Flora's War

by Audrey Reimann

  Whitmore, to buy time and save face, ignored him. Robert went in close. ‘Say it again!’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, wee Scot …’, Whitmore sneered, but he did not finish the sentence. Robert hadn’t known his own strength or fury or whatever it was that drove his right fist into Whitmore’s face as his left caught him in the chest.

  Whitmore put up his own fists, but far too slowly. Robert hit him under the jaw and saw his eyes bulge with fear. Whitmore’s arms flailed wildly. He staggered back with Robert going after him like a terrier, landing every blow to his enemy’s body, to his face, his head. Whitmore fell to the floor as the door opened and Cutler and the mob came in.

  Robert turned on them. ‘Who’s next?’ he demanded in a voice that had suddenly decided to stick at the lower register it had been heading for over the last months. ‘You, Cutler?’

  Whitmore got to his feet, his hands to his head, tears streaming down his face, mingling with the blood from his nose. He went backwards, to his bed, saying nothing. Robert ignored him and went for Cutler. But one crack was all Cutler needed to turn tail and fly for the door, slightly ahead of the mob, who scrambled to get out before him.

  Robert stood tall. ‘That felt good!’ he said. Then, to himself, because he never spoke aloud these days about the imaginary friend – the other half who had never gone from his imagination – he murmured, ‘What about that, Sandy? How am I doing?’ Sandy had always been the dauntless one.

  1957

  ‘Sandy. Are you ready?’ Uncle John strode down through the clearing to the jetty on the lake, where Alexander was stowing the outboard motor on the boat.

  Alexander, Sandy now to Uncle John, waved, uncurled his six-foot-two scrawny, strong frame and hopped on to the jetty. He tied the boat fast to the ring and called, ‘I’m coming. We have four trucks to unload today. Can you spare a couple of hands from the sawmill?’

  Alexander loved it all, especially the weekends and holidays spent here at the cottage on Lake Paudash. Paudash was eight miles long and one mile wide and, the locals boasted, had a hundred miles of shoreline, counting all the bays and inlets. Thousands of lakes joined one another in a lacework of rivers and lakes and forest and grassland that stretched from almost the Arctic Circle to the Great Lakes, which separated what Alexander thought of as his homeland from the Rocky Mountains and America.

  Alexander spent Monday to Fridays at school, living in the house at Bancroft with Aunt Dorothy and Uncle John. Aunt Dorothy still ran the Bird’s Creek store and the house at Bancroft while Mom, treated as a partner in the business as well as the daughter of the family, helped Uncle John run the sawmill from her cottage here on Lake Paudash.

  ‘Cottage’ was a misleading name for the sprawling timber lodge set in fifty acres of forest on a raised site overlooking the lake. The house had four bedrooms, three living rooms, kitchen, bathroom and basement. Uncle John had built it for Mom – had given it to her in appreciation of all the work Mom did for them.

  Lake Paudash had been popular since the 1920s with people who could afford to work in the towns and along the York River and buy a weekend place where in summer they sailed, swam and fished and in winter, when the lakes froze solid for four months, skated, tobogganed and skied.

  Alexander stood up as Uncle John reached the jetty and called out, ‘The Polanski brothers will unload.’ The mill employed thirty Poles who had stayed on after the war. Many of them had Canadian wives.

  ‘Good,’ Alexander said. The Poles were hard workers.

  ‘Were you hoping to go out in the boat?’ John asked as they went towards the Dodge and the fifteen-mile journey to the sawmill at Bird’s Creek. ‘I haven’t messed up your day, have I? Your Aunt Dorothy will have a meal ready for us all at midday at the store if the work takes longer than a morning.’ The mill workers’ week finished at twelve o’clock on Sundays.

  ‘OK.’ Alexander grinned. ‘I’m just checking the engine for Peter.’ Peter Murray, Uncle John’s son, a paediatrician at Toronto General Hospital, was staying with them at the cottage for the weekend.

  ‘He arrived?’ Uncle John put the Dodge into first gear and drove slowly and carefully over the rough forest tracks towards the main road. ‘A whole weekend! He’s not usually here for more than a day.’

