Poplar Lake

by Ron Thompson

  “This is it. We travel light. With my work, we move so much. How long have you lived here, Edie?”

  Clinton Sturgis’s room had a bed, a desk, a dresser. Suitcases and boxes had been tossed; his belongings were in piles on the floor. The walls were decorated with posters.

  “You wanna hear some music?”

  As he rummaged through a pile I studied the posters. They were of bands I’d never heard of: the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, The Clash. He pulled a cassette player clear of a heap of shirts and pressed a button.

  It was unlike anything I had ever heard, a jarring blast of sound, loud and fast and raw and fresh, full of energy and life and the anger that went with it. The music was discordant and distorted, not synthesized, the lyrics shouted in defiance, not trilled like birdsong.

  “Holy cow!” I said when “Anarchy in the U.K” ended. “I mean, like . . . holy shit.”

  When Mrs Sturgis called us out for cake and lemonade, we grabbed plates and glasses and went back to listen to the rest of the album. When the side was over he ejected the tape and handed it to me. Out in the hall he knelt to rummage inside a box, and I stood waiting, listening to murmured snippets of conversation from the kitchen, where our mothers’ voices seemed to merge. “. . . pointy heads . . . we know about . . .” (laughter, murmuring) “. . . reeds . . . and. . . oh . . .”

  “Gimme a sec, I know it’s here,” Clinton said and dug deeper in the box.

  “. . . tested two . . .” They were going back and forth, getting along like a house on fire. “Better to . . . routine and . . . busy . . .” A spoon clinked against the side of a cup then clattered onto the table. “More coffee?”

  Clinton found what he was looking for at the bottom of the box, a cassette with “Ramones” scribbled on its label. He handed it to me and we went through to the kitchen where our mothers sat at the table facing each other. “Hello, boys!” Mrs Sturgis said, cutting my mother short. “What have you been up to?”

  “Oh, dear. Look at the time,” my mother said, turning around to look at us. She took a close look at Clinton as Mrs Sturgis exhaled smoke and appraised me through narrowed eyes. That summer I showed Clinton around Poplar Lake, thinking it must seem puny and insignificant after all the places he hadlived; but he took it in stride. “I’ve seen worse,” he said without elaboration.

  * * *

  Simon and my mother were in the kitchen when I came downstairs. Dad had already left for a six o’clock tee off. “What’s she doing out there?” Mom asked me softly, rolling her eyes towards the front of the house.

  “I think she’s gone for her run now.” She went to the front window to look. “Call an ambulance. She’s back, and I think she hurt herself. She’s writhing around on the ground.”

  Genny was doing crunches on the grass.

  “We had a long trip. She’s been craving a workout. Let’s just have breakfast. She’ll join us when she’s done.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Who’d like a nice saucer of milk?” Simon asked. “Mom?” They exchanged blank-faced stares.

  Genny came in a few minutes later, said her good mornings, and went up to shower. We were drinking coffee when she returned, her face flushed, her hair wet and shiny. She sat next tome and smelt nice.

  “So how did you sleep, Jez-ahhm . . . uh, Genny?” Mom asked.

  “Fine, thank you, Edie. Wonderful. I guess I was tired. All day on the bus.”

  We made small talk about our trip and our return plans. When we left Poplar Lake we would fly to Toronto. I would gostraight back to England while Genny made a quick trip east to see her family.

  “Do your people all work down there in Nova Scotia?” Mom asked.

  Simon rolled his eyes. “Genny, please excuse my mother. She’s under the impression that every second Maritimer is out here these days.”

  Genny was being a good guest and showing appreciation for everything. “Edie, those date squares we had last night were delicious.” “Pardon?”

  “Your date squares—they were delicious.” A look of total incomprehension occupied my mother’s face. “Your date squares, Mom. Your squares that are date,” Simon said.

  She looked from Simon to Genny and suddenly slapped her thigh. “Oh, I see. Hah ha! We call that matrimonial cake out here, Genny. I suppose you never heard of that down—”

  “Hey,” I said, “I’ve been telling Genny about saskatoons! They don’t have them down east either.”

