Surface Rights

by Melissa Hardy

  “So, are you ready to meet your sisters?” she asked gently.

  He gulped and looked in the direction of the house. His face was drawn; he looked tired. Well, he did drive all night to get here. “I guess,” he said, sounding unsure.

  “Come on then,” she said, releasing Jude’s collar. Taking her nephew by the elbow, she steered him toward the cottage.

  Several hours later Verna, Winonah, Granny, and the cartons containing the gritty quintessence of sister, father, mother, and brother skimmed across the blue face of the lake toward its southern shore. Winonah and Granny had arrived at the cottage shortly after ten o’clock. After a hearty breakfast of blueberry-syrup-drenched Eggos and sausage, purchased by Verna at the grocery store in Beverley the day before, they announced their intention to make another stab at launching Lionel on his path to the Sky World, and, once again, Verna and Fern’s children — “the kids,” as Fern used to refer to them — had opted to join them.

  “The kids” had spent the better part of the past several hours in a huddle on the porch, speaking in hushed tones. Verna had thought it best to leave them to it; actually, she had gotten the distinct impression that Tai’s arrival had closed some inner circle, leaving her on the outside looking in. And looked in she had — every half hour or so to see if Paisley would like more coffee or if Romy was warm enough or if Tai could use a lie-down after his long drive. And every time the door creaked open and she stuck her head out, three heads swivelled in her direction and an awkward, sudden silence descended upon the group. Why was that? What were they talking about that they felt they must stop when she was within hearing? Were they talking about her? Blaming her? But no, she thought. Stop being so paranoid. They are probably just being sad together. Sad and happy — sad because of what they had lost — a mother, a family — but happy to be reunited and wary at letting others see this, particularly unsympathetic others, as she had certainly been. Had been to her shame, she realized now. She saw something else too. When she looked at them, together like this, Fern looked back. This, despite the fact that each of them individually resembled their fathers more than they did their mother. It was unsettling and wonderful all at the same time.

  The kids had decided to walk to the glen, accompanied by Jude — this was driven by Romy’s reluctance to commit herself to any more deeps. “I am never setting foot in a boat again.”

  Verna was concerned that the walk, given that there was no real path, might be too much for Romy, but she maintained that she would be fine, just fine. She was in excellent shape; didn’t they know that she worked out constantly? Fortunately, her widow’s weeds were still damp from her ducking the day before, so they would not have to contend with attempts to drag yards of black crinkle cloth through deadfall and bramble. The plan was to make their way along the west shore of the lake until they reached its southernmost point. There they would meet up with Verna, Winonah, and Granny and together, make the short trip into the bush and to the glen. The kids had set out about twenty minutes before the canoeists, since it took longer to reach the far shore by land than water and were just clawing their way out of a scramble of creeping juniper and sand cherry, bedraggled and covered with burrs, when Winonah ran the canoe up on shore and climbed out onto the rock barren dotted with lakeside daisies and Indian paintbrush that occupied the lake’s southernmost point.

  “Jeez!” Romy complained, swatting randomly. “What’s with these horrible flies? They’re eating me alive!”

  “They’re pickin’ at your bones!” cried Granny gleefully.

  “Sorry, guys,” Verna apologized, standing up in the canoe and handing Winonah the LCBO bag containing the three cartons of cremains. She toe-heeled her way to the bow and stepped out onto the rock barren. “I forgot there was a big hatch last night. I should have told you to splash some vinegar on your faces before going out.” That was what Donald had always suggested when she and Fern had complained about flies. It was a fix the efficacy of which he had remained utterly convinced his entire life; that was what he did and he swore by it. She, of course, had never done it, would have rather died than do it. Now, it struck her as possibly sensible.

  But not Romy. “Sure!” she scoffed. “Next you’ll be suggesting that we depilate with battery acid!” She turned to Paisley. “Do lesbians depilate?”

  “Some do. Some don’t,” replied Paisley. “I don’t.”

  “Ooh!” Romy grimaced. “Yuck.”

  “Look who’s talking!” Paisley snorted. “I could braid your facial hair!”