  ‘Well, it’s not every weekend you call a family conference,’ Alex replied. ‘Gonna tell me what it’s about?’

  Uncle John ignored his question and started to sing to himself. At this point Alexander switched off. He was too much of a musician to be able to concentrate on anything while listening to Uncle John singing out of tune, out of time and the wrong words. He looked at his uncle, at the shock of curly white hair, the ruddy face, strong hands on the wheel and wished as he did every day of his life that Uncle John had been his real father instead of simply the man who had taken him and his mom in, and whom both of them loved and honoured for the decent, good man he was. He said, ‘Does Peter know what it’s all about?’

  Uncle John grinned and sang louder. Alexander smiled, but it was difficult to look convincing. Alexander’s latest love was the guitar, though he could play every musical instrument he’d ever tried. He didn’t boast: he was simply a musician.

  ‘Have you made up your mind?’ Uncle John broke off from singing.

  ‘About university? Yes. I’m not going.’ Mom had some bee in her bonnet about his not falling behind, as if he were in some unspecified competition with a contemporary. ‘I’ll tell Mom soon.’

  ‘Sure it’s the right decision to go into the sawmill?’

  ‘I am sure.’ Alexander loved everything about the life Uncle John led: the pace, the independence of knowing you stood or fell by your own efforts. Even if he were to find what he had always sought, the perfect partner for music, singing and playing, becoming stars of the music scene, he’d always need the touchstone, the security of home. He said, ‘Mom, too. She’s never been happier than she is now with her own place. It was real generous of you.’

  ‘Nonsense. Your mom was an angel sent from Heaven to us. She’s the daughter we never had. Besides,’ he said, ‘your mom does the books, the buying and selling, the wages and the hiring and firing. The sawmill did only half as much before she took charge.’

  So the family conference was not about the sawmill. Uncle John began to sing again. He loved to keep things from them – keep them guessing, as he put it.

  Alexander hated secrets. He couldn’t say so to Uncle John but it drove him crazy at times when he got to wondering and asking, pestering Mom for answers. He’d say, ‘Who was my dad?’ for he thought Mom was lying when she said that she and his dad had married under a weeping tree, exchanging vows which they both swore were for ever, and telling him that Alexander must not think he was illegitimate, because in Scotland your word was your bond.

  ‘I don’t care about illegitimacy,’ he said. ‘It happens all the time in Canada. Men in the outback couldn’t get away from their farms or logging limits for a religious ceremony. They wanted brides to sew and keep house and they chose them or had them chosen by the guardians at the orphanages. They would marry them when they had the time. No, it’s not that. But how do you know my father died at sea? You won’t even tell me his name. Did he desert us, Mom?’ If his father had deserted him and Mom then he would find out who and where this man was and make him sorry. That he would. Make no mistake.

  Uncle John stopped singing as he swung the Dodge into the yard where men were working, adding to the great stacks of cut timber that half-filled the place. He said, ‘Don’t worry about a thing, Sandy. I’ll put in a word for you tonight with your mom. You don’t have to go to university if that’s what you’ve decided.’

  Flora came up the forest track from her swim in the lake, her wet hair like bronze ropes hanging down over her lightly tanned shoulders almost to the waist of her navy-blue swimsuit. There was something about the air here, or the sunlight that came filtering, green and honey-soft, through the trees, turning her skin a pale sandy colour wi
th none of the freckles that had plagued her childhood.

  She saw Peter, tall and fair and ridiculously boyish in appearance, though he was thirty-seven, standing on the deck, leaning over, watching her.

  She waved and called to him: ‘Lazybones. I thought you wanted to swim.’ She reached the cottage and stood looking up at him before climbing the steps to the side entrance, for the house was built on two levels on the hillside. Peter was barefoot, wearing shorts and a sloppy joe. The fair hairs on his arms shone golden in the morning sunshine.

  He said, ‘I’ve made coffee. Want some?’

  ‘Yes.’ She ran up the steps, slipped into the bathrobe she kept hanging in the bathroom by the door and went into the kitchen. Peter had made a big breakfast of fruit, scrambled eggs on toast and waffles with maple syrup. He’d set a place for her and she sat, sipping piping-hot coffee while he served her. ‘This is a treat,’ she said. ‘You know what? It might be a good idea to marry you after all.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, I don’t know what this conference is all about, but I’ll bet a dollar to a piece of toast that Dad and Mother will suggest it.’

