Crow Lake

by Mary Lawson

  “You’ve cut your finger,” Matt said.

  We were sitting on the sofa. Supper was over and I’d finished drying the dishes for Aunt Annie, who now, persisting grimly in her efforts to get us accustomed to a new order, was putting Bo to bed. You could hear Bo raging through two closed doors. “Not!” she was yelling. “Not! Not! Not!”

  What she meant was not Aunt Annie. We all knew that, Aunt Annie best of all.

  Luke was on his knees and elbows on the floor, pretending to read the paper. His hands were clenched against his jaw.

  “How did you cut your finger?” Matt said.

  “On a knife.”

  “What were you doing with a knife?”

  “Topping beans.”

  “You should be more careful.”

  He leaned back, waggled his shoulder blades, and groaned. “My back’s killing me. You’d rather be topping beans than doing what Luke and I were doing, I can tell you.”

  He wanted me to ask him what they’d been doing. I knew that, but the words seemed to be so far down inside me that I couldn’t drag them out.

  He told me anyway.

  “Today we were pitching straw. And I tell you, that is one awful job. The dust gets up your nose and in your mouth and the straw gets in your shirt and down your pants and the sweat and the dust turn into this sort of glue between your toes and Old Man Pye stands there leaning on his fork like some old troll, just hoping you’ll slacken off so he’ll have an excuse to eat you.”

  He wanted me to laugh, but that was more than I could manage. I smiled at him though. He smiled back and said, “Now tell me about your day. What exciting things happened today, apart from beans?”

  I couldn’t think of anything. Thinking had become as difficult as speaking. My mind seemed to have been swallowed up like a boat in a fog.

  “Come on, Katie. What did you do? Did anyone come to visit?”

  “Miss Carrington.”

  “Miss Carrington? That’s nice. What did Miss Carrington have to say?”

  I dredged around in the fog. “She said you were clever.”

  Matt laughed. “Did she?”

  But I was remembering now. She’d been nervous. She’d been scared of Aunt Annie and she’d had to force herself to say what she wanted to say, and it had made her voice funny

  “She said you were the cleverest child she’d ever taught. She said it would be a … tradegy … a tragedy … if you didn’t go to university.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Matt said, “Good old Miss Carrington. It always pays to suck up to a teacher, Kate. Take it from me.”

  His voice was funny now. I looked at him, but he was looking at Luke and his face was red. Luke had looked up from his paper and they were staring at each other. Then Luke, speaking to me but with his eyes still on Matt, said, “What did Aunt Annie say?”

  I tried to remember. “She said there wasn’t enough money.” She’d said more, but I couldn’t remember what.

  Luke nodded. He was still looking at Matt.

  After a minute Matt said, “Well she’s right. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

  Luke didn’t say anything.

  Out of the blue, Matt seemed to be angry. He said, “If you want to spend your life feeling guilty because you were born first that’s up to you, but don’t waste it on me.”

  Luke didn’t reply. He turned away and started reading his paper again. Matt bent forward and picked up another bit of the paper. He looked at it and then tossed it on the floor again. He looked at his watch and said, “We should go to the ponds. It’ll be light for another hour,” but neither of us moved.

  In the background we could hear Bo, still screaming.

  Luke abruptly heaved himself to his feet and left the room, and we heard him going into Bo’s and my room. We heard voices, his angry and Aunt Annie’s very firm, and Bo’s, heartbroken now, really sobbing; you could almost see her arms reaching out for Luke. Then, surprisingly clear and sharp, Aunt Annie saying, “You’re not helping her, Luke. Not one bit.”

  Then we heard Luke’s footsteps, loud and angry, and the door slamming as he left the house.

  Here’s the thing about Luke. Up until the very day our parents died, I don’t remember him ever picking Bo up. Not once. Matt would pick her up, but not Luke. I also don’t remember ever having a proper conversation with him. Thousands with Matt, none with Luke. Apart from the occasional row or bit of bantering between him and Matt, I don’t recall Luke ever showing that he knew—or cared—that the rest of us existed.

