The Maestro

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  He had heard the floatplane coming, seen it circle the lake flying low, then disappear out of sight behind the ridge and out of hearing only to reappear moments later, making an approach into the onshore wind. Burl had been in the cabin for four days, and this was his first sign of civilization.

  Shielding his eyes from the sun, he could see there was only the pilot on board. He tried to imagine his father crouching in the hold, ready to leap out once the plane reached the shore. This fantasy somehow failed to arouse any real sense of panic.

  The provincial police operated planes; there was no other way of getting around in the north in a hurry. But there were no police markings on this plane. And, as it drew nearer to shore, Burl realized he wasn’t going to run, whoever it was.

  The racket of the engine drowned out the bird songs. Then, just off shore, the engine was cut, and the plane drifted in until its pontoons nosed up onto the beach. The pilot switched off the noise and climbed out of the cockpit, down the ladder to the pontoon. A woman.

  She gave Burl a business-like nod, took off her mirror shades and twisted to get a kink out of her back.

  “Rabbits and hares,” she said loudly, as if the motor was still running.

  She jumped ashore. Got a soaker but didn’t seem to mind. “You Burl?” she asked. He nodded. “Bea Clifford,” she said. “Skookum Airways.” She shook his hand.

  Seeing he was bare-footed, she directed him to a cleat at the rear end of the pontoon. He waded out, grabbed a hold of it and helped swing the plane around so that the tail was facing the beach. The pontoons were tapered towards the back, and together he and Bea dragged the plane up the shore a bit. Bea had a long rope that she tied in a clovehitch to the cleat. She tethered the plane to a large driftwood log.

  “Onshore breeze,” she said. “Plane’s not going anywhere fast.”

  When Burl still did not reply, she pretended to knock on his forehead. Anybody home? Burl backed off.

  “It’s September first, kid. You always got to say ‘rabbits and hares’ the first of the month. Not that I’m superstitious.”

  She put her hands on her hips, gave Burl a quick but intense once-over. Then she surveyed the spot. “Great camp, eh?”

  Burl forced himself to say yes.

  “Shed’s up that way, as I recall,” she said. Then she jumped back aboard the pontoon, opened the door. “Come on, fellah. I’m gonna need a little help with this.”

  Burl waded out. “Mr. Gow isn’t here any more,” he said.

  Bea hefted a cardboard box out of the cab. She balanced it with her knee while she checked her watch. “I got a party wants out of Pogamasing at six, so put a little hustle into it, eh?”

  The box was heavy with groceries.

  “There must be some mistake,” he said.

  “That might be true,” said Bea. “But it’s not my mistake.”

  Burl took the carton which he left on the shore. When he returned, she was reaching into the breast pocket of her flight jacket. She showed him an invoice. “North End Ghost Lake. Old Starlight Claim. Round Trip. Burl.”

  “That’s all I got written here,” she said. “Mr. Gow gave me the shopping list when he passed through a few days back, but what with people closing up summer lodges and resorts and such, I couldn’t free up one of the boys until yesterday.”

  She inspected him again. “You don’t look like you’ve been suffering too much.”

  In a bit of a daze, Burl lugged a second box of groceries to the shore. Five more boxes followed in rapid succession, heavy with cans and stacked high with packaged goods: noodles, rice, tea, coffee, cookies, bread and canned milk.

  “Oo-ee,” said Bea. She had stopped to admire a line of fish Burl had secured to the underside of the deck so that they could swim in the shallows. He had caught them that morning—four bass and a couple of perch. The bass were a good size, plenty for supper and breakfast, too.

  “Good fishin’ here?” she asked. She stopped and took a good long gander at the lake. She breathed in deeply. “Very pretty. Very pretty.”

  The next part of the load was heavy. A 45-gallon drum of diesel fuel. The two of them improvised a ramp of boards Burl hauled out from under the cabin. Once they had the drum on the beach, Bea was winded.

  Burl headed to the house for something to drink. He brought her back a canned cola and one for himself. He had been saving them, he was down to three. Now, it seemed, he had another three dozen.