  ‘… as if the idea had only just occurred to them!’ Flora laughed too.

  This urging of them to marry had been going on year after year. They liked one another a lot but neither of them thought that liking was a strong enough foundation to base marriage upon.

  Peter became serious. ‘Flora, you still love the man you left behind in Scotland. I’ve never fallen wildly in love in my life. But we are both single and getting on in years. I’m thirty-seven. You’re thirty-three. We have to take the plunge some time, you know.’

  Peter went to the boat while Flora cleared the dishes then went to the bathroom to shower and change into her jeans and T-shirt. She thought about marriage to the serious, work-centred Peter and she knew she would have to tell Peter everything if she were to marry him. Flora could not tell anyone, ever, about Robert.

  Alexander was the living image of his father, though not yet as broad and strong. She never need wonder what Robert looked like, she reflected, though she was starved of news of her son. Nanny had never been able to send photos of him for obvious reasons, and for the last few years had written little about him, except to say that they had ambitions for him that included Fettes College and university.

  Much later, after supper, they all sat around the pine tables on the deck, watching the boats bobbing on the water by the jetty, while around them tiny moths fluttered about the lanterns on the deck’s rail. Tied up for their use was Peter’s canoe, the little sailing dinghy and the Dispro, the motor boat with a disappearing propeller that Flora used to cross the lake for gas and kerosene and boat supplies.

  They knew something serious was afoot when Uncle John brought from the trunk of the Dodge sherry for the ladies, a bottle of Glenfiddich whisky for the men, with soda water to dilute the whisky for Alexander.

  ‘Now then, you guys,’ Uncle John began. Peter and Flora exchanged smiles. Uncle John poured, then sat, then stood, and finally, leaning against the rail of the veranda, with fireflies dancing about his shock of white hair, said, ‘I’m sixty-seven. It’s time to retire. Dorothy and I want to see a few places before we die. While we are fit. Now, any suggestions?’

  ‘You mean – where will you travel?’ Flora asked.

  ‘No. We’ll travel in America for six months. Then Dot’s old country.’ Of course, Aunt Dorothy had been born in Edinburgh. Flora felt her face go pale.

  Suppose they turned up to see Nanny at Ingersley when Robert was there? It would be a terrible shock for them. She must write to Nanny and tell her to visit them here, in Canada. If she did, then there would be no need for Aunt Dorothy and Uncle John to go to Ingersley.

  ‘We can’t carry on doing this work for ever,’ Aunt Dorothy said while she handed round marzipan fruits. ‘And we couldn’t have dreamed of it but for Flora. She’s the backbone of the family.’ She added nervously, while giving a wistful look towards Flora, ‘If Flora and Peter were married …’

  Peter grinned and Flora gave him a quick wink and smiled.

  Alexander said, ‘Well, I am ready to leave school. Any time.’

  ‘No!’ said Flora. ‘I want you to go to university.’

  ‘I’ve made up my mind, Mom. There’s nothing I want to do that I’ll need a degree for.’ Alexander looked at Uncle John for support. ‘Mom and I could run the store and the sawmill.’

  Flora said, ‘We’ve talked round the subject for months. Alexander should have an education. What do you all think?’

  Uncle John said, ‘There was no choice in my day. It was work or starve.’ He took a sip of whisky and looked sidelong at Alexander as if to confirm that he was indeed being helpful. ‘I remember when the logs for Bancroft Hydro came out of Bruton Swamp in Haliburton County. At Sandy’s age I was navigating the chain of lakes above Baptiste, overseeing our logs being bagged in huge chained-together boomsticks and towed to the High Falls dam. At Baptiste’s foot they were channelled down a man-made chute …’, he took a quick sip of whisky and before anyone could stop him went on fast, ‘… past Crooked Rapids and Flat Rapids it was smooth sailing on the York until we reached the hydro mill just north of Bancroft …’

  ‘Yes, Dad!’ Peter said finally. ‘But this is now. And you made sure that Jake and I had an education.’

