by Ron Thompson
POPLAR LAKE
POPLAR LAKE
A Novel
RON THOMPSON
Copyright © 2018 by Ron Thompson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Thompson, Ron, 1957–, author
Poplar Lake / Ron Thompson.
ISBN 978–1–988098–64–7 (softcover)
I. Title.
PS8639.H639P67 2018 C813’.6 C2018–904207–9
Printed and bound in Canada on 100% recycled paper.
eBook: tikaebooks.com
Now Or Never Publishing
901, 163 Street
Surrey, British Columbia
Canada V4A 9T8
nonpublishing.com
Fighting Words.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for our publishing program.
For my mother
And in memory of my father
It was a place where doors were never locked, and no one was a stranger. Who’s your father, someone might ask. Is Victor your brother? You look just like him.
We wandered town freely, and grownups were kind. They offered cookies, a glass of water, a bandage for a scrape. There were the usual oddballs, like the man who played violin on his porch in his Stanfield’s, and a few old cranks who got mad when kids cut across their grass. They hollered and shook their fists and(rumour had it) poisoned candy at Halloween. That was why their garage doors got pelted with crab apples, why their gardens were trampled, their seasonal menorahs knocked down.
“Did kids there really do that?” Genny interrupted. “And call people those names?”
“Sticks and stones,” I said, realizing I had veered from the narrative I had intended.
“They knocked down menorahs?”
“No one knew what a menorah even was.” For a moment she stared out at the scene outside our tinted window. A lake sparkled in the summer light, edged by ancient rock and ganglion pine, by spindly larch interspersed with birch and poplar. I wondered at the beasts that lurked within the depths beyond. “Go on,” she said at last.
“I was a bit shy,” I allowed, putting on a grin, “kind of a loner maybe, but I had brothers, and I always tagged along with them. You know, the annoying little brother. So the thing I remember most about growing up out there is all the games we played.”
In winter it was shinny in the blue dusk after school, the frozen air scorching our lungs. Chasing the puck in a slashing, hacking mass. Getting hot and sweaty and unzipping our parkas, then throwing them off and playing impervious to the cold till it was time to go in.
When the days grew longer there was a sudden rapid melt, a blink of spring, a flourish of tulips, and a brief flowering of baseball; then summer began, endless blue-skied days that stretched towards a distant September. We migrated from house to house and game to game, played in the woods at the edge of town, rode our bikes to the beach where the water was frigid till late in July. We fought over things immediately forgotten, invented games and changed them on the fly. Every day, we played football, and would until the snow returned in November. Usually it was twohand touch on the street. Someone on defense counted steamboats while the quarterback looked for a receiver and simultaneously narrated for an invisible audience. We were always the Roughriders and the quarterback was Ron Lancaster, the receiver George Reed, who was black, and no one in Saskatchewan was black, except George, and he was one of us.
The year I turned thirteen my mother signed me up to play flag football in the local bantam league, then the following year I played nine-man in the local contact league, as my brothers had before me. That league was a funnel to the town’s two high school teams, the Martyrs of St Vitalis and the Lakers of Poplar Lake Regional. My friend Clinton Sturgis signed up with me. He had just moved to town and didn’t know anybody and all that summer we’d hung out together. He had a good arm and—
“Baby? You know I don’t know the first thing about football. Tell me about the town.”
I hesitated. “I’ll tell you when we’re there. I’ll show you.”
CHAPTER 1
It was awe-inspiring, magnificent, yet terrifying too. We gazedout at the passing forest, at knobby outcrops and crumbling layers of shale, the trees towering or gnarled or tumbled over, broken by wind and ice. There were fire scars on distant rollinghills, and lakes, forever more lakes, wide, thin, islanded, linked by calm streams, white water, raging rapids.
“Canada has too much geography,” I told Genny. “Mackenzie King said that.”
She gazed out the window, content with too much geography, and we held hands, and I was happy. We rolled west, the highway rising, winding, cresting, descending.
And then, eventually, there was Superior, a freshwater ocean glimpsed periodically on our flank. We were bound for Africa in a few weeks, the arid Kalahari, and we wondered out loud what people there would make of Superior.
We fell into a daily pattern. At a rest stop around noon we would hurry off the bus and buy chocolate chip muffins and sandwiches to go, usually fried whitefish on soft white bread, the fish from a local lake, thick and delicious, the grease soaking through to our fingers. We would laugh and wipe them clean and feel lucky for the trickle of water in the tiny on-board restroom. Midafternoon, we would disembark in a mill town we’d never heard of, the pong of sulphur heavy in the air. “We don’t get many walk-ins,” the motel owner might say, appraising us doubtfully. We would explore the town from end to end, read the plaques, visit the museum, get something to eat. The restaurants all served the same hearty meals, the portions large. “Money’s worth,” we called it in Poplar Lake, but Genny was less appreciative than me. She was a near-vegetarian, and the North was full of meat, breaded and fried, or bedrizzled in sticky goop.