  Bea took a good long pull on the can. “Caught you off guard,” she said. “Sure I did.” She laughed. What a laugh. Right from her boots. “Jeez,” she said, handing him back the empty cola can. “There’s something else.” She clambered up into the cockpit and backed out of the plane carrying a rod and reel and a brown paper bag.

  “Barry picked you up a coupla things: some line, sinkers, hooks and stuff. A coupla lures: a Hula Popper, a William’s Wobbler—hell, I never caught anything but bottom with one of those. But then Barry doesn’t know his butt from a turkey sandwich, most days.”

  Burl pulled the plastic package from the bag. The Wobbler gleamed gold.

  “Thanks,” he said. It seemed a lame thing to say. But then he hadn’t spoken much lately. “Was the rod Mr. Gow’s idea?”

  She looked at him inquisitively, looked at the N.O.G. on his shirt. He felt his hand floating up to cover the monogram.

  “Mr. Gow? Is that what you call him?”

  Burl didn’t quite like the look on her face. He didn’t answer.

  “Yeah. Yeah,” said Bea, good-natured again. “It was his idea.”

  “Can I see that paper?” Burl asked. Bea handed him the invoice. Ghost Lake. He had not known this place had a name until then. The Old Starlight Claim. That must be the prospector the Maestro had mentioned. But these things did not claim his complete attention. “Burl,” it read. Not “Burl Crow,” as he had feared. By now there might be a search party out looking for him. That is if anybody had declared him missing.

  He glanced at Bea. She was helping herself to a good long look at him. He wondered if she knew who he was.

  “Anything wrong?” asked Bea.

  “No,” said Burl. Then, with a shock, he noticed the price of the flight, over three hundred dollars. The invoice was stamped Paid.

  Bea was busy unhitching the Beaver from its mooring.

  There was one other thing on Burl’s mind.

  “What does it mean, ‘Round Trip’?”

  Bea leaned on one of the wing struts. “Well, Burl. As pretty a spot as you got here, I hadn’t planned on staying. So you see, it’s a round trip you pay for.”

  Burl made one last inspection of the invoice and then handed it back.

  “You can send anything back you want. The trip’s paid for. Anything up to twelve hundred pounds. Yourself included.”

  There was nothing Burl wanted to send back.

  “You sure now?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Thank you.”

  She looked out at the lake again, my-my-mying quietly to herself. “You got yourself one honey of a retreat here.” There was a directness to the statement that annoyed Burl, though he couldn’t say why. She was right.

  “You known him long?” she asked.

  Burl was on his guard.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he had a young sentinel and custodian—those were the words he used—watching over things for him ‘til he could get up again. Did he hire you?”

  Again Burl didn’t answer.

  “No,” said Bea. “Somehow I didn’t think so.” She gave him one more penetrating inspection, then put on her shades. “Well, we’ll be seeing you again, Burl, I imagine.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Thanks again for the stuff.”

  “Don’t thank me.”

  She unhitched the plane and pushed it back into the water. The waves pushed at the Beaver, rocking it like a rocking horse. Bea climbed back on board. Burl retreated a little up the beach. Bea flipped down her window, waved.


  “You take care now,” she said, her face up near the tiny opening.

  Burl nodded. Then he waded out so he could see her just as she was closing the window.

  “Tell Mr. Gow thank you, for me,” he said.

  She smiled. “I’ll be sure to send Mr. Gow your regards.”

  Then the silence of Ghost Lake was shattered for the second time in less than an hour as the plane roared off.

  Burdened with both gratitude and curiosity, Burl began to heft the groceries up to the cabin. There was easily a month’s worth of supplies.

  14

  The Cabin on the Cliff

  HE ATE, SLEPT, FISHED, EXPLORED, FLATTENED cans, played on the piano, counted shooting stars, tried reading the Bible, unearthed a flint arrowhead, conducted the Northern Lights, watched the poplars turn yellow, built a raft out of planks and plywood, wrote his name in frost on the railing of the deck, tried to remember what his father looked like, his mother, washed his clothes and hung them out to dry in the north wind, made roaring bonfires on the beach with fat pine, resinous and hot.