  ‘I don’t want it!’ Alexander got to his feet and went to stand beside his hero. ‘I want to work. I want to work in the lumber business, like Uncle John.’

  Flora knew that nothing would shift him. He was a young man of decision and he’d made up his mind. She made one last stab. ‘If you don’t want university, then how about music school?’ Alexander was talented – more talented than she was. He could play almost every instrument – not to concert standard, but well enough to be first violin in the school orchestra and the accompanist at her own music society rehearsals.

  Alexander played at the Scottish nights, and when he got up there on stage or at the centre of the gathering his face was a study in out-of-this-world enjoyment. It was as if he were lit from within. Now he did not even smile as he replied, ‘Mom, I’m never going to be Hank Williams. And unless I find someone as good at singing as I am at playing – unless I find a partner – I’ll play for my own enjoyment.’

  ‘And ours,’ said Aunt Dorothy loyally.

  ‘Of course.’ He smiled. ‘Once we’ve thrashed this out, I’ll play for you, Aunt Dorothy.’

  ‘I give in,’ Flora said. She stood up. ‘Carry on. You know my views. I’m going to put out the food for the racoons.’

  She had nailed a little platform to one of the trees where the light from the house glowed, slanting in the moonlight, into the forest. On the platform she put the remainder of the supper: meat and cheese, biscuits and apples. Alexander’s words had struck her like a knife wound. Nanny had told her that Robert had a lovely singing voice.

  She went back into the house and waited, watching through the glass the pointed, striped face of the heavy racoon who lowered himself slowly down the tree to the platform, where he sat, gnawing the food that he held in one little paw. She could hear every word they spoke on the deck. They were becoming voluble now. How could she and Alexander manage the mill? Should they sell the store and keep the mill because Alexander wanted it? Would Peter need the nest egg that a sale would bring? And Peter, laughing and saying that it was the parents who needed money and how about this … they keep the house, sell the store and leave the sawmill in the capable hands of the holy three – the mill manager, Flora and Alexander – for the next two years to see how it panned out.

  Flora watched the racoon, who seemed unconcerned that he was spilling food from his platform. Suddenly and at great speed he climbed the tree and was out of sight within seconds.

  Peter was behind her. He said, ‘Come out on the lake with me tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled and gave him a quick, friendly kiss on the cheek. ‘Thank you. I’d like that.’ />
  The following afternoon Peter took her out on the lake in his sailing dinghy as they had done dozens of times before, sometimes staying ashore in one of the bays, watching the wildlife – the beavers, chickadees and deer – and listening to the loons whose eerie cries, like wild laughter, echoed across the water.

  There were a dozen other boats on the lake, and the trees were aflame, bronze, orange, yellow and red among the dark green pines. At lunchtime, Peter tied up in one of the little coves and helped her ashore. They sat and made their picnic and watched a colony of beavers that at first set up a din, banging their tails on the water to let the others know that humans were there, before they returned to gnawing through tree branches, harvesting little pieces of trees before the frosts of late November.

  ‘They store small pieces to eat in winter,’ Peter told her when she said that their den looked like a muddled pile of brushwood. ‘It’s hollow inside above the water line. Their exit is underwater.’

  Flora thought she had seen everything. Now, suddenly, she caught hold of Peter’s arm and froze. ‘Turn very slowly,’ she said. High above them on the crest of the forested hill, looking down on them as if they were nothing more than water rats, were two bears; one an adult, the other a youngster. Peter had not brought his gun, but the boat was only feet away and the forest was silent.

  ‘They won’t come down to us,’ he said calmly. He was right, and when the bears had lumbered away, as silently as they had appeared, Peter kept his arm about her and pulled her close.

  She looked up at him and saw that his eyes were shining very brightly. He was nervous, for the hands that were holding her were shaking. He bent his head down to hers and kissed her without passion but with tenderness and affection.

  Flora moved away a little. She did not want him to think that she was any nearer to falling in love with him. She knew he had kissed her for all the old-fashioned reasons – they were a man and a woman, without attachments, in a remote and beautiful place, and the urge to make something more than a mere picnic of the day had overcome him. But she was certain that he felt no more than that for her.