  In the morning he wasn’t there.

  His bed had been slept in and there was a cereal bowl on the kitchen counter, but there was no sign of him. He and Matt were supposed to be working on the farm.

  “Maybe he’s gone already,” Aunt Annie said. “Making an early start.”

  “Not a chance,” Matt said. He was very angry. He was pulling on his workboots by the door, tying the laces savagely, yanking the cuffs of his jeans down over the tops of them to stop the straw getting in.

  “Where’s he gone?” I said.

  “I don’t know, Kate. If he’d left a note, I’d know, but he hasn’t. Which is typical. The day Luke bothers to tell anyone what he’s doing will be a great, great day.”

  This was true. Luke, the old Luke, the Luke of two months ago, had infuriated our parents by failing to keep them informed of his comings and goings. In those days Matt hadn’t cared much, because it didn’t affect him.

  I started gnawing at my finger where I’d cut it. I was afraid Luke had left us. Run away or died.

  “But where do you think he’s gone?”

  “Kate, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. What matters is unless he’s back in about two minutes we’re going to be late for work.”

  “You’ll just have to go without him,” Aunt Annie said. She was making sandwiches for their lunch—farm worker’s sandwiches, great hunks of bread with slabs of ham half an inch thick. “He’ll have to make his own excuses. Could he have gone to town for some reason? Would he have any way of getting to town?”

  “He could have gone in with the milk. Mr. Janie leaves about four in the morning—he could have got a lift on the milk truck with him.”

  “Will he come back?” My voice was starting to shake. After all, our parents had gone to town.

  “Of course he’ll come back. All I’m worried about is what I’m going to tell Old Man Pye. He’s going to go up in smoke.”

  “But how do you know he’ll come back?”

  “Kate, I know. Leave your finger alone.” He pulled my hand away from my mouth. “I know, okay? I know.”

  I spent the morning doing chores and most of the afternoon on the beach with Bo. Bo had declared war on Aunt Annie. I guess as she saw it, Aunt Annie was responsible for everything that had gone wrong with her life, and the only solution was to fight her to the death. I think she would have won, too. I suspect Aunt Annie thought so as well.

  So we were exiled from the house to give Aunt Annie a chance to marshall her defences. I can picture the two of us on the path to the beach, hand in hand, me dragging myself along, Bo stomping so hard little puffs of dust shot out from under her feet at every step. My hair would be hanging limp and lifeless, hers would be standing out from her head, radiating rage like a heat wave. A lovely pair of sisters.

  We sat on the hot sand and watched the lake. It was dead calm. You could just see it breathing, slow deep breaths under its flat, shining, silver skin. Bo sat beside me, pinching pebbles between her fingers and sighing every now and then around her thumb.

  I tried to still the whirlwind inside me, but when I succeeded, when by force of will I managed to calm it so that individual thoughts could settle and be looked at, the thoughts themselves overwhelmed me. Being without Matt. Being without Luke. Leaving our home. Going to live with strangers. Aunt Annie had told me about them; she had said there were four children, three boys and one girl. They were all older than Bo and me, but she said they were nice. But she
wouldn’t really know if they were nice, you would only know that if you were a child yourself. Matt had said that I must look after Bo, but he must know that I couldn’t. I was too afraid. I was much more afraid than Bo was.

  I focused hard on a small boat out in the lake and made myself concentrate on it. I knew whose boat it was—Jim Sumack’s, a friend of Luke’s who lived on the Indian reserve.

  “That’s Big Jim Sumack,” I said loudly to Bo. I wanted to talk, to drown out the thoughts.

  Bo sighed and sucked harder. Nowadays her thumb looked all waterlogged, and it was getting a big white callus on the top.

  “He’s going fishing,” I said. “He’s going to catch a fish for dinner. He’s called Big Jim Sumack because he weighs more than two hundred pounds. He doesn’t go to school any more, but Mary Sumack’s in grade three. In the winter she didn’t come to school, and they went to see her mum and it was because she didn’t have any shoes. The Indians are really poor.”