  Alone, Burl found himself caught between anticipation and relief. But he got on in fine style with the business of living. The Maestro would return when he returned. And when he did, Burl was determined not to get in his way. To that end, he started work, making something of a sleeping quarter in the shed.

  It was a challenge. There was all kinds of building material—rigid insulation, lengths of two-by-four, oddly shaped scraps of plywood—but after he’d made his raft, there was not enough of anything to actually wall off the diesel engine.

  Then one day, while he was working in the shed, his mind wandered to what he had read on the invoice. The Old Starlight Claim. Burl stopped what he was doing. Maybe the prospector had never found gold or whatever he was looking for, but he might have made himself a cabin of some kind. He stepped outside the shed and was surprised that it had never occurred to him before to look. For right outside the door the path that led up from the beach continued right past the shed, if only he’d had eyes to see. It was well and truly overgrown.

  There are paths in the woods. Tunnels. They still have walls if you can make your eyes adjust, see the signs. The hill climbed steeply. Branches brushed against Burl’s face, closed in on him. He kept his eyes peeled. Finally he found a blaze in a tree trunk. He went on. Then he found another blaze, long healed but still a sign. He was high enough to catch glimpses of the lake through the poplars. Then he was on a rocky ridge. He came to a digging site—not a mine, but a man-made depression in the ground. And then, finally, he came upon what he had hoped for. A tiny perfect cabin not much bigger than the Maestro’s shed.

  The door bristled with sharp black spikes, business side out. The windows were shuttered in the same manner. This was bear-proofing at its gruesome best! For all that, the door was not locked. In fact, when the latch was opened, the spiked door swung out to reveal a plain wooden door behind it. Burl ventured inside.

  There was an iron bedstead. A wide shelf under the window near the door with a large white enameled bowl, a couple of tin saucepots, a black iron frying pan. On a narrow shelf above this counter, beside the window, sat a couple of plates, bowls, cups and a wooden box with a few pieces of cutlery in it neatly wrapped in a tea towel. There was a tin box with matches inside. In the corner sat a tiny old woodstove vented through the wall. A cast-iron teapot sat on the top. That was all. There was no closet—only three hooks on the wall. There was no chest of drawers but only a shelf behind the door, empty. There was a layer of dust on everything, several dead flies, mouse droppings. But otherwise the place was as neat as a pin.

  Burl walked around the little cabin again and again, marvelling at its orderliness. Outside there was a neat stack of firewood with a sheet of plywood over it held down by rocks to keep it dry. Within half an hour of arriving at this spot, a person could have it cleaned up and a pot of tea bubbling on the stove.

  On the south side of the building there was a bare and rocky outcropping from which Ghost Lake, almost the whole expanse of it, could be seen—all but the beach directly below where the pyramid stood.

  Burl could not believe his luck. This is where he would stay when the Maestro came back. He didn’t need much. He could stay out of the Maestro’s way when he was composing or when he was in one of his moods. He would come down to cook meals and fix stuff that needed fixing. He would earn his keep. It was all so perfect.

  Burl closed up the cabin carefully. On the way back down the hill, he freshened up the blazes on the trees and added a couple of new ones. He would clear some of this trail. It would be something to do with his time. He had lots of time.

  He was far too busy for loneliness to enter his mind. It was September and he could not remember a September when he wasn’t at school. He thought about Mrs. Agnew. He imagined showing her around the cabin, making her supper there.

  He thought about her finding the book she had given him, in his old desk. He hoped she wouldn’t think he hadn’t wanted it. Nothing could have been farther from the truth.

  15

  Swept Away

  A MONTH PASSED. A MONTH AND A BIT. BURL measured the days in groceries. His boxes emptied slowly but steadily.

  Fall set in hard. It rained in cold grey sheets, and when it wasn’t raining there was invariably a cloud cover that hung like a badly strung and leaky tarp over Ghost Lake. On bad days Burl stayed in and fought his way through the Revelation.

  Flickering lights didn’t make it easy. There was something wrong with the generator: a dirty filter, contaminated fuel—he wasn’t sure what. He wasn’t sure which he’d run out of first: food or electricity.

