by William Bell
We stayed crouched behind the gravestone for a few seconds. Then, picking up his notebook, John stood up.
“Whew!” he said, trying to sound brave. “That was close.”
“Come on, let’s go.”
“No way. Not yet. I’m going to take a look.”
I knew he’d say that. If there was one characteristic that John had that was bigger than being organized, it was curiosity. I knew I’d never drag him away from there, no matter how cold we were or how terrified we were, until he’d seen what he wanted to see. The best thing to do was give in and try to get it over with as soon as I could.
Stumbling over the uneven ground, we walked slowly toward the gravestone the man had been sitting on. It looked brand new. The printing was clear and John started to copy it into his notebook, moving the pencil slowly with stiff fingers. The wet ground in front of the stone was freshly dug. Not one blade of grass on it, not even a dead leaf, not even a mark. I made sure I didn’t step in it.
But there was something.
“Look, John.”
I picked up the little leather bag I had seen hanging from the man’s belt. It was soft as wool and decorated with quills and hundreds of tiny coloured beads. There was some mud stuck to the bottom. The bag was warm.
“Hey, great,” John said. “Put it in your pocket and we’ll check it out later.”
“Do you think we should? Maybe we should leave it here for him.”
“Naw, take it.”
I didn’t argue. I wanted to get out of there.
John snapped his notebook shut and stuffed it into his windbreaker pocket.
“Okay, let’s go,” he said, taking his compass from the other pocket. He looked at it and pointed to the trees on the opposite side of the clearing from where the Indian had disappeared. “That way.”
By the time we got to the trees we were almost running, but we had to slow to a walk to enter the bush. John went first. As soon as we stepped into the trees it was summer again.
About twenty minutes later we were back at the shore, sweaty, panting, our heads surrounded by clouds of mosquitoes. We dragged the rowboat down the rock ledge and into the water. We quickly put on our life jackets and climbed aboard. I sat in the back this time, facing John, so I wouldn’t have to look at the island. John rowed fast, leaving the mosquitoes behind, until Chiefs’ Island was a dark shape in the distance. Then he rested the oars on the gunwales and sat hunched over, panting.
“You and your big ideas,” I complained.
“What do you mean?” he panted. He gave me a big dumb smile that showed almost all his braces. “That was great! It was fun. I told you it would be a great caper to start off the summer holidays.”
He lifted his pack onto his knees. “Want a chocolate bar? I think we’ve earned one.”
I knew there was no use talking to him, so I sat there chewing on a Three Musketeers, looking at the lights of the town. The Bingo Cross was still hanging brightly above the hill. The easy breeze felt good on my hot face.
I was thinking hard. Because none of what we saw made any sense. I wondered if I should mention what I was thinking to John. But he had probably picked up on the same things I had.
“John, did you notice anything strange about that man?”
“Yup.” He wasn’t panting anymore. “I know exactly what you’re going to say.” He held up his hand and started ticking off the points on his fingers.
“One, why was it cool in the graveyard and not in the bush?”
“Cool? It wasn’t cool. It was freezing. My toes are still—”
“Quiet, Karen, I’m on a roll, here.”
“Roll, my foot. You’ve only said one—”
“Two,” he cut in, “why was he dressed in traditional clothes?”
“And why wasn’t he cold? He was half naked.”
“Right. Four, why couldn’t we see his breath? Five, how come he was so easy to see? I mean, it was as if there was a light shining on him.”
John reached out and took the oar handles again. He had stopped counting. He began to row.
“All of those things have scientific explanations, of course. We just have to think about them some more.”
John had stopped counting too soon. I guessed he hadn’t noticed after all. When the man had climbed down from the gravestone and taken two steps toward us, he would have had to step in the fresh earth of the new grave.
But there had been no footprints.
Saturday Morning
I woke up about five minutes after I went to bed. At least that’s what it felt like. But when I crawled to the bottom of the bed and yanked back on the curtains I was drowned in bright yellow sunlight.
