Crow Lake

by Mary Lawson

  The bank gave my father two weeks annual leave (the first holiday anyone in his family had ever had), and a year after settling in Crow Lake he used that leave to go back to the Gaspé and propose to his childhood sweetheart. She was a girl from a neighbouring farm and had a good solid Scottish background like his own. She must have had a sense of adventure as well, because she said yes and came back to Crow Lake as his bride. There is one photograph of them, taken on their wedding day. They are standing at the entrance to a little church on the shores of the Gaspé; two tall, strong, big-boned, fair-haired, serious-minded people, who could as easily have passed for brother and sister as husband and wife. You can tell they’re serious-minded by their smiles: honest, direct, but essentially serious. They don’t think their life will be easy—neither of them has been brought up to expect that—but they think they are capable of taking it on. They will give it their best shot.

  The two of them travelled back to Crow Lake together and set up their home, and in due course produced four children: two boys, Luke and Matt, and then, after a ten-year gap and presumably much deliberation, two girls: myself (Katherine, known as Kate) and Elizabeth, known as Bo.

  Did they love us? Of course. Did they say so? Of course not. Actually, that’s not quite true—my mother did say she loved me once. I had done something wrong—it was a spell when I was always doing something wrong— and she was cross with me and wouldn’t speak to me for what felt like days, though it was probably only hours. And finally, in fear, I said to her, “Mummy, do you love me?” And she looked at me in surprise, and then said simply, “To distraction.” I didn’t know what “to distraction” meant, on one level, but on another level I did know, and was reassured. I am still reassured.

  At some stage, probably quite early on, our father banged a nail into the wall of the bedroom he shared with our mother and hung upon it the picture of Great-Grandmother Morrison, and we all grew up knowing about her dreams and being aware of her gaze. As far as I was concerned it wasn’t an entirely comfortable experience. I was always convinced that she disapproved of us all, with just one exception. I could tell by her expression that she thought Luke was lazy and I was a dreamer and Bo was so strong-willed she’d be nothing but trouble the whole of her life. It seemed to me that the only time those fierce old eyes showed any sign of softening was when Matt walked into the room. Then her expression would change, and you could see what she was thinking. She was thinking, That one. He’s the one.

  I find it hard to remember much of what happened in the days immediately following the accident. Most of my memories seem to be merely images, caught in time like a photograph. The living room, for example—I remember what a mess it was. We all slept in there the first night; probably Bo wouldn’t settle or I couldn’t get to sleep, and in the end Luke and Matt brought Bo’s cot and three mattresses into the living room.

  I have an image of myself lying awake, staring at the darkness. I kept trying to sleep and sleep would not come and time would not pass. I knew that Luke and Matt were awake too, but for some reason I was afraid to talk to them, so the night went on forever.

  Other things seemed to happen over and over but I’m not sure, looking back, if that was only in my mind. I can still see Luke standing at the front door, holding Bo in one arm and with his free hand accepting a large covered dish from someone. I know that happened, but in my memory he spent practically the whole of the first few days in that pose. Though that could have been true—every wife, every mother, every maiden aunt in the community must have set her lips and started cooking as soon as she heard the news. Potato salad figured largely. And cooked hams. Also nourishing stews, though it was far too hot to eat them. Every time you went out the front door, you tripped over a quart basket of peas or a vat of stewed rhubarb.

  And Luke holding Bo. Did he really carry her for every waking moment of those first days? Because that’s how I remember it. I suppose she was affected by the atmosphere in the house and was missing our mother and cried if he put her down.

  And myself clinging to Matt. I held on to his hand or his sleeve or the pocket of his jeans, anything that I could get hold of. I was seven, I should have been beyond such behaviour, but I couldn’t help myself. I remember him gently disengaging my fingers when he needed to go to the toilet, saying, “Just wait, Katie. Just give me a minute.” And myself standing at the closed bathroom door, asking, “Have you finished yet?” with a shaking voice.

