Crow Lake

by Mary Lawson

  I turned eight at the end of May, an event which triggered the dreadful realization that we had missed Bo’s birthday by four months. Bo was unperturbed, of course, but the rest of us were guilt-stricken. Mrs. Stanovich was appalled. She had baked me a cake, iced with pink icing; now she stormed into the kitchen and produced another one. Around the top edge of both cakes she stuck sugar cubes, each of which was decorated with a tiny pastel sugar-flower. I was fascinated by them. I’d never seen such delicacy, such artistry, in food before. Heaven knows where she got them—they must have cost a small fortune. I’m sure she wouldn’t have dreamed of giving them to her own children.

  I remember her conversation with Bo. They did converse by then. They had formed a relationship which I think both of them found quite satisfactory.

  Mrs. Stanovich set the cake on the sideboard, beside mine, and said something like, “There you are, my lamb. Your very own cake.”

  “I not my lamb,” Bo said. She was licking out the icing bowl so the cake was of less interest to her than it might have been.

  “Well, goodness, you’re right,” Mrs. Stanovich said. “Aren’t I the silly one? You’re Little Bo Peep.”

  Bo looked pleased. “Bo Peep!” she said. She disappeared into the icing bowl and then reappeared briefly, waved her spoon at Mrs. Stanovich, and said triumphantly, “As lost-er sheep!”

  Mrs. Stanovich beamed at her, but the poignancy of the moment—sweet, pink-iced, motherless child with her tragically late birthday cake—was too much for her, and I saw her mouth start to quiver. I tried to slide from the room but she called me back.

  “Katherine, sweetie?”

  Reluctantly I slid back. “Yes?”

  “Sweetie, as there are two cakes—” She dug a large hanky out of the vast reservoir of her bosom, blew her nose violently, stuffed the hanky back, and drew a quavering breath. She tried heroically, she really did. “As there are two cakes, I wonder if you’d like me to put yours in a tin so you could take it to school and share it with your friends tomorrow.”

  It was a good idea. I liked it. I said, “Okay. Thank you.”

  Maybe I smiled at her, or maybe it was the “thank you,” or maybe it was the fact that by then Bo had pink icing in her hair, but whatever it was it was too much for her, and she lost the battle and dissolved.

  In the background, always, there was Matt with his books. All through April and May while the rest of the household careered around him in its normal chaotic fashion, there was Matt, sitting at the kitchen table, scribbling away. A lot of the time he was babysitting and no doubt felt he had to be where Bo was, but even when Luke was home it didn’t seem to occur to him to seek the quiet of his bedroom. Maybe we were background noise. Certainly he had phenomenal powers of concentration.

  I loved watching him. I’d sit beside him sometimes, drawing pictures on the back of his study notes and watching the movements of his pencil. He wrote so fast that it seemed to me the words just ran down his arm and out onto the page. When he had math to do there would be a great row of numbers snaking across the paper and the pencil would make marks and squiggles between the numbers which I knew meant something, though I didn’t know what. When he got to the end of a question, if he’d got the answer he was expecting he’d underline it hard. If it wasn’t what it should have been, if he’d made a mistake somewhere along the line, he’d say, “What? What?” in an outraged tone, which always made me giggle, and score a line through it, and start again.

  I don’t remember him showing any sign of exam nerves, either before or during the event, though our visits to the ponds became shorter for a while in the immediate run-up. Once the exams actually started he became positively laid back. When Luke asked him how one or other of them had gone, he’d say “Okay” in a noncommittal tone and leave it at that.

  And then, with no fuss or celebration to mark their passing, they were over. He cleared his papers off the kitchen table, stacked them neatly on the floor in his bedroom, and went back to work for Calvin Pye for the summer.

  Think of all that work. The dedication and determination. The hours and hours of study. Work carried out as a tribute to our parents, to wrest something good from the devastation of that year, to prove himself to himself and to Luke, for my sake, for his own sake, for its own sake, for the pure joy of it—perhaps that above all. Work so that he could in his turn support the rest of us, work for the future of the family. Work because he knew he could do it, knew his efforts would be rewarded.

