I decided I would tell people about the eye patch. Do you remember that? I think I was about six. I don’t even remember why I had to wear that stupid patch. All I remember is that Dr. Milne said I had to wear an eye patch and that I refused. Nothing was going to make me wear that patch. I cried all the way home from the doctor’s office. When we got into the house, you sat me down at the kitchen table.
You pulled out two eye patches, and you put the first one over your own eye. You said we would have a deal. You said that I would wear my patch until Dr. Milne told me I could take it off. And you would wear yours until I told you to take it off. I said, “But people are going to look at you funny.” And you said, “Well, if they do, I guess I can talk to you about it. You might know how that feels.” Do you remember how we decorated them? I think you drew flowers on mine. I don’t remember. But I remember I drew a huge, gross, red eye on yours. And you wore it for a whole week before I let you take it off. You wore it to work, and when you took the car to the garage, and out to dinner at the Turlingtons’. I can’t believe I made you do that.
If I had to talk at your funeral, I would tell people the story about the eye patch. Then I would tell them that’s the kind of dad you were. That you would do anything for me and Sam. Even if it made you look silly.
I love you, Daddy.
Steph
P.S . I don’t want you to die. If you die I am going to kill you.
Dave took Stephanie’s letter to the store. It is still in the drawer by the cash. Sometimes when he reads it, it makes him happy. Sometimes it makes him cry.
Mary hasn’t been back in the store, although she has been over for dinner. All in all, it was a successful evening.
Dave still has the coffin. It’s still in the back of the store. But it is not covered anymore. There is a display of forty-fives in it: teenage death songs.
Dear Mr. McLean,
My father and I are planning to spend the summer weekends renovating our cottage, but it seems a shame that no one will be able to get up there during the week to continue the work. My dad pointed out that as your show is aired by a public broadcaster, we, as taxpayers, are essentially coughing up the dough for your salary. With that in mind, we were hoping that you could make yourself available for a few days this summer. I’ve enclosed directions to the cabin.
Jeff
Dear Jeff,
Well, when you put it that way, it is hard not to agree.
However you might want to read the following story before we go ahead with this arrangement.
PETIT LAC NOIR
No one ever gasps in awe when they see the Laurentian Mountains for the first time. Rather than express awe, first-time visitors, who have spent a morning being toured through Les Laurentides, are more apt to turn to whoever has been driving them around and ask that mortifying question so many have asked before them, “When do we get to the mountains?”
The Laurentians are, admittedly, more hills than mountains. They roll, rather than tower, but they roll with a dignity that befits one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world. The Laurentians, and the pleasant lakes that dot the hills, make you feel that both comfort and constancy are to be had in this changing world.
Ahh. Tous les lacs des Laurentides: Lac Marois, Lac Saint-Amour, Lac des Seize Îles. Et tous les little lakeside villages: Saint-Sauveur, Saint-Rémi, Val des Bois and, of course, Notre-Dame des Plaines—hardly a village, really. One gas station, two general stores, a Catholic church and a handful of cottages.
Notre-Dame des Plaines and Petit Lac Noir. The little village, and the little lake lapping just over the hill, just behind the church, where Jean-François Clément and his family have whiled away summer afternoons since, well, since Jean-François was a boy. And before.
Every Friday at 5:30, precisely, Jean-François, a small-animal vet, closes his office. If you were to arrive at say 5:35 and find him in the parking lot, he would say, Well, I would like to help you, mais le bureau est fermé. And he would give you, or whoever it was standing there holding their sick cat or limping dog, directions to the nearest emergency clinic.
He would, incidentally, mean it. Jean-François is nothing if not both earnest and honest. He would like to help you. But how could he? At 5:30 on a Friday? Five-thirty on a Friday is when he picks up his wife, Marie-Josée, and they drive, like his father did before him, to the cottage for the weekend. They stop on the way of course, like his father did, at the boulanger in Shawbridge to pick up a country loaf and a baguette.
The idea of phoning Marie-Josée and leaving later wouldn’t occur to Jean-François. Five-thirty is when you leave.
The cottage has been in Jean-François’ family for five generations. For five generations, Cléments have been learning lessons from the mountains. And what they have learned is to pray at the altar of tradition.
The cottage has been passed down like a religious relic. Nothing about it has changed. Not the way you get there, nor the things you do when you arrive. It is a cathedral of constancy, although you mustn’t get the idea that it’s run down. It has been kept up perfectly. Though not updated. It is one of those endangered species. A cottage in the old style.
Well, there has been one change. After much heated discussion, and threats, and pressure from his mother—after a crusade, you might say—Jean-François’ father did install an indoor toilet; but he left the old outhouse standing, and whenever he was angry with his wife, he would revert to using it, grumbling out the kitchen door even in the middle of the night. So there is an indoor toilet. But there is also a woodstove and a summer kitchen. Five generations of believers. And Jean-François is a faithful member of the church.
Marie-Josée, who has hankered for a hot-water tank at the cottage, and maybe even a shower, has had problems with this. They have argued about this, Jean-François and his wife.
“Ils sont tous morts. Tes parents, ton grand-papa,” she has said. “C’est à ton tour.”