  I cannot imagine what those first days must have been like for Luke and Matt; the funeral arrangements and the phone calls, the visits of neighbours and the kindly meant offers of help, the practicalities of looking after Bo and me. The confusion and anxiety, to say nothing of the grief. And of course, nothing was said of the grief. We were our parents’ children, after all.

  A number of the phone calls were from the Gaspé or Labrador, from various branches of the family. Those with no phone of their own called from a call-box in the nearest town, and you could hear the coins clanging into the box and then heavy breathing while whoever it was, unused to phones and certainly unused to long-distance calls in times of crisis, tried to work out what to say.

  “It’s Uncle Jamie.” A windy bellow from the wastes of Labrador.

  “Oh. Yes. Hello.” From Luke.

  “I’m calling about your father and mother.” He had great lungs, Uncle Jamie. Luke was forced to hold the phone out from his ear and Matt and I could hear him from the other side of the room.

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  Painful whistling silence.

  “Is that Luke I’m speaking to? The oldest one?”

  “Yes. It’s Luke.”

  More silence.

  Luke, sounding more tired than embarrassed. “It’s nice of you to call, Uncle Jamie.”

  “Aye. Well. Terrible thing, lad. Terrible thing.”

  The main message seemed to be that we were not to worry about the future. The family was sorting things out and everything would be looked after. We weren’t to worry. Aunt Annie, one of my father’s three sisters, was coming and would be there as soon as she could, though it was unlikely to be in time for the funeral. Would we be all right on our own for a few days?

  I was fortunate in being too young to understand the implications of those calls. All I knew was that they worried Luke and Matt; whichever one of them had taken the call would stand staring at the phone afterwards. Luke had the habit of running his hands through his hair when he was anxious, and in the days and weeks following the accident his hair looked like a well-ploughed field.

  I remember being struck, suddenly, while watching him search through the chest of drawers in the room Bo and I shared, looking for something clean for Bo to wear, by the notion that I didn’t know Luke any more. He wasn’t the same person he had been a few days ago— the half-defiant, half-embarrassed boy who had scraped into teachers’ college—and I wasn’t sure who he was. I hadn’t been aware that people could change. But then, I hadn’t been aware that people could die. At least not people you loved and needed. Death in principle I had known about; death in practice—no. I hadn’t known that could happen.

  The funeral service was held in the churchyard. Chairs had been brought out from the Sunday school and placed in neat rows beside the two open graves. We four children sat in the front row and tried to keep the chair legs from wobbling on the hard-baked earth. Or rather, three of us sat in a row; Bo sat on Luke’s lap with her thumb in her mouth.

  I remember being very uncomfortable. It was extremely hot, and Luke and Matt had been consumed by the need to do everything properly, so we were all in our darkest clothes—in my case a winter skirt and jersey, in Bo’s a flannel dress from the previous year, much too small. The boys were in dark shirts and trousers. All four of us were shiny with sweat long before the service began.

  All I can remember about the service itself is that I could hear several people snuffling and I couldn’t turn around to see who they were. I think I was protected from the reality o
f what was happening by disbelief. I could not believe that my mother and father were in those two boxes by the gravesides, and certainly I could not believe that if they were, people would lower them into the ground and heap earth onto them so that they could never again get out. I sat quietly between Luke and Matt, and then stood beside them, holding Matt’s hand, as the coffins were lowered into the ground. Matt held my hand very tight; I remember that.

  Then it was over, except that it wasn’t, because everyone in the village had to pay their respects to us. Most of them didn’t actually say anything, they just filed past and nodded at us or patted Bo’s head, but still it took a long time. I stood beside Matt. A couple of times he looked down at me and smiled, though his smile was just a white line. Bo was very well behaved, even though she was beet red with the heat. Luke held her, and she leaned her head against his shoulder and watched everybody around her thumb.

