“What’s that?” he asked as Mr. Munro added a splash from the flask to his mug.
“Medicine,” Mrs. Burt answered. “I was telling the boys that Joseph — that’s Mr. Burt — was a high rigger. Right, Spar?”
“What’s that?” Artie asked.
“The fella who scampers up the tree and tops and delimbs it. You know, chops off all the branches,” she said.
Mr. Munro nodded.
“Mr. Munro worked with Mr. Burt back in the days I cooked in the camp. Tell them about my cooking, Spar.”
“Not bad.”
Mrs. Burt threw a tea towel at him, but it didn’t get anywhere close.
“We’re sure going to have a good supper tonight. These boys haven’t ever had grouse.”
“What’s grouse?” Artie asked.
“Those birds Mr. Munro snared for us. Tell them about when the grizzly came into camp.”
Mr. Munro said nothing.
“Spar. Tell them.”
“Me?” He thought a moment, trying to recall. A drink straight from his flask helped. “When he got us all up the tree?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Burt, taking the lid off a pot and poking inside it.
“A bear came along and Joe got us all up a tree.”
Mrs. Burt sighed. “This big old grizzly wanders into camp. Nowhere to go but up. Half the fellas were terrified of heights. That’s something you probably wouldn’t guess about loggers. Most of them are happier on the ground.
“In a matter of minutes, there’s a big logger sitting up on every branch, swinging his boots, thumbing his nose at the biggest grizzly you ever seen.”
“I remember now,” said Mr. Munro.
“Tell them, then.”
“Conk rot.”
“The tree looked fine from the outside,” Mrs. Burt explained, “but it was all rotten inside. With the weight of those boys sitting in it, the thing just keeled. Crash! Oh, the screaming. I tell you, that bear took off and it never came back.”
“What if a grizzler comes here?” Artie asked with a wail.
Mr. Munro put together a few more words than usual.
“Don’t worry, son. It’s mostly blackies around here.”
When supper was ready, we sat around the table in the cabin and Mrs. Burt said grace, which she normally didn’t do with us. I think she was trying to make a good impression on Mr. Munro, who took a big swig out of his flask after the “Amen.”
Grouse is like chicken, but better. The meat is browner and tastier. Mrs. Burt roasted them and made gravy and potatoes and steamed greens from the garden, which were the only thing she made that I didn’t like. We had to eat it or we would get rickets, she said. For dessert there were baked apples swimming in custard.
“How’d you like that, Spar?” she asked afterward.
His beard was decorated like a Christmas tree with half of his dinner.
“Not bad,” he said.
I made a fire for us to sit around outside. Mrs. Burt kept burping into her fist. Artie came over, but she didn’t want to burp the alphabet with Mr. Munro there so she got him singing instead. “I’ve Heard That Song Before.” “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary.” “I Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” Those were the old songs they sang while they wandered the forest on their quest for the round toilet seat.
Artie stood by the fire, hands clasped, warbling at the evening sky. Each time he finished a song, Mrs. Burt clapped and asked Mr. Munro if he wasn’t the cutest kid he ever saw while Mr. Munro shook his little flask hard over his tea mug, like he shook the salt shaker at supper, trying to get the last drops out.
Then I took Artie off to bed. While I lay there waiting for him to fall asleep, I could hear Mrs. Burt talking at Mr. Munro. I didn’t really listen until Mr. Munro said something.
“You always pick favorites, Mavis.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You didn’t even cook his fish.”
“You brought grouse. I’ll cook it tomorrow.”
“You didn’t say nothing to him about it.”
“He catches fish all the time.”
Then she did something surprising. She started bragging about me and my outhouse and my wood chopping and swimming and how well I looked after my little brother.
“He’s sharp,” she said.
After Artie fell asleep, I went outside again. Mr. Munro looked up as I approached the fire.
“I hear you’re going to swim across the lake.”
“I might,” I said, “if I get good enough.”
Mr. Munro sank into his beard. Then he noticed something in it and ate it.
11
AN OUTHOUSE SHOULD be a good place to think. That’s what Mrs. Burt said and, ever since Mr. Munro’s visit, I started using it for that.
It actually didn’t smell. We cleared the ashes out of the fire pit every day and left them in the outhouse in a box. Instead of flushing, you took a big scoop of ash with the tomato can and sprinkled it down the hole. Also, there was always a breeze off the lake.
I went there because of what Mr. Munro asked me in the canoe. I went to think about my mom. Usually I went when the Knights of the Round Toilet Seat were on their quest. Or, if I happened to be there anyway, I just sat a little longer. If I added up all the hours, I must have sat about a week.
What did I think about?
Where she was. What she was doing. If she was okay.
And I worried. What if she’d met another guy with the sleeves ripped off his T-shirt, like Gerry? What if that was what had happened?
Gerry had cast some kind of spell on her. She told me so herself. He had powers, like Brandon. Brandon had controlled me with his powers and Gerry had controlled Mom. He played songs for her on his guitar — songs about her, that he would write himself. She was flattered. It was hard looking after a little kid all on your own, especially when you were only twenty-one, and everybody else was out having fun. When Gerry drank, she felt she had to keep him company. If she didn’t, he might stop playing songs for her. Then where would she be? Alone again in a crummy apartment, bored and poor.