Jean-François will hear none of it. The Laurentians, you might say, suit him to a T.
To put it precisely, like the mountains, he is not a man who embraces change. For Jean-François, Je me souviens, the words on the licence plate of his Ford station wagon—the exact same car his father favoured—aren’t a political statement. For Jean-François, Je me souviens is a way of life.
Every Friday at 5:30 precisely he and Marie-Josée drive north. And every summer, during the construction holiday at the end of July, they spend two weeks on the coast of Maine. Just like he did when he was a boy.
The ocean, as his father used to say, is something you can count on.
When he goes to Maine, Jean-François walks two miles along the beach every day. At eight in the morning and again at four in the afternoon—the hours when you won’t get burned. He collects sea glass and driftwood. And he brings back one piece of each every summer. He began his collection when he was a boy. The sea glass goes on the windowsill. The driftwood lines the path to the lake. He appreciates the way the weather has worked the glass and the wood. He has no time for so-called artists who hack at a piece of wood to create a sculpture in just a few weeks. Or months.
Jean-François loves Maine.
Well, that’s not totally true. He used to love it. Things have been changing in Maine. The old highway is getting busier. Franchise joints and condos are popping up everywhere. The truth is, he has grown tired of it lately, and these days the thing he loves most of all about Maine is the Saturday in August that he and Marie-Josée return to the cottage.
After all, is there anything more pleasant, or more reassuring, than an afternoon at Petit Lac Noir? Marie-Josée on the chaise longue, reading Marie Claire and sipping homemade lemonade; Jean-François trimming the front lawn. The lawn his great-grandfather planted and cared for— keeping it up is Jean-François’ pride and joy.
That’s how they spent the last Saturday of this August. Most of it, anyway. Jean-François puttering in the shed, Marie-Josée reading magazines, although after lunch Mar
ie-Josée did set Jean-François to work in the garden, a huge bed of wildflowers that stretches right across the front of the cottage.
“I want it looking its very best,” she said. “Mais oui! Remember who is coming.”
They were expecting guests. A younger couple whom they befriended years ago and hadn’t seen in … could it be that long. Ce n’est pas possible … a decade?
At five o’clock precisely, Jean-François came in, took off his gardening gloves and said, “Eh ben.”
Marie-Josée glanced at the clock over the kitchen door. It was time for his Saturday swim. Jean-François has a dip every Saturday at five—until the Saturday after Labour Day, when he folds his trunks and puts them away until St-Jean Baptiste.
She smiled at him and reached out and touched his face. The scars on his cheek were raised and a little inflamed.
It was hot. He had been working hard. She kissed him on the forehead and said, “Je pense que je te joindrai.”
The scars were one of the great lessons in Jean-François’ life. He got them in an altercation with a deranged cockatoo.
For the first ten years of his practice, he didn’t treat birds at his clinic. But after a protracted campaign waged by his receptionist, an impatient and flighty girl, he relented and agreed to treat the cockatoo, the first and last bird he ever admitted.
He had stayed late, as was his habit on a Tuesday night, Tuesday night being the night he does the books. So he was, as fate would have it, without backup when he went down to the basement to check the assorted dogs, cats, rodents and the solitary bird, which appeared to be going bald, losing feathers to some unknown malaise.
He was holding the cockatoo up to his face, and whispering to it in that ridiculous baby style that birds seem to encourage, thinking while he did that he might have been too inflexible about birds, that perhaps his receptionist had been right all along and he should consider apologizing, and wondering what he might possibly say to her, when the cockatoo abruptly turned and said something to him that sounded disturbingly adult. Something you would never hear in a church.
And then the bird sank his beak into Jean-François’ cheek and wouldn’t let go. Or perhaps couldn’t.
Both Jean-François and the cockatoo panicked when they realized what had happened, and the two of them began flapping wildly, the bird shredding Jean-François’ cheek with his claws. Until Jean-François realized panic wasn’t going to get him anywhere, and he stumbled into the O.R., grabbed a needle that he had prepared for the next day’s surgery and plunged it into the bird’s back, anesthetizing it. Then he drove himself to Emergency at Hotel-Dieu with the drugged cockatoo dangling from his face like an earring.
This was over thirty years ago.
The intern who removed the bird still tells the story at dinner parties.
“I thought the guy was crazy,” he will begin. “He was barely coherent. He was screaming, ‘It’s going to wake up. It’s going to wake up.’
“I said, ‘That parrot isn’t going to wake up. That parrot is dead.’
“‘No. No,’ he said. ‘It’s just resting.’”
Over the years the doctor has embellished the story, of course.
“It was a huge parrot,” he says, holding his hands about two feet apart. “And it was dangling from his cheek. At first I thought it was jewellery. But it was a parrot.”
These days, in his version the bird does wake up halfway through the operation and there is a heroic struggle.
In fact, the bird slept through it all. In fact, even after he had removed it, the intern still believed the bird was stuffed, or dead, and he had put it down on a shelf, and he was stitching up Jean-François when the bird did wake. The rest is more or less true the way he tells it—he and Jean-François trapped in the triage with this crazed and angry cockatoo dive-bombing them, the three of them crashing about, and the large nurse from the Gaspé who burst in and grabbed the cockatoo right out of the air, like it was nothing more than a fly and snapped its neck.