  Sally McLean was one of the first to come up. She was one of the ones who’d been crying—you could see by her face. She didn’t look at Matt or me but she turned her tear-stained face to Luke and said, “I’m so sorry, Luke,” in a broken whisper.

  Luke said, “Thanks.”

  She looked at him, her mouth quivering with sympathy, but then her parents stepped up so she didn’t say anything else. Mr. and Mrs. McLean were small, shy, quiet people, nothing at all like their daughter. Mr. McLean cleared his throat but didn’t actually say anything. Mrs. McLean smiled unhappily at all of us. Then Mr. McLean cleared his throat again and said to Sally, “We’d better be getting along now, Sal,” but she just gave him a reproachful look and stayed where she was.

  Calvin Pye came up next, herding his wife and kids before him. Calvin Pye was the farmer Matt and Luke worked for in the summers, and he was a bitter-looking man. He had a scared-looking wife called Alice whom my mother had felt sorry for. I’d never been quite sure why. She’d just said, “That poor woman,” from time to time.

  She’d been sorry for the children too. The eldest child was Marie, who’d been in Matt’s class at high school until the year before, when she’d left to help at home, and the youngest was Rosie, who was seven and in my class. The boy, Laurie, was fourteen, and should have been in high school, but he’d missed so much school due to having to work on the farm that he was never going to make it out of grade eight. Both the girls were pale and nervous-looking like their mother, but Laurie was the spitting image of Mr. Pye. He had the same lean, bony face and the same dark, furious eyes.

  Mr. Pye said, “We’re sorry for your loss,” and Mrs. Pye said, “Yes.” Rosie and I looked at each other. Rosie looked as if she’d been crying, but she always looked like that. Laurie stared at the ground. I think Marie wanted to say something to Matt, but Mr. Pye herded them all away.

  Miss Carrington came up. She was my teacher and had taught both Luke and Matt. The public school had only one room, so she taught everybody until they went to the high school in town or left to work on their fathers’ farms. She was young and quite nice, but very strict, and I was a bit afraid of her. She said, “Well, Luke. Matt. Kate.” Her voice was unsteady and she didn’t say anything else, just gave us a rather shaky smile and patted Bo’s foot.

  Dr. Christopherson and his wife were next, and then four men I didn’t know who turned out to be from my father’s bank, and then, in ones and twos and whole families, all the people I had known since the day I was born, all looking upset and saying, “Anything we can do …” to Luke and Matt.

  Sally McLean was still standing as near to Luke as she could. She looked at the ground as people paid their respects and every now and then stepped closer to Luke and whispered something. Once I heard her say, “Would you like me to hold your little sister?” and Luke said, “No,” and tightened his grip on Bo. After a minute he said, “Thank you, but she’s fine.”

  Mrs. Stanovich was one of the last to come up, and I remember what she said very clearly. She’d been crying too, and still was. She was a large soft lady who looked as if she didn’t have any bones and who talked to the Lord all day, not just during grace and prayers like the rest of us. Matt had said once that she was as mad as a hatter like all the Evangelicals, and my parents had banished him from the dining room for a whole month. If he’d just said she was mad as a hatter he might have got away with it. It was disparaging her religion that got him into trouble. Religious tolerance was a family creed and you defied it at your peril.

  Anyway, she came up to us and looked from one to the other, tears rolling down her cheeks. We didn’t know where to look. Mr. Stanovich, who was known as Gabby because he never said a word, nodded at Luke and Matt and headed speedily back to his truck. To my alarm, Mrs. Stanovich suddenly pulled me into her huge bosom and said, “Katherine, sweetie, great will be the joy in Heaven this day. Your parents, bless their dear souls, have gone to join our Lord, and the Heavenly Host will rejoice to welcome them. It’s hard, my lamb, but think how happy our Lord will be!”

