’ve heard a lot about you. I’m Verna Macoun.”

  “I know who you are,” grumbled the old woman, who then fixed her beady gaze upon Romy. “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “Romy,” the girl replied, sliding behind Verna as if for protection. “She looks like a really scary gnome,” she whispered to Verna.

  “Shush!” Verna hissed back.

  “These two just saw a man in the bush,” Winonah told Granny. She spoke slowly and loudly. Apparently Granny was deaf.

  “Eh?” The old woman cocked her head.

  “A-man-in-the-bush,” Winonah repeated.

  Granny scowled, shook her head. “That’s no good. Man in the bush. What kind of man? White or red?”

  “White,” replied Romy.

  “That’s bad,” said Granny. “White man in the bush. What was he up to? Nothing good, probably. Doesn’t look good. Not good at all. Give me a smoke, Granddaughter.”

  Winonah extracted a cigarette from the unmarked pack in her pocket and handed it to Granny along with a Zippo.

  “Can I have one, too?” Romy asked.

  “Romy!” Verna looked daggers at her niece. To no avail.

  “Please!” Romy begged. “I want to try a butt-legged cigarette.”

  Winonah shrugged. She removed two cigarettes from the pack and handed one to Romy. “Your ancestors gave our people blankets infected with smallpox,” she told Romy. “We gave you tobacco.” Granny passed the lighter to Romy who lit her cigarette, then passed it to Winonah.

  “What did this white man look like?” Granny asked, puffing away at her cigarette like the little engine that could.

  “He was wearing a flannel shirt.” Romy remembered. “And a baseball cap.”

  “Great,” said Winonah. “You’ve just described every man within a five-hundred kilometre radius of here. How old was he?”

  “Old,” replied Romy. “Maybe forty.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He had a beard. Kind of a reddish colour.”

  “A red beard,” said Granny. “Not good news. Means he has a temper. A bad temper. I knew a priest had a red beard. He used to bugger all the little boys at school.”

  “Ooh!” Romy breathed.

  “Nothing else?” Winonah asked.

  Romy shook her head. “It was like a minute and then he was gone.”

  “Probably just some hoser wandering through,” concluded Winonah. “There’s some that live in the bush all year round. Hermits, like.”

  “Or a windigo. Or a blood stopper. Or a bear walker,” said Granny.

  Romy tugged at Verna’s bathrobe. “What’s a windigo? What’s a bear walker?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Granny assured her. “It would scare the shit out of you. You would never go outside again.”

  Lionel’s occasional woolly manifestation may have ceased to unnerve Verna; not so the flesh-and-blood presence of a strange man at the lake’s shore. Suddenly it seemed more imperative than ever to keep the formidable Winonah close at hand even if it meant inventing tasks for the handywoman to do. Accordingly she marshalled her forces. “Say, Winonah, now that you’re here, I mean, I noticed that the larch outside Dad’s window needs cutting back. And wouldn’t it be a good idea to caulk the windows and doorsills?”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Winonah told her. “Today Granny and I are going to return my brother’s ashes to Mother Earth so that his spirit can begin its journey to the Sky World.” She sounded oddly formal.

  Finally, thought Verna, relieved and, at the same time, slightly saddened by the thought of Lionel wending his way to some Happy Hunting Ground, never to be seen again. She had grown to enjoy their little brushes and certainly he had given her some good advice. “You’ve come to pick up Lionel’s cremains, then?”

  “Shhh!” Granny hissed, putting a bony finger to her lips and wagging her head. “Don’t say his name, Verna. If you say his name, he might think you want him to stay. He’s been around too long as it is.”

  “Since the Spring Pow Wow. Two months,” Winonah confirmed this. “Way too long.”

  “Usually, it’s ten days, eh?” Granny said. “For our people. But the stupid white undertaker guy in Beverley, he made a mistake.”

  “Two mistakes,” Winonah clarified.

  “Two mistakes,” Granny agreed. “First mistake is he goes ahead and cremates him without even asking us.”

  “Ojibway, we bury our dead,” explained Winonah. “Not burn them in a big old oven.”

  “Second mistake is he loses him,” Granny continued. “The cremains, that is. Only turned up over the weekend. In some shed out back.”

  “Just a minute.” Romy was incredulous. “The undertaker lost Lionel’s cremains?”

  “Shhh!” Granny warned her. “No names!”

  “If he’s even in that box,” said Winonah. “And not somebody else they’re pawning off on us.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure it’s him,” Verna said.

  Winonah looked at her strangely.

  “What?” Verna asked.

  Winonah frowned. “We need to borrow your dad’s canoe.”

  Verna was puzzled. “Sure, but why?”

  “So we can get to the glen.”

  “Why
do you want to get to the glen?”