  As if life were as simple as that.

  People say, “You can do anything you want if you want to badly enough.” It’s nonsense, of course, but I suppose we all work on the assumption that it is true— that life is simple, that effort will be rewarded. It wouldn’t be worth getting out of bed in the morning if you didn’t believe that. I’m sure it underpinned Great-Grandmother’s efforts to educate her children. Jackson Pye must have believed it—think of the incredible commitment of energy and effort he put into wresting that farm from the wilderness. The handsome farmhouse, the well-made barn, the sheds and outbuildings, the fields carved out of the forest, the tons of rock shifted, trees uprooted, fields fenced. Arthur Pye must have believed the same—believed that he could succeed where his father had failed, if only he worked hard enough. And Calvin after him.

  And all the Pye women—they all must have been filled with excitement and determination when they first saw that farmhouse, seeing in their minds’ eyes a large and happy family slamming in and out of the door onto the wide veranda. They must have willingly shared their husbands’ dreams, believing in them and clinging desperately to that belief for years. Because in an ideal world, effort, like virtue, is rewarded, and it simply makes no sense not to act as if it’s an ideal world.

  I finished school a week or two after Matt’s exams ended and we settled into the summer routine. Mrs. Stanovich still came on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and Bo and I continued to go to the Mitchells’ on Wednesdays, so Luke worked on those days. Mr. Tadworth, whose field he had cleared earlier in the spring, had asked him to help with the building of a new barn. He’d offered more money than Calvin Pye was prepared to pay and was a good deal pleasanter to work for, so Luke took the job, though I imagine he felt guilty at leaving Matt to go to the farm alone. With Laurie gone Calvin was extremely short-staffed and Matt worked twelve-hour days. He said Marie worked closer to twenty-four; she spent her days on the tractor and the evenings doing the cooking and the housework.

  Mrs. Pye was not in good shape. She was found in a distressed state one evening, wandering the roads around the farm. Mr. McLean came across her when he was driving back from town with the week’s provisions for the store. She said she was looking for Laurie. Mr. McLean said she looked as if she’d fallen into a ditch. He said her hair was all tangled and her face and hands were scratched and dirty and her skirt was torn. He wanted to take her to see Reverend Mitchell but she refused, so he drove her home.

  July came. I remember overhearing Matt and Luke in the kitchen one evening saying that it seemed incredible that it was a year already. I didn’t know what they were referring to. What had been a year? I listened, but they didn’t elaborate. After a minute Luke said, “When do the results come out?”

  “Any day,” Matt said. There was a pause, and then he said, “You could still go, you know.”

  “Go where?” Luke said.

  “Teachers’ college. I bet they’d still take you.”

  There was a silence. Even from my position behind the door I could tell it was an ominous one.

  Matt said, “All I’m saying is, if you’ve changed your mind it’s probably not too late. I bet they’d still take you. I could stay with the girls.”

  The silence stretched out. Then Luke said, “Listen carefully, okay? I’m staying with the girls. And I don’t want to talk about it any more, ever. If we both live to be a million years old, I don’t want to mention the subject ever again.”

  I waited, my skin tight with app
rehension. But Matt didn’t reply and after a minute Luke said more calmly, “What’s the matter with your brain anyway? I thought you were supposed to be smart. There wouldn’t be enough money for me to go now even if I wanted to. That’s why you need a scholarship, remember?”

  I remember my relief; there wasn’t going to be a quarrel. That was all that concerned me. The content of their talk didn’t worry me at all, because somehow, incredibly, in spite of a whole year’s worth of argument about whether or not Matt was “going,” it had never once occurred to me that he was actually going to go somewhere. I don’t know how I could have failed to realize it, but that is the case. I had no idea.

  I don’t think anyone doubted that Matt would win a scholarship, but I don’t think even his teachers realized quite how well he would do. He wiped the board. He won everything going.