  My mother had said we should all be ashamed. I hadn’t been sure what it was she thought we should be ashamed of, and I’d felt obscurely to blame. I thought of my mother. I tried to summon up her face, but I couldn’t get it to come clear. Bo had already stopped asking for her.

  A loon popped up out of nowhere twenty yards out from the shore. “There’s a loon,” I said.

  Bo sighed again, and the loon disappeared.

  “Uke?” Bo said suddenly, taking her thumb out and looking at me.

  “He’s not here.”

  “Att?”

  “He’s not here either. They’ll be home in a while.”

  I looked around for something to distract her, to stop her winding herself up into a rage. A spider was heading toward us across the sand, dragging a dead deerfly. Or rather he was tailing toward us, moving backwards, holding the fly with his jaws and front legs and scrabbling hard with the rest. Once Matt and I had watched a small spider trying to drag a mayfly three times his size out of a hollow in the sand. The sand was dry, and every time he got his burden halfway up the slope the sides of the hollow caved in and he slid to the bottom again. He tried again and again, never varying his route, never slackening his pace. Matt had said, “Here’s the question, Katie: Is he very very determined, or is his memory so short that he forgets what happened two seconds ago, so he always thinks he’s doing it for the first time? That’s the question.”

  We’d watched him for almost half an hour, and in the end, to our delight, he succeeded, so we decided he was not only very determined but also very smart.

  “Look, Bo,” I said. “See the spider? He’s got a fly, and he’s dragging him home to his nest, see? And when he gets him home he’ll spin a cocoon around him and then later, when he’s hungry, he’ll eat him.”

  I wasn’t trying to share my fascination with her as Matt had shared his with me. My goal was less exalted. I merely hoped that she would be interested, instead of angry, because I didn’t feel up to coping with one of her rages.

  It didn’t work, though. I thought it was working, because she leaned forward and watched the spider intently for a couple of seconds, but then she took her thumb out, got to her feet, staggered over to him, and stamped on him.

  chapter

  SEVEN

  Matt got home just before six. I was waiting for him on the steps of the veranda. He asked if Luke was home yet, and when I said no he didn’t say anything. He just walked straight down to the beach, stripped off everything but his underpants, and plunged into the lake.

  I’d followed him down and I stood silently on the shore watching the ripples spreading out from where he had disappeared. When he broke through the water again, he looked like a seal, wet and sleek. His body was broken into blocks of light and dark; dark face and neck and forearms, paler back and chest, white legs.

  He said, “Could you get me a bar of soap? I forgot it.” And I went up to the house and got one.

  He washed savagely, scrubbing at his body with the soap, rubbing it into his hair. Then he tossed it onto the beach and plunged into the water again, making a milk-white cloud in the dark water. He swam a long way out.

  You weren’t supposed to throw the soap onto the beach because it was almost impossible to get the sand out of it. You were supposed to put it on a rock. I picked it up and dipped it into the water and started trying to clean it off, but the sand just sank in deeper.

  Matt swam back and waded out of the water. He said, “Don’t bother, Kate,” and took the soap from me. He gave me a brief, tight smile as we walked up to the house, but it wasn’t a real smile, just a stretch of skin.

  Aunt Annie delayed supper as long as she could, hoping that Luke would appear, but in the end she served it without him. She’d cooked a leg of pork and there was a big bowl of applesauce, which I loved but found I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t eat anything. I couldn’t seem to swallow. Spit kept gathering in my mouth and I had to squeeze it down.

  Bo was having problems too. When Aunt Annie had put her supper in front of her, she’d thrown it on the floor, so now, white with exhaustion and with dark purple shadows under her eyes, she was sitting in front of an empty place, gloomily sucking her thumb.

  Matt ate in a steady, businesslike way, as if he were stoking a boiler. He’d changed into clean jeans and a shirt, and his hair was combed straight back. It dripped steadily onto his collar. There were scratches on his hands and arms from the straw. They’d been black before his swim but now they were fiery red.