She told me all this in the Pennypacker living-room after Social Services started letting her visit me for an hour every Saturday.
“You weren’t alone,” I told her. “You had me.”
“I know, I know.” She put her face in her hands. “I’m so sorry. I made a terrible mistake. I want you back so badly.”
Those were my outhouse thoughts. I usually went back to the cabin feeling pretty rotten.
Around that same time Artie started getting up in the night and going into Mrs. Burt’s room to sleep with her. When I woke up in the morning, his sleeping bag would be crumpled beside mine, empty and cold.
“Why did you go to Mrs. Burt last night?” I asked him.
“I got scared.”
“Of what?”
“A spider.”
“Where’s this spider? Show me.” We searched the room but never found it. “Anyway,” I said, “spiders are good. They can’t hurt you.”
Artie said, “I wouldn’t be afraid of them if they didn’t have so many legs!”
“So if they had six legs instead of eight they wouldn’t bother you?”
“No.”
“But you’re scared of bugs, too. They only have six legs.”
“I wouldn’t be scared of them if they had four legs.”
“Squirrels have four legs.”
“If squirrels had two legs, I’d like them better.”
“So you’re not afraid of people?”
“No. Except for that man at the motel. And Brandon Pennypacker.”
ABOUT A WEEK after Mr. Munro’s visit, Sir Mrs. Burt and King Arthur came back to the cabin ve
ry excited. The blueberries were ripe.
“Boys, I’m going to make you the best jam you ever tasted,” Mrs. Burt said. Artie cheered because he’d long ago licked clean the little jam packets that Mrs. Burt had loaded in her purse on our road trip. “And the best pie you ever tasted,” she went on. “The best flapjacks you ever tasted.”
She took three old cans and got me to punch two holes in each of them. Then she threaded a string through the holes to make a sort of necklace. With the cans bumping around our necks, and a bucket in Mrs. Burt’s hand, we headed out.
We were supposed to drop the berries into the can around our necks until it was full, then empty it into the bucket and start picking all over again. But the wild blueberries were so good. They were smaller than the ones you get in the store and twice as sweet. Artie picked them straight into his mouth. Once in a while I’d hear the ping of one landing in his can, probably by accident.
Mrs. Burt had both hands going so fast that she emptied her can twice into the bucket and moved on to the next bush before I emptied mine once.
Now that I was spending all that time in the outhouse thinking about Mom, I wanted to talk about her to Artie, but not in front of Mrs. Burt. It had been ages since Artie had even mentioned Mom. We hadn’t used the Economizer Extra-Strength Hand and Body Lotion since our first night at the cabin. So when Mrs. Burt got a little farther up the path, out of earshot, I asked him what he missed most about Mom now.
He looked at me, his face purple with berry juice. “Nothing.”
I remembered exactly how I felt when I was his age and separated from my mother. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.
“You do miss her, Artie. I know you do.”
“I don’t!” He stamped his foot on the ground. I was shocked, but also afraid of starting a fit so I didn’t push it.
And then I realized what I’d been doing wrong. Because I worried about making Artie cry, I didn’t talk to him about Mom.
Now I said, “Well, I miss Mom. I miss how she smells. I miss when she phones from school to say goodnight. I miss spinning around while she’s on the phone and falling on the floor and her getting all worried when she hears the thump. I miss doing homework with her. The way she holds her pencil in her teeth.”
I snuck a look at him. He was pretending not to hear.
“What about you?” I asked.
“I don’t remember.”
“I think you do. I think you remember sucking her hair to get to sleep. I think you remember peeking under her eye mask and growling.”
Artie swung around with a horrible cannibal face.
“Mom’s no good!” he screeched.
I froze. The berry I’d just picked fell to the ground. From the corner of my eye, I saw my hand lift high in the air. I wondered what it was going to do.
Hit him? Yes. I was about to hit my brother for what he’d just said about our mother.
I’d never hit a person in my life.
Then I heard a snort from Mrs. Burt. The weird thing was, she seemed to be coming back in the opposite direction from the one she’d left in. Coming just in time to see the slap that was itching at the end of my hand.
When she snorted a second time, I looked past Artie.
It wasn’t Mrs. Burt. A bear was lumbering toward us, its snout twitching in the air.
Everything went quiet. So quiet I could hear Mrs. Burt humming “I’ve Heard That Song Before” from where she was picking berries way up the path in the other direction. I think I even heard her berries plinking in the can.
The bear’s head thrashed from side to side and he reared up on his hind legs, enormous and black. He made an awful bear sound, not a snort at all, and Artie spun around. He didn’t seem surprised by the bear towering over him.
Then an angry chirring sounded.
“Watch out!” Artie screamed at the bear. “There’s a squirrel behind you!”
The bear spooked. It crashed to the ground and charged right past us, toward where Mrs. Burt was picking. A moment later we heard a scream, then a lot of noise, like trees ripping out by the roots. Mrs. Burt appeared, not quite running, puffing, her hand on her chest, the tin can swinging round her neck, blueberries flying everywhere.