  She smiled at me through her tears and squeezed me again. Her bosom smelled of talcum powder and sweat. I’ll never forget it. Talcum powder and sweat, and the idea that up in heaven they were rejoicing that my parents were dead.

  Poor Lily Stanovich. I know she was genuinely grief-stricken by our parents’ death. But that memory of her is the clearest one I have of their funeral, and to be honest I still resent that, even after all this time. I’d have liked a pleasanter memory, that’s all. I’d have liked a clear strong picture of the four of us, standing very close together, supporting each other. But every time I get it fixed in my mind, in wallows Lily Stanovich, bosom to the fore, and smothers it in tears.

  chapter

  THREE

  It was a long time before I told Daniel much about my family. When we first started going out we exchanged bits of personal information, as you do, but it was all very general. I think I told him that my parents had died when I was young but that I had other family up north and went to visit them sometimes. It was hardly more detailed than that.

  I knew quite a bit about Daniel’s background because a lot of his background was in the foreground, so to speak, right there at the university. Daniel is Professor Crane of the zoology department. His father is Professor Crane of the history department. His mother is Professor Crane of the fine art department. It’s a little Crane dynasty. Or as I learned later, it’s a small subsection of a large Crane dynasty. Daniel’s forebears roamed the cultural capitals of Europe before emigrating to Canada. They were doctors or astronomers or historians or musicians, each of them without doubt eminent in his field. Against all that, Great-Grandmother Morrison’s little handmade book rest seemed a bit pathetic, and I kept it under wraps.

  But Daniel is a curious man. He shares with Matt— and it is the only thing they share, don’t get the idea that in Daniel I have chosen a replacement for Matt—a curiosity which extends to almost everything. One evening when we’d been going out for a couple of weeks he said, “So tell me the story of your life, Kate Morrison.”

  As I say, this was at the beginning of our relationship. I didn’t know it at the time, but that little request from Daniel was the beginning of what was going to be a problem between us, a problem which I described to myself as Daniel asking more of me than I could give, and which Daniel described to me as my shutting him out of my life.

  I am not from a background where people talk about problems in their relationships. If someone does or says something that upsets you, you don’t say so. Maybe it’s another Presbyterian thing; if the Eleventh Commandment is Thou Shalt Not Emote, the Twelfth is Thou Shalt Not Admit to Being Upset, and when it becomes evident to the whole world that you are upset, Thou Shalt on No Account Explain Why. No, you swallow your feelings, force them down inside yourself, where they can feed and grow and swell and expand until you explode, unforgivably, to the utter bewilderment of whoever it was who upset you. In Daniel’s family there is vastly more shouting and accusing and slamming of doors but far less bewilderment, because peopl
e say why.

  So I did not, in the months to come, say to Daniel that sometimes he made me feel that he would like to put my life and everything in it on one of his little glass slides and slide me, like some poor hapless microbe, under his microscope, where he could study my very soul. But he did say to me, quietly but very seriously, that he felt that I was not willing to give him very much of myself. That there was a barrier somewhere, which he could feel but not identify, and that he was finding it a real problem.

  All that was in the future, however, on this particular night; our relationship was still very young and very exciting. We were in a deli at the time. Neon strip lights and yellow plastic tables on spindly metal legs, a constant clatter from the kitchen. Reuben sandwiches and coleslaw and excellent coffee, and this little request: Tell me the story of your life.

  I couldn’t figure out at the time why I felt such a resistance to the idea. Partly I guess I’m just not given to soul-baring. I never was the sort of teenager who sat on friends’ beds, whispering and giggling and exchanging secrets behind cupped hands. And I’ve always thought there was something a bit distasteful about laying your family out in front of a relative stranger, sacrificing their privacy on the altar of the getting-to-know-you ritual of dating. But I now think that most of my reluctance was due to the fact that the story of my life is all bound up with the story of Matt’s life, and there was no way I was going to dissect that over a cup of coffee with anyone, far less someone as successful as Daniel Crane.