The regional cuisine would normally have appalled her; but on that journey across the Shield she was struck, smitten even, by the wholesome kindness of the people who served it; indeed, by all the people we met, the hardy inhabitants of the North, whose trials and tribulations she recognized, whose unceasing struggle to tolerate, let alone survive, the insects and distances, the winter cold, and the always-ailing, hard-scrabble economy, she felt like her own pain. She felt one with them, as she did with all who struggled, the oppressed and downtrodden, the labouring masses. And so she gave herself over to the culinary ordeal, embraced it even—out of consideration for them.
“Would you like some fresh hawberry-rhubarb pie?” they might ask, speaking to her, almost shy in the beam of her understanding blue eyes.
“‘Hawberry’?” I’d ask.
“I’d like that,” she’d say.
“Ice cream? I make it myself. How ’bout two scoops?” She would hesitate for just a second. “Ooh, that would be . . .”
(sharp intake of breath, a small, appreciative smile) “. . . such a treat.” Watching her, my heart would swell, and yet I could not help myself. “Just wait till you try saskatoons,” I would say, suddenly jealous of hawberries.
* * *
The Sault. Wawa. Marathon. After a while the northern names blended into one. NipigonThunderbaydrydenkenora. The North was a continuous layer of crumpled rock, one huge interconnected l
ake, a ribbon of infinite asphalt. Beautiful as it was wetired of it, for it was too much to absorb on a single journey, an unending feast on which we gorged to the point of satiation. We read then, or she might ask me about growing up in Poplar Lake. “It was idyllic,” I’d reply, and tell her a story. We might talk about some snippet on the news, me filling her in on the geography of a region or the history of a conflict. She liked to tease me about my interest in trivia, the more arcane the better. At one point she tugged at the book I was reading, an account of the struggle for land reform in nineteenth century Ireland. “Who does that for fun?” she taunted, and we both laughed when I pointed out what Genny the Academic was reading: Gender Power Disparity in Sub-Saharan Africa. We would read for hours, snuggled together, looking up intermittently to comment and marvel at the vastness of that boreal wilderness.
We entered Manitoba but the Shield still held us in its grip—until, miles west of the Lake of the Woods, it simply sank into the earth whence it came. In its place, the forest grew thick and tangled. When we finally emerged onto the prairies, Genny was asleep, her head resting on my shoulder, and I sat unmoving, unwilling to disturb her, cherishing her trust as she lolled against me, relying on me to protect her from the perils of the world.
Cherishing her trust; and worrying it was misplaced. What if I was not up to protecting her? She was the reason I was going to Africa. I was following her. Since graduating two years before, I had worked at the Commonwealth Atlantic, a venerable old investment firm in London, analyzing risk and creating derivatives to smooth capitalism’s rough edges. Yes, I was uncannily good with numbers, and I was apprenticed to a prestigious institution within the throbbing heart of global finance. It seemed to everyone that I had laid aside my childish ambition to be a writer to become an adult, one embarked upon a sensible and highly remunerative career.
But in truth I had stayed in England to be with Genny. She was then still at the university where we’d met. It was barely an hour’s journey from London, and we had our lives, or at least the near-term logistics, all worked out. She would come down to the city on Thursday and return Sunday night or early Monday; or I would go up on Friday after work. With the help of British Rail we’d be together. And when we weren’t, I would spend my spare time writing.
The logistics had worked superbly. But I had not written a single word. And now I was following her to Africa.
It was easy for me to look into her eyes and say, I’m coming with you (and see them grow misty; my own grew misty at the thought); but she did not know the way I was. Now, in the summer of 1990, we had been together for nearly three years, and she still had no clue about the blindness at my core—and of what it made me capable. My incomprehension and detachment made me fickle and undependable, my judgement questionable. I was a tapestry of failure, and likely to fail her too. This fear had been festering in my mind, was the reason I had not been sleeping well for days, why I was edgy and wakeful now. I was stewing over the future. Was I worthy of her—could I become worthy of her; or would I take the easy route, that of the apathetic, the oblivious, the coward: the path I’d trod before?
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. As a keen student of history I believed that to be true. And as the Great Plains spread before us, I knew in my gut that the anxiety I was feeling was connected to my past. All of Genny’s questions about Poplar Lake had me in a knot.
* * *
We reached Winnipeg, the last stop before our journey’s end. We checked into a cheap hotel near the bus depot and went out to explore downtown. Genny found a vegetarian restaurant, which made her happy—so happy that she treated herself to a piece of organic double-chocolate cheesecake for dessert. “Two forks,” she told the server disingenuously. As she waited for her order she gave her tummy and sides an exploratory squeeze. “I need to get some exercise when we get to your parents’ place. We’ve just been riding and sitting and eating this whole trip.”
“The hawberries have been excellent this year. A banner season, they say. And the cheesecake continues to amaze.” She gave me a look before relenting and laughing. It was getting dark when we left the restaurant. We walked a few blocks to get a sense of the city. There were, I noticed, a lot of Indians in the core.
“They’re not ‘Indians’,” Genny replied tersely when I men tioned it.
“Well, what are they then?”