  “That’s where we’re scattering his ashes.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Verna. “You’re talking about our glen? The one on the other side of the lake?”

  “I’m talking about the glen that was an old Ojibway burial ground a long, long time before your grandfather came here,” Winonah reminded her sternly. “Yes. I’m talking about our glen.”

  “Gee!” exclaimed Verna, her mind in sudden, headlong freefall. The stranger had been on the southern shore of the lake, right where they would have to land to reach the grove. Maybe splitting up wasn’t such a great idea. “I have an idea!” She hadn’t, but she felt one coming on. “Wait! Wait!” She held up her hand, squeezed her eyes closed, and furrowed her forehead, forcing the thought front and centre. “Here it comes! I’ve got it! Why don’t we make an outing of it? All go together. Kill three birds with one stone? I mean, we’ve got to scatter Dad and Fern’s ashes sometime. Why not today?”

  “Yay!” cried Romy.

  Winonah was less than enthusiastic. “Not a good idea,” she warned. “A bad idea.” To her way of thinking, the scattering of Lionel’s ashes should be a private affair with only her and her grandmother present. There were aspects of the ceremony that Romy and Verna would not understand, that they might possibly mock afterwards, when they were alone together — the speeches that would have to be made so that Lionel’s spirit might be released from its duties on earth and given sanction to move on to the Sky World, the burning of tobacco, the invocation of the four directions on the medicine wheel. The thought that they might mock this set her teeth on edge.

  But Romy was not to be deterred. “Come on!” she cajoled the handywoman. “It’ll be fun.”

  In the boathouse they found a cottonwood canoe slung from the ceiling and a small skiff — a flat-bottomed rowboat with a pointed bow and a transom stern — bobbing sluggishly in one of the two slips. Donald had steadfastly refused to own any watercraft equipped with an outboard motor. He didn’t like fiddling with machinery (he wasn’t good at it), but mostly it was the noise — like a bone saw jangling through cartilage and gristle he said. And, in truth, the lake was not so big that getting from one end of it to the other was arduous.

  Verna had forgotten about the boathouse. She had forgotten how it smelled — of water as thick as soup and sodden pilings shaggy with rot. She had forgotten the way it sounded — creaky and reverberant with the reflected sound of water lapping against the pilings and the skiff’s straight sides. She had even forgotten the way the air bottled up inside of it felt — moist and sticky with cobweb that draped down from the ceiling beams to graze her as she passed below, to briefly cling to arm and face — the boathouse was an arthropod paradise, teeming with expectant spiders. Best not to mention that to Romy, Verna thought. She was bound to be terrified of spiders. What Verna did recall was how spooked she and Fern had been of the boathouse when they were younger, scared to go into it on their own, but not because of spiders. No. They had been convinced that some monster — some thing of death by drowning — lurked in the murky water below the jumbled floor. Mishepishu. That was its Ojibway name — the unpredictable one, the one who pulls boaters and swimmers to their deaths, the hidden form beneath the ice. Looking around her now, she thought that perhaps they had been right, that it had been some thing of death by drowning that had come in the night to take Fern that bleak October four years earlier; that even now was biding its time. She repressed a shudder. Don’t be silly, she told herself. It’s an old, smelly boathouse. End of story.

  While Granny sat in the old Muskoka chair at the end of the dock, chain-smoking and muttering incantations as she crumbled loose tobacco into the lake — offerings to the mishepishu and whatever other manitous might inhabit its depths — Winonah, in some dudgeon, prepared for the short journey across the lake to the glen. First she hauled up the boathouse door. Then she took down the canoe, and, with Verna’s help, lowered it into the second slip. Next, she removed a paddle from its hook on the wall and put it, along with the sturdy plastic LCBO bag containing not only Lionel’s cremains, but Fern’s and Donald’s, as well, in the canoe’s hull. “Are you ready?” she asked Romy and Verna. She sounded grumpy. She was grumpy. Not only had she not wanted the white women’s company in the first place, she and Granny had ended up having to wait for an hour while Verna bathed and Romy agonized over what to wear to what was, after all, the next best thing to her own mother’s funeral. She finally settled on a baggy black dress that made her look that much more ill. And that made Winonah angry. It exasperated her. Why in a world of trouble someone would not eat seemed perverse to her, fundamentally ungrateful. “Coming?” she repeated fiercely.

  Romy, chewing hungrily on her middle finger, eyed with trepidation the canoe, twenty feet long with a shallow arched hull, a rockered bottom, and a moderate degree of tumblehome. “We’re not going in that, are we?”

  “You have a better idea?” Winonah growled.

  Romy appealed to Verna. “It looks tippy. Don’t you think it looks tippy?”