  “Excess body and facial hair — that’s caused by the anorexia,” Tai explained shyly. He seemed both pleased and grateful that this esoteric medical information was his to impart. “It’s the body’s attempt to keep warm.” Tai had a kind of sweet earnestness that reminded Verna of his father, poor, limp, clammy-handed Jag Patel. How wistful he had been. How hopeless a romantic. Well, actually more of a helpless romantic, unable, finally, to withstand the pressure placed upon him by his family to abandon Fern and live as they would have him. What might have happened had they not intervened? What kind of a life might they have had together? But Fern was inconstant by nature, headlong and random. Surely she would have abandoned Jag, given time. Just as she had Ben.

  But was that true? Had Fern left Ben or the other way around?

  Verna had always assumed that her sister had engineered the failure of her various unions, sprung herself from the traps she herself had set. On the other hand, she had always thought that Fern left Paul, when, according to Paisley, that had not been the case. How much do you really know about your sister’s life? she asked herself. How much is pure conjecture, rooted in malice and sustained by willful ignorance? The idea distressed her; it hurt her heart. She dismissed it as best she could by turning to the task at hand — helping Tai and Winonah drag the canoe up farther onto the alvar in order to secure it.

  With Winonah taking the lead, they picked their way across the limestone plain to the stand of Jack pines at its edge. Verna noted that, for a woman her age, Granny proved surprisingly spry, hopping from rock to rock like a bandy-legged toad, steadying herself, when required, with her walking stick. It was Romy who had the most difficulty negotiating the uneven terrain. There was no tone to her; everything about her was slack. Well, she was probably weak with hunger. Verna was relieved when Tai took Romy by the elbow to prevent her toppling over in a heap of layers. Her bones had to be as brittle as glass. One false step and she could imagine — snap! — an ankle broken. Pop! One of those jutting hipbones shattered into a million pieces, strewn like potsherds around an archeological dig.

  Beyond the alvar lay a mixed wood, both coniferous and deciduous — this much Verna had remembered, but it was Paisley who identified the different kinds of trees for her as they went along — the black and white spruce, the Jack pine, the balsam and the fir, the tamarack and eastern white cedar, along with the poplars and the white birch.

  Verna was impressed. “You really know your trees.”

  Paisley shrugged. “I was in the tree-care industry before I got into landscaping.”

  The tree-care industry? Verna thought. She had never known there was a tree-care industry. “Your grandfather liked trees, too,” she told her. “Until you, he was the only person I’ve ever known who could identify so many.”

  To her delight, Paisley was also able to name the ephemerals dotting the forest floor — those wildflowers that must fulfill their biological imperative before the canopy overhead becomes too dense for sunlight to penetrate, that begin to fall even as they bloom. “Hepatica,” the girl had told her, pointing. “Trillium. Trout lilies.”

  This much Verna knew: that in another week, this flurry of colour would be all but gone, leaving only the ostrich and the bracken and the maidenhair spleenwort ferns to unfurl in this shady realm. Their father had named Fern for this ancient plant form, which, not coincidentally, reproduces not through conventional means, but, like fungus, through the production of spores. Indeed, Fer
n had always been susceptible to fungus — to athlete’s foot and then to toenail and fingernail fungus. She had shared a kind of affinity with it. The last time Verna had seen her, her thumbnails had looked like copper gone green with verdigris, fecund. Verna thought about mentioning this — Fern and her affinity with fungus — but thought that such an observation might be construed as criticism, as had been the case when she had compared Fern to a pig and a parrot and Romy had taken umbrage.

  And then suddenly, up ahead, a gathering of birch around a clearing, a white verticality, shining through the deciduous gloom like a forest of bone. “There it is,” she said to Fern’s children, pointing. “There’s the glen.” At the sight of it, Verna’s eyes welled up with sudden, ridiculous tears. She quickened her pace to put some distance between her and the others. She needed to regain some measure of control over her wayward emotions; the last thing she wanted was for Fern’s kids to see her cry. She didn’t think she could bear being comforted at this juncture and they might be moved to do so if they noticed her distress. How were they to know that hers were tears not of sorrow so much as remorse? Bitter, not sweet, and, therefore, incapable of being soothed away, but only endured. This hastening of her step soon landed her in the epicentre of the clearing known as the glen. Festooned with yellow violets and pink Lady Slipper orchids, it was delineated at its perimeter by rotting nurse logs, once giants twenty metres tall; saplings now clung to these, wavering greenly upwards. The cylinder of dusty light that bored through the canopy bathed her in a kind of mote-filled radiance.