Morning. I blinked a few times and checked my clock radio. Seven thirty. Then I groaned. I knew I would never get to sleep again. Not after the dream I had. But I crawled back under the blanket anyway.
It was one of those dreams that was creepy and crazy at the same time. I saw myself wake up in the middle of the night. I was wearing one of those long flowing nightgowns that all the women in the Dracula movies wear. My room was washed in silver moonlight. I glided over to the window and stared out across the lake for a moment. Chiefs’ Island shone silver, as if it was lit up. There was a power seeping from the island, like thick black smoke, that held me in a spell.
I slowly picked up the little leather bag from the windowsill, not wanting to, but forced to do it by … something. I cupped it in my palm and gently pulled at the drawstrings.
I took out a rubber ball—red, white and blue—and bounced it a couple of times. It made no sound. I tossed it in the air and it disappeared. I slipped my fingers into the neck of the little bag again and lifted out a big white plastic toy airplane. I let go of it and it flew off. Then I took a pocket watch out of the bag, dragging it by the heavy gold chain. The watch had no hands. Even in the dream I wondered how all those things fit into that little bag.
Holding the watch by the chain, I swung it like a pendulum, chanting, “It’s time. It’s time.” But it wasn’t my voice. Time for what, I thought.
And that’s when I woke up.
I got out of bed for the second time that morning, took off my pajamas, and pulled on my new bathing suit. The only thing that was going to get the cobwebs out of my head was a quick swim. Mom and Dad let us swim alone in the morning as long as we didn’t go in above our waists. So far I had never broken the rule, even though I had been tempted a couple of times.
I went down the back stairs and into the kitchen, which is under my room. There’s a big window and when we’re eating or just having a cup of tea we can look out across the wide lawn, past the weeping willow and the boathouse over the green water. This morning I didn’t look.
“Morning, Karen.”
My mom was sitting at the table, sipping tea. In front of her was a small china plate with one piece of dry toast on it.
“Did you sleep all right last night? You look like you were up all night playing tennis.” She smiled and took a bite of the toast and dabbed the crumbs from her lips with a cotton napkin.
I rubbed my eyes, trying to squeeze the puffiness away.
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
I poured myself some tea and sat down. Like my mother, I drink it clear. I sipped noisily and waited for her to frown. She did. I smiled at her and she smiled back. It was a game we played. My mother hated it when you made noises when you ate.
She was wearing a loose white blouse with a thin gold chain around her neck. She had on pearl earrings with gold barrettes holding her long blonde hair away from her face. My mother wore very little makeup. She looked smashing. That was one of her words. Smashing. I wished for the millionth time in my life that I had inherited her looks and John had taken after Dad. Instead, I was the stocky redhead with the freckles.
Sometimes I wondered why Mom dressed so nice when she spent most of the day wearing one of those long white coats the phony doctors in the TV commercials wear. She was a radiologist over at Sol
diers’ Memorial Hospital.
My Dad came into the kitchen from the study, carrying a big white coffee mug with The World’s Greatest Dad written on it in red. He wasn’t dressed up at all. He had on cut-offs, his leather sandals, and a tank top. His muscles bulged all over the place.
“Morning, Karen.”
Dad filled the mug up with coffee from the pot on the back burner. He always had a coffee resting on his drafting table. I thought he had coffee in his veins instead of blood. He leaned against the stove and took a sip. Quietly. He looked lost in thought—probably stuck on his picture book about the fat magician. After a moment he stepped over to the table and gave Mom a kiss. Then he wandered back into the study.
When he had left I said, “Mom, do you believe in ghosts?”
She put the last bit of toast into her mouth and dabbed with the napkin.
“No, I don’t think so, dear.”
“How come? I mean, a lot of other people do.”
She took a sip of her tea, holding the white china cup with both hands so that it seemed to hang between her fingertips.