  I remember the evening after the results came out. Supper was chaotic because people kept popping in to congratulate him, all of them beaming with pride that Crow Lake had produced such spectacular success.

  Miss Carrington was the first. The high school must have notified her as soon as they got confirmation of the results, so she would have known almost as soon as Matt did. It had been several weeks since I’d seen her and I was a little shy of her and hung back a bit. I remember her laughing—all three of them laughing—and Matt looking pleased and embarrassed, and Luke thumping him, quite hard, on the shoulder. I remember watching them, not knowing quite what all the fuss was about but knowing that it meant that Matt was the cleverest person in the world, which I’d always known anyway, and feeling pleased that everyone else had finally realized it too. And still, incredibly, not having the least idea what the consequences would be.

  I remember Matt phoning Aunt Annie. She’d have known that the results were due and would have instructed him to call. I don’t know what she said, but I remember Matt, red-faced, grinning into the phone.

  I remember Marie Pye coming around. Matt got up abruptly when he saw her coming down the driveway and went out to meet her. I saw her smile that nervous smile of hers and say something to him which made him smile back. I remember other well-wishers, Reverend Mitchell among them, all wanting to shake Matt vigorously by the hand. The last to come was Dr. Christopherson, who’d somehow heard the news and had driven out all the way from town.

  I can still see him standing in the kitchen with Bo and Molly waltzing around his feet, saying, “A magnificent achievement, Matt. Magnificent.”

  And I remember him saying, “When do you leave? Beginning of September?”

  And my bewilderment. I remember my bewilderment.

  I said, “How long for?”

  A hesitation. Then, gently, “A few years.”

  “Don’t you like it here any more?”

  “I love it here, Kate. This is home. And I’ll come back lots and lots. But I’ve got to go.”

  “Will you come back every weekend?”

  His face was strained, but I felt no pity for him.

  “Not every weekend. It costs a lot of money to travel back and forth.”

  A long silence, while I fought with the ache in my throat.

  “Is it very far?”

  “It’s about four hundred miles.”

  An unimaginable distance.

  He reached out and touched one of my braids. “Come here. I want to show you something.” Tears were rolling by then, but he didn’t comment on them. He took me to our parents’ bedroom and positioned me in front of the photograph of Great-Grandmother.

  “Do you know who this is?”

  I nodded. Of course I knew.

  “She’s Dad’s grandmother. His father’s mother. She lived on a farm all her life. She never went to school. And she wanted to learn so badly. She wanted to know things, and understand things, so badly, Kate. She thought the world was just fascinating, and she wanted to know all about it. She was really clever, but it’s awfully hard to learn when you have hardly any time to study and you have no one to teach you. So she was determined that when she had children, every one of them would get a proper chance to learn.

  “And they did. They all got through public school. But then they had to stop and go out to work to earn a living because they were really poor.

  “Her youngest boy—our grandfather—he was the cleverest—he grew up and had six kids of his own. He was a farmer too, and still poor, but all his kids got through public school too, and then the older boys did the youngest’s share of the work so that he could go to high school. And that was Dad.”

  He sat down on the end of our parents’ bed. For a minute or two he just looked at me, and maybe because I’d been looking at Great-Grandmother I noticed how much his eyes were like hers. His eyes and his mouth.

  He said, “I’ve got a chance to go even further, Kate. I’ve got a chance to learn things Great-Grandmother never even dreamed of. I’ve got to go. Do you see?”

  The thing is—and it shows how well he taught me, during our years together—I did see. I saw that he had to go.

  He said, “Look, I want to tell you something, okay? I’ve got a plan. I haven’t told anyone else, and I don’t want you to tell anyone. It’ll be our secret. Okay? Promise?”

  I nodded.

  “When I finish university, if I’ve done really well I’ll be able to get a good job and earn lots of money. And then I’ll pay for you to go to university too. And when you’ve done, the two of us will pay for Bo and Luke to go. That’s my plan. What do you think?”