  “Beam me up, Scotty,” Winonah said sarcastically.

  Verna blinked back hot tears. Ignored Winonah. “Well, here it is. The glen. Your great-grandfather’s ashes are scattered here and your great-aunt Margie’s … the lake was named after her …”

  “Lake Margie?” Tai asked

  “Marguerite,” clarified Verna. “Lake Marguerite.”

  “Margie was her nickname,” said Romy. “She committed suicide.”

  But Verna was not finished. “And your grandmother, too — my mother, your mother’s mother.” She imagined her tearful father upending the urn in this very spot (they had returned a loved one’s ashes in metal urns in those days, not in cardboard cartons; somehow that seemed more gracious), while, back at the cottage, she and Fern, infant matricides, lay howling in their cribs. Why was it that Donald had never remarried? Had he loved their mother that much? Or had he just been overwhelmed? Why hadn’t she asked him? She should have. Now she never would. So much she didn’t know about the people in her life; the thought oppressed her, weighed her down. “Oh, and our dogs,” she added by way of afterthought. “Those that died in the summer. You don’t want to be putting a Lab on ice for any significant period of time.” She briefly considered, but thought better of telling them about Fern’s “offerings to Gaia.”

  “Oh, and by the way, this is also an old Ojibway burial ground,” Winonah piped up. “Not that my ancestors are as important as your family pets.”

  “Hey!” Paisley exclaimed. “What’s this?” Her eyes had snagged on a blaze cut into two sides of a tree. She ran her hand over the tree’s exposed inner bark. “I think these are fresh cuts.”

  Winonah appeared to have discovered something equally untoward. “Would you look at that!”

  “What?” asked Verna, looking in the direction where Winonah was pointing. There, about twenty paces from the blazed tree, a wooden post a little more than a metre tall had been driven into the ground. “What’s that?”

  Winonah snorted. “Now we know what your Peeping Tom was up to.”

  “Peeping Tom?” Tai turned to Romy and Paisley. “What Peeping Tom?”

  “It’s a corner claim post,” Winonah informed Verna.

  “A really creepy one,” Romy told Tai. “Auntie Verna and I saw him yesterday morning.”

  “I’m sorry, a what?” said Verna. “Can we all be quiet for a minute so I can hear Winonah?”

  “A corner claim post,” Winonah repeated. “Somebody must be staking a claim to this land. Or a piece of it, anyway. See there? How the brush is cut back? And that stone cairn there. And there, that line post, the one with the red tag. Those mark the claim line.”

  Verna was confused. “But how is that possible? This is my land.”

  “Hey!” Romy said. “You mean, it’s our land.”

  “Yeah!” Paisley asserted herself. “All of ours.”

  “Okay, okay, our land,” Verna conceded. “How can somebody lay claim to our land?”

  “Our people have been asking that question for years,” said Winonah.

  Tai crossed over to the post and hunkered down next to it. “J.R. Eubanks,” he read the attached metal tag. He looked up. “According to this, he began staking at eight yesterday morning and finished at ten. There’s a number, as well, but I can’t make it out.”

  “Probably his licence number,” said Winonah.

  “Licence?” Verna asked. “What kind of licence?”

  “A prospector’s licence,” said Winonah. “You need one of those if you’re going to stake a claim.”

  “I don’t care what kind of licence this jerk has!” Verna declared heatedly. “He has no business coming onto my … onto our land and blazing our trees and … I don’t know. Piling up rocks!”

  “Yeah!” Romy was aggrieved. “Those are our rocks!”

  Winonah looked at Granny. “What do you think?”