  “More pork?” Aunt Annie said, grimly cheerful. If she was concerned about Luke she wasn’t going to show it.

  “Thanks,” Matt said. He handed her his plate.

  “Potatoes? Carrots? Applesauce?”

  “Thanks.”

  “The applesauce is from a Mrs. Lily Stanovich. Dropped by this afternoon. She was inquiring about you all. A weepy soul. Still, it was kind of her to bring the sauce—it saved me a lot of paring. I told her you were on the beach, Kate, and she was all for going down for a chat with you, but I told her you had your hands full with Bo and maybe another time. The vegetables are from Alice Pye. Now there’s a strange woman. She’ll be the wife of your employer, Matt.”

  She paused in a way that required an answer, so Matt nodded.

  “And what’s he like?”

  “Mr. Pye?”

  “Yes. What’s he like? Nice person to work for?”

  Matt chewed. “He pays okay,” he said at last.

  “That’s not what I’d call a fulsome description,” Aunt Annie said. “Put a little meat on it for us.”

  She’d had enough drama for one day and we were going to have a proper dinner-table conversation if it killed her.

  “You want me to describe Mr. Pye?”

  “I do. Tell us all about him. We want to be entertained.”

  Matt cut up a potato and forked a chunk in. You could see him considering adjectives and rejecting them. “I think he’s probably insane,” he said at last.

  “For goodness’ sake, Matt. An honest description.”

  “That’s an honest description. I think he’s probably insane. That’s my opinion.”

  “Insane in what way?”

  “He’s mad all the time.”

  “Mad isn’t a proper word.”

  “Furious. Raging mad. In a rage.”

  “Have you been having words with him?”

  “Not me. He doesn’t get at Luke or me—he knows we’d just walk off. It’s his kids he goes for. ‘Specially Laurie.’ You should have heard him this afternoon. Laurie’d left a gate open—you should have heard him.”

  “It’s a serious thing,” said Aunt Annie disapprovingly. She didn’t care for Matt’s description of his employer. “You wouldn’t know that, not being brought up on a farm, but a lot of damage can be done if cattle get into a field. A whole crop can go down.”

  “I know that, Aunt Annie! I’ve been working on that farm for years! Laurie knows it too! There were no cattle in either field. Anyway, I’m not talking about
just today, I’m talking all the time. Old Man Pye’s after him every minute of the day.”

  He was trying hard not to be snappy but I could hear edges in his voice. He was so mad at Luke he didn’t feel like talking at all, far less about Mr. Pye.

  Aunt Annie sighed. “Well it’s too bad, but there’s no need to go calling him insane. Most fathers and sons go through a bad patch from time to time.”

  “This is some bad patch,” Matt said. “This is a bad patch that’s been going on for fourteen years, getting worse—”

  He stopped. He’d noticed at the same time as I did that Bo was behaving strangely. She’d pulled out her thumb and her hands were half raised and her eyes were stretched wide. She looked like a cartoon of somebody listening.

  “What in heaven’s name’s she up to now?” Aunt Annie said crossly, and Bo said, “Uke!” and twisted around, and sure enough, there he was, coming down the drive.

  “Right,” Matt said, putting down his knife and fork and pushing out his chair. “Now I’m going to kill him.”

  “You sit where you are, Matt. We don’t need any of that.”

  He didn’t seem to have heard her. He headed for the door.

  “You sit down, Matthew James Morrison! Sit down in your seat and hear what he has to say!”

  “I don’t care what he has to say.”

  “Sit down!”

  Her voice was shaking, and when I looked at her, her chin was wobbling and her eyes were strained and red. Matt looked at her too. He flushed. He said, “Sorry,” and sat down.

  Luke came in. He stopped in the doorway and looked at us. “Hi,” he said.

  Bo crowed and held her arms out, and he picked her up. She buried her face in his neck and kissed him passionately. He said, “Am I too late for supper?”

  Aunt Annie’s chin was still wobbling. She swallowed, and said, “There’s some left. It’s cold though,” without looking at him.