  CHAPTER 4

  It was still early when I took Genny for a walk. It was a glorious day, the air still, the sun bright. You could almost hear wheat growing on the infinite plain that began on the edge of town. “Show me the sights,” she said as we turned onto the sidewalk. “I want to see everything! Where you played, where you went to school, where you had your first kiss.”

  My gut tightened. My first kiss. And the next, and where it led. She wanted everything, and I knew how persistent she could be. But we only had a few days in Poplar Lake. A few days, then we’d be gone. I suddenly knew what I would do.

  “That’s a lot of territory, Genny. Okay. You asked for it. My friend Danny Braddock lived in that house there. They had a chinchilla. My friend Clinton Sturgis lived in the house next door—that one—with his mom, but that was years later. We played football together in the—”

  “You and your football,” she said, but she hugged my arm endearingly. “By the way, why does Simon call you Rufus?”

  “It rhymes with Doofus. It’s just an old nickname he had for me.”

  “And your dad calls you Jake.”

  “Sometimes. He had a nickname for all of us when we were little. Andrew was Gus, Simon was Bernie, and Victor was Ralph. I don’t know how he came up with them. Victor always said they were the names of his army buddies. The guys in his tank.”

  “Jake. Rufus. You had a lot of nicknames. Where’s the lake?”

  Inwardly, I smiled, relieved, knowing this could work. “What lake?”

  “Well, the town’s called Poplar Lake.”

  “Ah, yes. There was a lake here the year after they settled the place. And then again a couple times in the naughts. Once each in the teens and twenties. At least once in the fifties. I’ve seen pictures of people rowing around downtown in boats. I can remember a time or two in the seventies myself. Part of town gets flooded every few years.”

  “Then why did they build the town here if it’s flood prone?”

  “Flood prone?”

  She studied my face for a moment. “Well, it seems to keep flooding. So . . . why is the town even here?” “Good question. There’s a story there.”

  * * *

  The territory around Poplar Lake was covered by a treaty signed in the 1880s by a group of stragglers who had opted out of negotiations a decade before. They were led by a chief called Pîwiwisakedjak, Little Trickster, who was also known as Charlie Parnell, a name given him by a priest who missionized in the area in the years before the treaty was concluded.

  “He was like you,” Genny observed. “He had a lot of names.”

  “With him, it’s complicated. His father was Cree, his mother from somewhere else. There was a lot of mixing going on between people on the plains, a lot of flux, and customs got merged, and—this is only my understanding, mind you—people might have different names at different times in their lives. He’s also known in some accounts as ‘Owaktawalawathai,’ but that was just a mistake. Someone cussed at a white man and it got written down, and of course it was heard wrong, and written wrong on top of that. That’s how things happened. That’s how history gets recorded.”

  For a second she studied my expression. “And you’re here to tell it.”

  I inclined my head and gave a bow like a courtier. In his youth Pîwiwisakedjak embarked on a vision quest to discover the meaning and purpose of his life. From his father’s encampment in a grove o
f trembling aspen he rode south onto the treeless plain, following faint trails until they ended then reading the terrain for subtle landmarks: a sunken coulee, a scrubby salt flat, a cairn of stones, a tipi ring. He travelled for days, not knowing what he was looking for; until, one morning, on a gentle rise, he dismounted to survey his surroundings. The modest slope (no one would ever call it a hill) provided an all-round panorama. In the distance, buffalo grazed on tender spring growth. The sun was warm on his face, the air cool. This, he decided, was the place. Here he would begin his fast. Here he would attain the vision that would impart meaning to his life.

  That day he studied the vastness of the sky, the line of the horizon. At times he chanted. At night he shivered, fireless, staring into the dark or up at the stars, listening to coyotes and the snorting and farting of his horse, which was hobbled close by. In the morning, again: bird song, the sky, the horizon (over which the buffalo had disappeared during the night). He studied a bug, a blade of grass, a cloud. His fingernails. Occasionally he chanted or hummed to himself. He maintained his fast.

  Days passed in this manner, but no vision came to him. Until he awoke one morning to an unfamiliar sound; and opening his eyes he beheld a fantastical sight: a covered wagon, squeaking and rattling across the plains towards him with a red-bearded giant slumped across its bench.