“I’m a scientist, Karen. All my education has been in the sciences. I’ve never read a word in my whole life that even began to prove the existence of the supernatural.”
“Oh,” I said. What else could I say?
“Ghosts, miracles—all those things are things some people like or need to believe in. But that doesn’t make them real.”
She took another sip of tea and put her cup down on the saucer. “I wrote out a menu for you kids for when Dad and I are away. Try to follow it this time.”
“It’s John who won’t, Mom. You know what a piglet he is.”
Mom laughed. Her laugh is really funny. She always looks so sophisticated and sort of … formal, but when she laughs she sounds like a ten-year-old girl giggling.
“And,” she went on, “I’ve put some sanitary pads on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet in the bath—”
“Mom!” I hissed, shooting a look down the hall towards Dad’s study. “Dad—”
“It’s best to be prepared,” she said. “You never know.”
My mom. She thought I couldn’t wait to get my first period. I couldn’t blame her, I guess. I mean, the girls in my class didn’t talk about anything else. The whole grade eight year was like a big competition. Girls who hadn’t had theirs yet kept their mouths shut—or lied. Girls who had theirs strutted around like queen bees, talking about different brands of pads and pretending everything was so inconvenient. The whole topic bugged me.
“Try not to be so worried, dear. It’s part of growing up, becoming a woman. It’s—”
“Let’s just drop it, okay, Mom?” I said harshly. A little too harshly, I thought. Mom looked hurt.
“All right, all right. There’s no need to talk like that.”
Mom stood and carried her dishes over to the sink. A few minutes later I kissed her goodbye—she was leaving for work—and took my tea out into the yard. The grass felt cool on my feet, although most of the dampness had already been cooked away by the hot morning sun. I walked out onto the narrow dock, feeling it creak and sway a little under me. I put my tea down on the boards beside the lounge and jumped into the water.
It was cool and it felt great. Most of my friends liked the lake to be warm as a bathtub, but I didn’t. When it was cool it felt clean, and when you jumped in the coldness made you suck in your breath. And when you got out again, your skin tingled. But later in the summer the lake would be like soup and you’d swim all day without feeling refreshed.
I splashed around a little, swimming back and forth in the shallow water, then I got out. The tiredness had not gone away like I’d hoped it would. I sat down in the lounge and picked up my tea. I took a sip. And for the first time that morning, I let myself look at Chiefs’ Island.
It lay out there, quiet, a dark green shape on the lighter green water. I could make out the individual branches of some of the taller trees in the centre. I tried to figure out where the graveyard was. I knew it was somewhere on this end of the island. I wished it was on the east end, the end away from our house.
Between me and the island boats went by—a big cabin cruiser plowing foamy white waves in the water. Some speedboats pulling skiers. And as usual, a few sailboats with wildly coloured sails. They seemed to be struggling in the light breeze. Lake Couchiching had a lot of sailboat races because of the winds. That’s what John said. The winds swirled around in between the islands, making the sailing tricky. When the wind was strong the lake was dangerous because the waves got big. And the most dangerous place was near Chiefs’ Island.
But on sunny calm days like today a lot of people liked to go over to the island in a boat and drop anchor along the north shore and swim from the boat. There was a terrific sand beach there. But nobody anchored too close to the island. And nobody went ashore. Some kids I knew wouldn’t even touch the shore.
I adjusted my chair and lay back, closing my eyes tight against the sun. I tried to relax. But every time I did, a picture of the graveyard would appear in my mind, like on the old TV mystery shows when the guy is developing pictures in his darkroom and you see the photograph slowly appear on the paper in the chemical bath. Like the picture was dissolving, only backwards. Then I’d open my eyes and the sun would practically blind me. I’d squeeze them shut again, seeing blazing yellow stars from the sunlight for a moment. Then the dark would come and the picture of the graveyard washed in moonlight would backwards-dissolve again. The man with the scary face would get off the headstone and glide into the trees and disappear.