  Granny scrunched up her face in wrinkled contemplation, shook her head, and, without a word, she and Winonah turned around and started back towards the canoe.

  “What? Stop!” Romy cried. “Where are you going?”

  “Where does it look like we’re going?” Winonah asked.

  “We’re going back to the cottage,” said Granny.

  “But what about … you know … the cremains?” asked Paisley. “Aren’t we going to scatter them?”

  Granny shook her head. “A guy with a truck comes in here, trenches the place out. All that digging … that would make the spirits restless. All turned around. Not able to find their way to the Sky World. Then we’d never get rid of them, eh? They’d be always hanging around, bugging us.”

  They all began to talk at once.

  “You mean they would haunt us?” asked Tai. “That’s ridiculous. There are no such things as ghosts.”

  “Digging?” Verna demanded. “What digging?”

  “But we’ve come all this way!” wailed Romy. “And it was such an ordeal! Those blackflies must have sucked a pint of blood from me! And yesterday I nearly drowned.”

  “How are we supposed to ever get closure if we can’t lay our mother to rest?” Paisley asked.

  Winonah held up her hands for silence. “Quiet! Quiet, now.” When she had got their attention, she said, “Look, Macoun Clan, this is how it works. A white guy stakes a claim. Then he brings in a truck and starts to trench. The law says he can haul up to a thousand tons of earth out of a claim.”

  “That’s a lot of Mother Earth,” observed Granny.

  “The law?” Verna demanded. “What are you talking about? What law?”

  “And what about this beautiful stand of birch?” Paisley cried. She looked stricken at the thought of the grove’s destruction.

  “The Mining Act,” Winonah told Verna. To Paisley she said, “The birch is a sacred tree to my people. For your people, it is the money tree that is sacred.”

  Tai rose to his feet. “I’ve got an idea. Winonah, you said that this was an old aboriginal burial ground!”

  “Yeah,” said Winonah guardedly. “And …?”

  “Why don’t we play the old aboriginal burial ground card!” Tai said this in the same way he might suggest a game of shuffleboard or croquet. Oh, God, Verna remembered suddenly, he was the one who liked board games. She remembered him furiously hunched over a checkerboard, nose dripping green snot onto the checks.

  “Never knew there was one of them,” said Granny.

  “One of what?” dem
anded Verna.

  “An old aboriginal burial ground card,” replied Granny.

  “But, of course there is,” Romy insisted. “If you mess with an old Indian burial ground, weird shit happens. Poltergeists and zombies. Everybody knows that!”

  “Really?” asked Granny. “Well, that’s good.”

  “Roo!” objected Paisley. “Come on! That only happens in movies.”

  “Yeah,” said Winonah. “Otherwise every house in every suburb of this country would be haunted. The whole country is built on our burial grounds.”

  “I don’t watch a lot of movies,” Granny admitted. “Too many white people, eh? Can’t tell them apart.”

  “What I’m talking about is the fact that, legally, you can’t disturb a burial site,” explained Tai. “Not without a lengthy process involving the police and the coroner. And right now Native burial grounds are a real flashpoint for the government. Rather than kick off another land claim, they might just say that this guy can’t dig here.”

  “He’s got a point!” Verna said.

  “Well, sure he does,” Winonah conceded, “if we could prove it.”

  “Prove what?”

  “That it’s an old burial site.”

  Tai blinked at her. “There’s no proof?”

  “No,” Winonah replied.

  “What do you mean?” Paisley muscled in. “No records?”

  Winonah shook her head. “Oral tradition.” She snapped her fingers in mock regret. “Gets us every time.”

  “Records are for keeping track of people,” explained Granny. “Where are the people? What are their names? Are they dead? Are they a Status Indian? We’re not so interested in those things.”

  “Tai’s got a good idea,” Paisley pleaded. “Let’s not give up on this. We can do some digging ourselves. All we have to do is unearth some remains. How hard would that be? I’ve got spades and shovels in the truck.”

  “I hope you don’t expect me to dig,” said Romy. “Because I’m not a digger.”

  “That could be a pretty big job,” Winonah warned. “Because the glen, eh, it don’t stay put.”