  Thus, in the year of our Lord 1857, young Pîwiwisakedjak met the trader Thadeus Spunk, who had set off from Montana that spring to make his fortune with a wagon full of rotgut whiskey.

  * * *

  Spunk had come west along the Missouri in the 1820s, a boy with visions of adventure and riches, and plans to find both with John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. Unlike the Hudson Bay men, who traded with the Indians for pelts, Astor’s men did their own trapping, which put them in perennial conflict with the inhabitants of the areas they exploited. As a consequence, their attitude towards the natives was harsh and uncompromising; the redskins, many believed, were a nuisance to be hunted to extinction.

  Young Spunk joined a brigade of trappers. He learned from them how to survive in the wilderness, yet he never absorbed their disdain towards injuns. With his red hair and propensity to sunburn, he was sensitive about sneering at redskins. Besides, it struck him that there was profit potential in the way the Bay mencollected furs. They got the Indians to do all the work.

  An astute observation, but Spunk did nothing to exploit it, for he grew comfortable with Company life. He was a gregarious fellow, and he enjoyed the companionship of the brigade, the brotherhood of shared toil, a few drinks and a game of poker around the campfire at night. Once a year, sometimes every second year, he went down the Missouri to spend a month in the fleshpots of Saint Loo.

  He became a Company man through and through, but the Company life was ending. The Bay men had ruthlessly trapped out the Oregon territory to prevent the Americans from expanding into it—nary a beaver survived in the watershed of the Columbia River. And fashions were changing; silk from China was supplanting fur from the wild. Squeezed on all fronts, the American Fur Company collapsed in 1842. The trapper brigades stayed together and went to work for smaller outfits, but the furtrade was dying. Hundreds of trappers like Spunk found their livelihoods gone overnight. They turned to the buffalo hunt—there was a good market for hides—but it was unsustainable; and cattlemen and farm folk were flooding into the west. The wild would not stay wild, and trappers could not stand the thought of becoming sodbusters. The brigades disbanded or slowly dissolved. Most of the men moved up into the mountains to live as recluses, trapping and living free.

  But Thadeus Spunk was not the solitary sort, the kind who could live alone, wrestling and rutting with bears and eschewing the society of men and the company of women. As a boy he’d had visions of adventure and wealth. Thirty years on, he had yet to gain the latter, but he still intended to return east with a heavy poke. Once there, he would find a good woman and wed; or live out his days as a lodger in a whorehouse.

  He knew that time was not on his side. It was the fall of 1856, and he was getting on. To fulfill his ambitions he would need tothink big. He would need to take some risks.

  There was a stretch of territory he had always wondered about, a vast region north of the Missouri that was vaguely defined and little explored—it had been bypassed for more promising country to the west. He knew that Rupert’s Land lay up there somewhere, but he had heard that the Hudson Bay Company had never fully exploited its southern reaches; he resolved to carve a piece of it out for himself and exploit it like a Bay man, getting the Indians to do the trapping for him.

  Over the years he had put some money away in a bank in St Loo. Now he headed east to collect it, planning to spend the winter there, eschewing the brothels while provisioning for the journey north. He would hire an assistant, a boy who reminded him of himself, and teach him the trade.

  But Spunk was not good at eschewing. In the spring, when the ice was off the river, he boarded the first steamer north withfar fewer trade goods than he had intended, and without an assistant. The range of his wares was also limited, both by his reduced wallet and his limited understanding of his end-market. Having lived among Company men, he had kept a wary distance from Indians. Thirty years on, he knew little about them beyond their apparent fondness for drink.

  There were other independent traders heading for the wilderness in the spring of ’57. Over cards in the paddle-wheeler’s saloon, he learned that most of them intended to follow the Missouri as far west as they could. Reasoning the less competition the better, he decided to disembark well to the east of where they were headed. He left the steamer a day’s journey upriver of the Missouri’s fork with the Yellowstone.