“Aboriginals. First Peoples. First Nations people. Indigenous peoples. Cree, Chipewyan, Anishinaabe, Mi’kmaq, Mohawk . . . It matters, the words we use, baby. How would you like it if people assumed things about you? Called you names you didn’t like?”
If only you knew, I thought, but held my tongue. Genny was hypersensitive about Indians—she claimed to have some Mi’kmaq heritage herself, although I thought this was an indulgence on her part, an expression of solidarity. She was a blue-eyed Irish Catholic with roots in Cape Breton; still, there was that thick black mane of hers, those high cheekbones, that touch of bronze. I took her for a black Celt.
We walked back to the hotel and turned in early. We soon realized why it was so cheap. All night, doors opened and closed in the corridor outside our room; voices echoed, men and women laughed and stumbled into walls. On the street below there was a succession of noisy events. A police siren approached, car doors slammed, lights flashed through our thin curtains. Atabout three o’clock the commotion died down.
In the morning I felt washed out before I even got up. Genny seemed tired too, and preoccupied. She had a shower and lingered in the bathroom for a long time while I poked around in our room, waiting for her to finish.
“I have a zit,” she said when she finally emerged.
“What?”
She took her hand away from her face and there it was, a real little Kilimanjaro, right in the centre of her cheek.
She watched my face.
“It’s humungous. Isn’t it?”
“No, no. Not really.” Her face fell. She had read my mind.
“And that’s not all. All that fried food, all that meat and pastry and sugar . . . I’ve been eating crap, and look at this. See? Blackheads! And this. Look at this!” She gripped the flesh at hersides, which bunched (appealingly, I thought). “I’m . . .” Her lip quivered. “Genny?”
Her hand returned to her cheek and her eyes welled.
For a moment I stood there, uncertain what to do. “Why today?” she sniffled. “Of all days . . . the day I meet your mother!”
I took her in my arms and held her as she sobbed, patted her back, murmured reassurances, kissed and comforted her, all of which, I knew, were expected in the circumstance. The whole while I wondered at convention, and what this was about, and that I should somehow get a picture of that zit of hers for The Guinness Book of Records.
CHAPTER 2
We caught the noon bus, a milk run that stopped in most of the towns along the way. It would be a daylong journey, and as mile after mile of prairie spooled past our window Genny fell asleep. My own eyes closed, and I dozed briefly, but then I was awake, thinking of what lay ahead. Poplar Lake, my formative years. My choices, and my ghosts.
I knew from an early age that there was something different about me. “A tantrum won’t get you your way,” my mother told me. “You get your way when you get along. Now look me in the eye. The eye! Here. No! Don’t you dare look away!”
Apparently a glassy stare was what I needed to get along. “Good,” Mom said. “Now you do that with the kids.”
Ah, the kids. My brothers were athletic and gregarious, popular with the kids, while I was awkward and inept. The social interplay required to “get along” baffled me completely. Nothing about it was what it seemed to be on the surface. There was information everywhere, and I was oblivious to it. Hint, subtlety, sarcasm—they all flew over my head. Metaphor was wasted on me, body language a foreign lingo. People were cuneiform characters, unreadable and unknowable, a
nd so I kept my distance from them. And when I couldn’t I put on a blank mask and agreed, or dissembled, or held my tongue and went with the flow until I could escape.
My mother declared me shy and had just the remedy for that. “He’s going with you,” she informed my brothers. “You’re going to keep him out of trouble, and you’re going to keep him safe.” Even I heard the unstated Or Else in that command. Then she turned to me, her voice softening. “You go play with them. And look people in the eye. Let me see how you do it.” She held me at arm’s length, studying my face. “Try smiling a bit.”
Thus I went forth, trailing my brothers and grinning like Alfred E. Newman. They knew not to cross Mom, although they interpreted “trouble” and “safe” like tax lawyers for old money. Under their begrudging watch I joined in the neighbourhood activities they excelled at, and whenever anyone shoved me around or asked, “Is he a retard or what?” one or the other would duke it out for family honour. Word soon got around to leave me alone. I was tolerated and eventually accepted, and I even made a few friends, although making friends was work for me, and none of them were close. When the best of them, Danny Braddock, moved away when I was seven, it was a blow. I became disheartened and withdrew once more into myself.
I was a collector of stuff: stamps, hockey cards, coins, comics—the usual things—as well as cash register receipts, match books, box tops, bottle caps, ticket stubs, even words. For the latter, I read the dictionary, and the encyclopedia too, and kept lists. I memorized facts, dates, mathematical formulae. There was a pattern in this that I understood only later: everything was black and white, just as I saw the world.
My brothers called me weird, but Mom insisted I was bookish and there was nothing wrong with that. Still, consultations were held with somebody from the school board, then somebody in a white coat. Soon after, my mother handed me a Hilroy notebook and a good Paper Mate. “You’re going to carry this with you and make notes on things,” she said. “Things” meant everything that was not black and white, as in what people said and did. “Read everything over, after. Every night you’re going to do that. You’re smart and you’ll figure things out. You can even make a story out of it, if you like. You like making stories.”