Finally I sat up. I struggled out of the lounge and jumped into the water. While I was splashing around, I looked at the island, then turned and looked up to my bedroom window, where the little leather bag rested on the sill. The sunlight glinted on the glass bits in the wind chimes.
When I went back into the house, John was up. He was standing at the sideboard beside the fridge, making a sandwich. I sat down at the table.
John had his bathing suit on and his bones stuck out all over the place through his pale skin. He looked tired, the way I felt.
I watched him building his sandwich. My brother is the weirdest eater in the universe. He put a piece of whole wheat bread on a plate, then spread peanut butter on it the way you’d gob cement on a brick. He fingered two fat dills out of a jar and sliced them onto the peanut butter. The juice from the dills started to sog the bread. John paid no attention.
He sliced a tomato onto the dills. Added salt and pepper. Then he took another slice of bread and spread a thin coat of strawberry jam onto it.
“The jam is the secret,” he said to me over his shoulder. “You have to get it just right.”
After the jam, he slathered on some mayonnaise and upturned the bread onto the tomatoes. He took a knife and sliced the mess into two pieces and brought it to the table.
When he sat down he said, “Well, what do you think?”
“I think you have set a new record in horribleness.”
He took a big bite and talked around the mess in his mouth. A glob of jam slid out of the comer of his mouth.
“I don’t mean this delicious sandwich. I mean last night. When we got back you refused to talk about it, remember?”
“Yeah, well, I was scared.”
“Nothing to be scared of. That guy didn’t see us.” He took another huge bite of the sandwich.
His fingers were wet with pickle juice and tomato juice. “I might even go back. I didn’t get much info last night.”
“He did see us, John!” Sometimes my brother’s confidence made me mad. He was so sure all the time. “He looked right at us when your stupid watch beeped!”
“Lookit, Karen. Be reasonable. You were rattled before we even found the graveyard. You were convinced we heard a wolf, right?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer. “So everything after that was influenced by the fact that you were scared. See? It’s basic psychology.”
; It’s hard to take anyone seriously when he talks with his mouth full and you can see gobs of red and green and brown when he talks, not to mention silver bands. How could someone who is so neat and organized in everything be such a messy eater?
“Being scared doesn’t mean I didn’t see what I saw, John. You talk like I was a winkie or something.”
John was licking the juice from his fingers. He burped. “We found a cemetery, saw an old Native in traditional clothing, and that’s it. He was probably doing some kind of Chippewa ritual at that new grave, that’s all.”
“Then how come he wasn’t cold, like we were? We could see our breath, but not his. And how come he left no footprints in the earth?”
“No footprints?” He thought for a moment.
“That’s easy. It was dark. You thought he climbed off the gravestone on our side, but he obviously got off on the other side where the ground wasn’t dug up.”
I noticed that he ignored the point about not seeing the man’s breath.
“I know what I saw, John.”
“What did you see, then? A ghost or something?”
He laughed the way you do at school when somebody does something really dumb.
I didn’t answer. But I was sure that what we saw wasn’t a real human being.
He slurped some tea. “Anyway, let’s see what’s in that little leather bag. I’ll come up to your room in a minute.”
Late Saturday Morning
While I was changing I could hear John blow-drying his hair in the bathroom.
I put on a light blue cotton blouse and loose-fitting white shorts. Then I slipped into my blue deck shoes. While I was combing my wet hair at the mirror over my dresser John came in wearing white track pants and a baggy blue O.D. T-shirt.
“Where is it?” he asked.
I waved toward the window with my comb, trying to look casual. The truth was that I was dying to open that little leather bag, but I had been too scared to do it myself.
John held it in the palm of his hand. The quill and bead work seemed to glow in the summer sunlight that poured in my window. He held it up by the neck for me to see and pointed to the dried dirt that still clung to the bottom.