  His covered wagon creaking with his mostly-liquid cargo, and Old Glory flapping from the back opening, he rode north across the prairie, north for Rupert’s Land; north through the grasslands, north through the Big Muddy badlands, north across the Missouri Coteau.

  It was a magnificent achievement, that solitary crossing, a miracle in fact, considering he was blind drunk for most of it.

  It was not his intention to journey that way. On the first days of the crossing he rode alert and upright at the reins, scanning the horizon for the first sign of Rupert’s Land. There was a sameness to the landscape that he found depressing; yet he knew that beyond this wasteland lay Rupert’s Land, Rupert’s Land with its unspoiled Indians, its untapped riches.

  After four or five days, he would have settled for a tree. Andafter another week of rolling and jarring across the unending short-grass prairie, he began to wonder if he had made a horrible mistake. What if there were no furs in this godforsaken country, let alone Indians? He had gambled everything on this route. All was lost if he had miscalculated.

  Afflicted by a growing sense of desperation, he resolved to ride on, convincing himself that the land could only get better. After another three days he decided it would not—which meant he was ruined, and probably as good as dead, and if that were the case he reasoned he might as well go out on a bender. He cracked a keg and filled a jug and took a long thirsty pull, the first of many.

  He continued north, drinking as he went. The whiskey helped. It made his situation seem less desperate, especially when he blacked out. For days he faded in and out of consciousness. Whenever he came too, groggy and befuddled as he was, he had the presence of mind to adjust the direction of the horses to due north. Then he continued the binge from where he’d let off. The wagon rolled on, reins dragging, across the prairie, the horses perpetually harnessed and in search of water; until he was delivered, unconscious, as Pîwiwisakedjak’s spirit vision.

  * * *

  Pîwiwisakedjak approached the wandering cariole and saw a red giant slumped across its bench, apparently dead. Could it be a white man? Pîwiwisakedjak had seen white men before. They were known to his people. Fifty years before, the Nor’Westers and the Bay men had established trading posts in the are
a to the north, and there were still Bay men trading there for pemmican. He had seen how some of them turned red in the sun, but not their heads and beards. This one looked like he was born red.

  Pîwiwisakedjak jumped at a sudden horrifying noise, a clamour like thunder only worse, a roar like the ripping of the sky. It took him a moment to realize what it was. The man was snoring. He was not dead, then, merely stupid. He knew the Bay men were not stupid. They were canny. They certainly never slept on their journeys. And now that he was close, now that he had the reins in his hands, he could smell this white man. His stink was worse than that of the Bay men, which was saying something.

  Pîwiwisakedjak tugged at the red beard. No reaction. He crawled over the insensate body into the back of the wagon, took in the clutter piled to the bows that supported the canvas top, saw the casks of rum in the bed of the box. One of them was dripping. He reached down and tapped it with his fist. Let a drop fallon his hand and licked it. Looked out the back opening of the wagon, saw the Stars and Stripes, and understood.

  * * *

  Spunk awoke in the dark to a crackling fire. He opened his eyes, took a moment to register the black sky, the stars spinning crazily. Realized it was his head spinning, not the stars. A moment later he became aware that he was on the ground, that there was something beneath his neck. He reached around to feel the rough wool of a horse blanket.

  Wait—a crackling fire? He raised his head to see that it was not his wagon, but a campfire. A young savage was sitting on its far side, his eyes glassy in its light; he was staring into the flames,but his eyes seemed to float, one of them wandered with a willof its own as he raised a tin cup to his lips and drank.

  Through his befuddlement, through the reeling of his senses and a wave of dizziness, Spunk was sentient enough to think: They’re into the merchandise. And he felt cold as ice and suddenly very sober as his next thought formed: They’re going to roast me over that thar fire.

  The Indian looked up; his eyes met Spunk’s. One danced wildly of its own accord, as if seeking out accomplices. Well and truly drunk, Spunk observed; yet the savage was steady enough to get to his feet and come toward him. Spunk readied himself to meet his maker. Prayers he had not invoked for decades came into his head. Sorry for whatever I done, he thought; but he could not remember anything in particular for which to atone. I paid my debts, he thought. I pulled my weight, never stole from a friend, never cheated a whore. Never even hit one.