  It was hunting season. Flights in and out of the bush increased until there were planes coming Burl’s way almost daily, but none of them touched down on his lake. Each distant buzzing brought on a low-level pain in Burl’s head, like a tooth that needed attending.

  He couldn’t be sure the Maestro would allow him to stay. He was not a boy who had grown up with any guarantees about anything, but this—this he wanted so much. He imagined scene upon scene with Nathaniel Orlando Gow. He prepared himself for every kind of take two.

  Nothing, however, quite prepared him for what was to happen.

  Indian summer rolled in. And so it was on a rare sunny day that Bea returned. Burl was out on his raft fishing for pickerel in deep water off the cliff from which he had first spied Ghost Lake. Despite the sun, a metallic, wintry-tasting cold came up from the bottom of the lake. His feet were frozen up to the ankles; buoyancy was not his craft’s best quality. Then came the drone and the speck in the wide sky getting closer.

  He recognized the orange floatplane with the black stripe down the side. He waved. Bea tipped her wing at him. She did not need to circle upland to make her approach, for even on a fine day now the wind blew nearly always out of the north.

  He rowed hard, but with a piece of one-by-three whittled into a very rough paddle, his progress was slow. Bea reached the beach before he did. He looked to shore expectantly. She didn’t seem to have a cargo or a passenger this time around. She stood on the beach kicking at the sand with her toe, her hands in the back pockets of her jeans.

  Burl straightened up. He stopped rowing. Something about her stance made him want to just let the offshore breeze blow him away down the lake.

  She gazed out at him. She still had her shades on but she held him in her vision as surely as if he were a runway on a stormy day. So he paddled again, despite the wind and despite the churning in his stomach. She was reeling him in.

  Bea gave him a hand to haul his raft onto the shore. When he looked up to thank her, the words stuck in his throat. The set of her jaw was grim.

  “I got some bad news,” she said.

  Once upon a time, Burl’s mother told Cal to show the boy a little love. So Cal had written the letters L O V E with a ballpoint pen on the knuckles of his fist and asked Burl how much love he wanted. Nothing bad ever really came as a s
urprise to Burl.

  “It’s your Mr. Gow,” said Bea, clearing her throat a bit. “There isn’t any easy way to say this. He’s gone. He died.”

  Burl took a couple of deep breaths, as if he was going to dive for something a long way down.

  “It was a coupla days back. I got up here as soon as I could.”

  Burl held onto his breath, wouldn’t let it escape.

  “It was in all the papers,” said Bea. “Front page in the Toronto Star.” She seemed surprised that Gow demanded so much attention. “Even the Sudbury Star. I got them here. Thought you might like to see.”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. She brought him the papers from the cockpit. There was a picture of an intense young man hunched over the keyboard of a piano. Burl’s eyes scanned the story: “One of the world’s great pianists… massive stroke … eccentric genius … recluse … the music world mourns…”

  He looked up. Bea was staring at him expectantly. He wondered if she was waiting for him to cry. He became aware of how cold his feet were. He sat on a rock and took off his shoes, his soaking socks.

  She showed him the other paper. The face of the pianist here was older, more haggard.

  “He booked a flight for the middle of this month,” said Bea, stowing her shades away in her pocket. “Not for him,” she said. “Wild horses wouldn’t get him up in a plane.” She laughed a little at this, as if nothing could be quite so incomprehensible to her as someone with a fear of flying. “You okay, kid?”

  “Pardon?”

  “He say anything to you about his plans?”

  Burl swallowed hard. “Just that he was coming.” “So what happens now?” she said. Burl stared at his feet. Couldn’t speak. “He paid for the trip already. Normally, folks pay the day they fly, but he was pretty determined.”

  Burl took another couple of deep breaths. Whatever he was diving for was buried way deep in the lake, in the mud somewhere a long way down. It was cold down there.

  “He was firm about payin’ for the flight in advance.” Bea seemed uncomfortable. “I tried to tell him there was no need, but he wouldn’t listen. When I heard he died, I found myself thinkin’, maybe he had a premonition. Know what I mean?”