Jean-François’ wound got infected and healed poorly. And he learned his lesson. It wasn’t a new one. More a confirmation than a lesson, really. But there you have it. Plain as day. Change never led to any good. From then on he stuck to dogs and cats. He went to the cottage on the weekends, and to Old Orchard Beach in Maine every July.
The scars slowly faded with the years, and these days only announce themselves when Jean-François is tired or upset. He does his best to avoid both.
Dave met Jean-François the summer after he and Morley were married. They met when Dave and Morley rented a cottage just down the road from the Cléments. That was the summer Dave and Morley had already spent what little vacation money they had on a trip to Holland. They had flown there for a weekend in February so Morley could fulfill one of her lifetime dreams and skate along the frozen canals.
Dave heard about it—the cottage down the road from the Cléments’ place—from an old friend in Montreal.
“You’d love it there,” he said. “No one will bother you, and it would be cheap.”
This was, as I said, a summer when cheap was important.
His friend called back a week later. “You can have it for free,” he said. “All you have to do is a few chores.”
“Cool,” said Dave.
They left at the beginning of August, in Morley’s old orange and white Volkswagen van. The trip took almost ten hours. They went along old Highway 7, stopping every couple of hours—for coffee, for a swim; at a cheese factory outside of Perth; for cheeseburgers at a little stand in the middle of nowhere. They shared the driving, the way they shared just about everything in those days. They crossed the Ottawa River at Hawkesbury and from there rattled north onto Highway 329 and into the grey-blue Laurentians.
As they pulled in to Notre-Dame des Plaines, Van Morrison was cranked on the cassette deck, “Brown Eyed Girl,” and Dave was pounding the steering wheel in time to the music. Morley was squinting at a piece of paper.
“Okay,” she said, reaching out and turning the music down. “It says to make the following turns: à gauche, à gauche, à droite.”
Dave said, “Huh?”
Morley said, “That means left, left, right … right?”
“Right,” said Dave.
“Right,” said Morley. “But not right away. Gauche, gauche, then right.”
“Right,” said Dave.
“But first left, left,” said Morley.
“Then right … right?” said Dave.
“Right,” said Morley.
This went on for several minutes more than it should have, and they were feeling pretty goofy as they passed the gas station, and the general store, and the white church, and eventually pulled onto a dirt road with a bunch of cottages.
The road had two ruts down each side and a strip of grass down the middle. It was narrow enough that tree branches were brushing the side of the van. Dave slapped the steering wheel and cranked the music back up.
“This is going to be great,” he said.
They passed a few cottages and then saw the lake for the first time and a small, neat cottage with pale blue trim.
“Well, that was easy,” said Dave as he pulled in to the driveway.
Easy until they lifted the welcome mat and there was no key where the key was supposed to be. Morley stood there for a moment, looking around, and then she slid her hand under a planter on the step beside the mat. She smiled. There was the key.
The house was in much better shape than Dave had been led to believe. It was old, to be sure, but not rundown like his friend had warned. It was clean and neat and just about perfect.
“There’s a wood stove,” said Dave. “This is perfect.”
Dave’s friend had sent them a note explaining what they were expected to do in exchange for their free rent: take down the little wall between the kitchen and the living room and dig up the grass lawn so the owners could put in a garden.
“You think this is the wall they want down?” said Mo
rley. She was pointing at the door between the kitchen and dining room.
Dave shrugged. They had a week. Time enough for work tomorrow.
“I’ll get the bags,” said Dave.
They found a bedroom and changed into their bathing suits. They headed across the lawn to the lake.
Morley said, “That’s where they want the garden, I guess.”
“Et voilà,” said Dave.
They stood at the end of the dock gazing out at the lake. Then Morley touched him on the back and dove without testing the water. She dove clean and straight and flat. When she came up, her long hair was floating behind her. It was the first time Dave had seen her in water. The first time they had swum together.
She turned and flicked her hair and looked back. “It’s beautiful,” she said.
Dave stuck his foot in the lake and yanked it out.
“It’s freezing,” he said.
Tuesday they slept until ten, had a big breakfast on the porch, went swimming, ate lunch on the dock, read on the dock and napped on the dock. Morley was reading Alice Munro for the first time in her life. Dave was reading Rolling Stone.
After supper they went for a walk further down the road. All the way to the end where a little stream flowed into the lake.
They talked about each cottage they passed; some in good repair, a few neglected; one with a sagging moss-covered roof, one a brand-new A-frame that seemed glaringly out of place.
“I like ours the best,” said Morley.
On Wednesday morning Morley made pancakes. They ate them on the porch. After they had cleaned up she said, “We should get to it.”
Taking down a wood wall in an unfinished cottage shouldn’t be too complicated. Dave began slowly and carefully, standing on a chair, gently prying the tongue-and-groove wallboards free with a hammer. By late afternoon, covered in sweat, his patience spent, he was stripped to the waist, ripping down the wall with a crowbar he had found in the woodshed.
While Dave attacked the wall, Morley was working on the garden.
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