By then Artie had collapsed on the path completely hysterical over the squirrel.
“Get the lotion!” Mrs. Burt roared, and without even thinking, I ran back to the cabin.
I couldn’t find it. It wasn’t in our room. I checked by the sink and on the shelves. The last place I looked was in Mrs. Burt’s room.
That’s where I found it, on her dresser. As I ran back, I noticed how light the bottle was.
THE PIE SIR Mrs. Burt baked that night was to celebrate King Artie’s wondrous deed, how he drove away the fearsome bear and the fearsome squirrel.
“Weren’t you frightened of that terrible bear?” Mrs. Burt asked him.
“No,” said Artie, shoveling in the pie. “It only had two legs.”
“I was terrified. I thought it had already killed you boys. I thought I’d find you eaten up on the path. What’s the matter, Curtis? Don’t you like the pie?”
I was poking at it with my fork.
“Not bad,” I said, and she laughed, thinking I was imitating Mr. Munro.
Actually, it was the best pie I ever tasted, but I was too mad to tell her.
That night I didn’t sit out and watch the fire with Mrs. Burt like I usually did. I got Artie to sleep and I stayed with him, listening for the owl that sometimes roosted close to the cabin. It sounded like somebody blowing over the mouth of a bottle.
When it was time to get ready for bed, Mrs. Burt shuffled inside, lit the kerosene lamp, brushed her teeth at the sink. I heard her slow steps carry her to her bedroom and the sounds she made as she undressed and put on her nightie.
Shuffle, shuffle. She came and stood in our doorway with the lamp, lifted it and shone it around the room. She was looking for the lotion. I sat up in my sleeping bag and rubbed my eyes, pretending that she had woken me with the light.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said, shining the lamp one more time at the dresser where the bottle of lotion used to be before she took it. “Go back to sleep.”
I lay down again, smiling and feeling with my feet for the bottle at the bottom of my sleeping bag.
THE NEXT DAY I thought she would come right out and ask me where the lotion had got to. But she didn’t. She didn’t have to because Artie got up in the night and went to her anyway. She had been rubbing herself with that lotion to lure him away. Now that she had him trained, she didn’t need it anymore.
I felt sorry for Mrs. Burt because she lost her little boy all those years ago. Now she was here with Artie and she wanted to give him all the love she couldn’t give her own son. Even though I didn’t like what she was doing, I understood.
But I was disappointed in Artie. When I stayed with the Pennypackers, whenever Mrs. Pennypacker tried to hug and kiss me, I would make myself as stiff as a piece of wood. I would turn my head to the side so her kisses could never reach me. All my kisses were for my mother, no matter what she’d done.
Artie had given up too easily on our mom.
That afternoon I asked Mrs. Burt again when I could swim across the lake. She asked if I thought I was ready, if I was strong enough. I told her yes.
“Show me then,” she said, plunging forward.
We started to swim side by side, away from the shore where Artie was in the water with the walker, pretending it was a canoe. I turned my head to take a breath and saw Mrs. Burt right beside me. We were swimming neck-and-neck. And because we were so close, I felt spurred on to swim harder, to race her. I fluttered my feet and drove my arms into the lake, cupping the water and throwing it behind me the way she had shown me, so I
would be faster.
Which I was, I saw, when I finally noticed that I was swimming alone. I stopped and looked around and saw Mrs. Burt’s turquoise bathing cap bobbing far behind me and Artie on shore so small I could have squashed him between my thumb and finger.
That was when I realized I was floating in the middle of the lake in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing under my treading feet but a terrible black bottomlessness.
I felt so small. I felt like a little kid who’d lost his mother, who was losing his little brother, too. I panicked and started to flail, then sink. I swallowed water, coughed it up. I went under.
I was drowning.
Then Mrs. Burt’s big wobbly arm reached out and flipped me on my back and started to tow me in.
SHE WOULDN’T SPEAK to me after that, she was so mad. She stayed in the cabin the rest of the afternoon smashing pans around, jamming sticks of wood into the stove, slamming the cast-iron door. Artie was so terrified he hid in our room. I went and sat in the outhouse and thought about Mom until Mrs. Burt called us to supper.
She had cooked so much food — biscuits, split pea soup, potato hash with tinned meat, sliced tomatoes from the garden, blueberry cobbler — all of it crowding out the table. But because it had been cooked in anger, it didn’t taste as good. Also, we weren’t hungry. Neither was she. She drank her tea and glared at us miserably lifting our forks to our faces.
“What?” she snapped.
We hung our heads and chewed and, when we had choked down all we could, I got up to clear the table.
“That’s it?” said Mrs. Burt.
“I’m not very hungry,” I said.
“Not hungry? I thought you’d be starving after that great big swim you had.”
I knew I had to apologize.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Burt. I’m sorry for swimming ahead. It was stupid. I know I scared you. I scared myself, too. I won’t do it again.”
She slammed her mug down. “Your little brother was all alone in the water! What if something happened to him? Who was I supposed to go to? Who was I supposed to choose?”
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