  What did I think? I thought I would probably die from losing him, but that if I did not, it would almost be worth having lived, to be part of such a glorious plan.

  part

  FIVE

  chapter

  TWENTY

  Daniel said, “You realize this is my first experience of real uncharted wilderness. I’ve flown over it before but I’ve never been in it.”

  I said, “It’s been charted for at least a hundred years. If you look, you’ll notice we’re on a road.”

  “A track,” Daniel said cheerfully. “A mere track.”

  It isn’t a track, it’s a paved road. And even before it was paved it was a perfectly decent road, a bit boggy in the spring, a bit dusty in the summer, snowed in from time to time in the winter, but otherwise just fine. Daniel was loving it though. As far as he was concerned, this was The Real Thing, this was Nature In The Raw. Daniel knows as much about the great outdoors as your average Toronto taxi driver.

  I had no classes on Friday afternoons and he had only one tutorial which ended at eleven, so we’d set off as soon as he finished. It’s a four-hundred-mile trip, and while it no longer seems an unimaginable distance it is still a good long drive.

  The weather was good, a fine clear April day. The sprawl of Toronto gave way quite quickly to fields, and then the soil got thinner and fields gave way to meadows bounded by trees, with the rounded grey shapes of granite breaking the surface here and there like whales. And then the whales began to take over, and the meadows were merely rough patches of grass between the rocks.

  We reached cottage country by two. After Huntsville the traffic thinned out, and from North Bay onward we had the road to ourselves. It’s paved all the way to Struan now. It is only when you turn off to Crow Lake that the tarmac runs out and the forest closes in and you really start to feel you’re going back in time.

  Up ahead there was a clutch of scrubby white pines growing close to the road. I slowed down and pulled over.

  “Again?” Daniel said.

  “Afraid so.”

  I got out of the car and picked my way through the underbrush to the pines. They were growing in a shallow dip between bare ribs of granite; around them tough wiry blueberry bushes fought with the grasses and the mosses and the lichens, all of them struggling for foot room. In some places there is so little topsoil you wouldn’t think it was worth the effort of trying to grow, but they manage. They thrive, in fact. They find every crack, every crevice, every crumb of soil, and sen
d out their tough little roots and dig in, and cling on, and hoard every dropped leaf, every twig, every grain of sand or dust that’s blown their way, and gradually, gradually build up enough soil around themselves to support their offspring. And so it goes on, down the centuries. I forget, when I’m away, how much I love this landscape. I squatted down behind the scant shelter of the pines, flapping my hands behind me to fend off the blackflies, and peed into a brilliant green pillow of moss, and ached with love for it.

  “You okay?” Daniel said when I got back to the car. “Want me to drive for a bit?”

  “I’m okay.”

  I was tense, that was all.

  It was the previous Tuesday that I’d had my little crisis of confidence in the lecture hall. I’d been in a bit of a state afterwards and for the next couple of nights I hadn’t slept well. On the Thursday I’d had another class, and though it had gone all right—no flashbacks, no drying up midsentence, a reasonable question-and-answer session at the end—I was exhausted afterwards. I’d returned to my lab intending to work, but my concentration was gone. Matt kept coming back to me. An image of him, standing by the pond. I went into my office and sat down at my desk and stared out the window at the Toronto skyline. It was raining. Dull grey Toronto rain. I thought, Something’s wrong with me. Maybe I’m sick.

  But I knew I wasn’t sick. The old expression “sick at heart” came to me, and with it a memory of Mrs. Stanovich weeping into the kitchen sink, telling the Lord that she dared say He must have His reasons but that it still made her just sick. “Just sick. Sick at heart,” she’d said fiercely, determined that He should know. I don’t think it was about us, that particular time. I think Mrs. Tadworth’s grandson had died of some childhood ailment that people didn’t usually die of.

  I watched the rain leaking down the window, small snail-trails of light. It seemed that nowadays all I did was think of home. It was getting me nowhere. I thought, You should pull yourself together. Sort out what the problem is and work it out. Solving problems is supposed to be what you’re good at.