  “It’s a canoe,” said Verna. “That’s how canoes look. And it’s not just any canoe. It’s the canoe my grandfather — your great-grandfather — paddled all over this part of north Ontario when he was a surveyor for the Crown.”

  “So it’s not only tippy,” said Romy, “it’s old. Really old.”

  “Look, it wasn’t my idea to make this a party,” Winonah intervened. “If you don’t want to go in the canoe, fine. Go some other time. Walk. It’s no skin off my nose.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with this canoe,” Verna attempted to reassure Romy. “Dad had it restored a few years ago. I remember him talking about it. Some place up on Lake Temagami.”

  “It’s too small,” Romy objected.

  “Don’t be silly,” Verna told her. “It used to hold all Granddad’s gear.” Her father had kept all of George’s instruments — his Dollond’s sextant with the ten-inch radius, his artificial horizon, his solar compass, his micrometre and aneroid barometers, his brasses … beautiful things, really. She wondered how much they would fetch on eBay. “He could get his camping equipment into it along with three months’ worth of provisions. It’ll sit four easy with room for the dog.”

  “The dog?” Romy asked.

  Winonah had had enough. “Come on, Granny. Let’s get going.”

  “No, wait,” Verna implored her. She turned to Romy. “If you don’t want to come, you can stay here. I can scatter Fern’s ashes.”

  “But I do want to come! I do! I just don’t want to go in a canoe. Can’t we go in that rowboat thing?” She pointed to the skiff.

  “Clang! Clang! Choo-choo! All aboard!” Granny announced, imitating, Verna could only imagine, a railroad conductor. “Woo! Woo! This train’s leaving the station, eh? All aboard!”

  Winonah helped Granny into the canoe, steadied it while the dog clambered in, then climbed in herself. Picking up the paddle, and, without a backwards glance, she brought its blade forward along the side of the canoe, dipped it into the water, and drew it straight back, propelling the canoe out of the boathouse and into open water.

  “Great!” Verna was exasperated. “Now we have to use the skiff.”

  “The skiff! Hooray! But you’ll have to row, Auntie Verna. I’m feeling kind of lightheaded or something.”

  At some point the skiff sprang a leak. Unfortunately for Verna and Romy, they did not discover this until they were in the middle of the lake. Verna because she was still fuming — paddling the skiff solo was far more work than paddling the canoe in concert with Winonah would have been; only half way and already her shoulders and upper back had started to ache; her hands, too, unaccustomed to gripping oars;. As for Romy, she wiggled and squirmed and nattered nervously on and on about this and that: “Oh, it’s so beautiful here, Auntie Verna! What would you call that colour that the lake is? I would call it ‘midnight blue.’ Do you see the clouds reflected in the water? What kind of clouds are those?
Are those nimbus clouds or cumulus clouds? Auntie Verna! Is that a dragonfly? Why do they call it a dragonfly? It doesn’t look like a dragon.” When she did pause to catch her breath and glance at the bottom of the boat, she gasped with horror. “Omigod, Auntie Verna! What is that?”

  Verna, disgruntled, followed her gaze. Water was pooling at the bottom of the boat. “What? What do you think it is? It’s water.”

  “I know it’s water. Do you think I’m an idiot?” (Well, yes, thought Verna unkindly.) “What I want to know is what’s it doing on the bottom of the boat?”

  “There must be a leak. Don’t worry. Boats leak. It’ll be fine.”

  “What if it isn’t fine?” Romy demanded. “What if the boat sinks?”

  “It’s not going to sink.”

  “But what if it does?”

  Honestly, Verna thought. “Romy! It’s only a little water.”

  “Oh, yeah? It’s more now.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Yes, it is. Look!” And she pointed.

  She was right. The bottom of the skiff was now covered with water an inch deep. Verna could feel it start to seep through the canvas of her sneakers. Don’t overreact, she told herself. Go into downplay mode. Otherwise Romy will go ballistic. She’s teetering on the edge as it is. She’s always teetering on the edge. What is wrong with her, anyway? Doesn’t she realize that youth is everything, that she’s obsessing away the years that matter? That, in the end, this is what you’re left with: only this. For example: me. I am left. And it’s not bloody much, not at all. “Remember Archimedes’ principle of buoyancy.” A clumsy attempt to dampen the girl’s evidently escalating panic — one which turned out to be entirely unsuccessful.

  “What?” Romy made a horrible creaking noise.

  “‘A body immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid.’ You know, Romy. The principle of buoyancy. Archimedes.”

  “Archie who?”

  “Oh, Jesus, never mind! Look, all I’m saying is that, as long as we don’t take on too much water, we’ll stay afloat long enough to get to shore. Worst comes to worst, we come back in the canoe. Or walk.”