The Maestro

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  On a blustery Thursday, his third week there, a party of four bowhunters arrived at the airport, having killed a couple of hours at the local bar waiting for their flight.

  “Killed a few too many brain cells while they were at it,” said Palmateer as he loaded the Beechcraft.

  The hunters were dressed head to foot in camouflage, as if the hunt was already on. They were after bear. There was snow in the air, and they kept themselves warm by teasing Barry. They poked him a couple of times. “Hope we bag one this size,” said one of them.

  “Try your fawn bleat on him, Blake,” said another. Blake made a whimpery little sound into Barry’s ear as the boy loaded stuff on the weigh scales. The men roared with laughter and slapped their legs. Barry carried the stuff on down to the water’s edge where the plane was tethered. He just shut himself off when that kind of thing happened. Burl had seen him do it before. Burl, on the other hand, was writhing inside. He couldn’t stand to even look at the hunters.

  “Now that fawn bleat usually attracts your smarter bears,” said one of the men. “Better try something simple.”

  “How about I piss around the bait like a raccoon,” said Blake, making as if to undo his fly. The hunters found this hilarious.

  “You get a raccoon pissing around your bait and you’re gonna get bear big-time.”

  Burl was hauling a heavy box down to the plane. Palmateer must have seen the anger in his face. He spoke right up close to Burl.

  “Picture this,” he said. “Tonight while Barry is sleeping in his comfortable bed, those idiots are gonna be perched in a tree above a big trap smeared with smelly fish, freezing their useless butts off. So who’s the stupid one, eh?”

  Burl exploded in laughter. The hunters stopped talking. Turned to look.

  “What’s so friggin’ funny, brown-face?”

  One of the men sauntered down towards the loading dock, one called Gord. He stood in Burl’s path. Head down, not wanting trouble, Burl made to pass him by. Gord stepped in front of him again. Burl looked up; he had no choice. Gord’s sour and scornful expression changed. Burl could see him searching for something to say in his drunken brain, but before he could speak, Palmateer was out of the plane.

  “Look, you fellahs,” he said. “You keep holding up my boys, and the lake’ll freeze over before we get you out to Onaping.”

  He said it mildly but with an authority that was hard to deny. Gord backed off with a big groveling kind of bow, which started his friends up again. The four of them moved off a few paces to light up another smoke. Blake found a can of beer in his pocket, cracked it open.

  Palmateer sent Burl back to the shack for some more barf bags. “Maybe some bear’ll get lucky,” he said, winking.

  But the confrontation had startled Burl, started him to shaking. He slipped on an icy patch and almost fell. Barry caught him.

  “Don’t let ‘em ride you,” said Barry.

  It wasn’t that. Burl had recognized Gord. Gord was one of his father’s cronies. And he was pretty sure Gord had recognized him. When he returned from the shack, he dared to look over at the four men. Through a haze of cigarette smoke and frozen breath, Gord was looking his way.

  18

  The Love Child

  THERE WAS A MAP IN THE OFFICE BEHIND THE counter. A series of maps of northern Ontario, all joined together. There were circles drawn on it radiating out from Skookum Airways. Each line represented a new price zone. Burl had looked at the map often since he arrived. Ghost Lake was there. It wasn’t named, but he knew the shape of it.

  There was a square dot representing the tiny cabin on the cliff. Nothing for the Maestros pyramid.

  With a finger Burl traced the path of his journey through the bush that day in late August when he had left his father behind by the riverbank. And he traced the helicopter route of the piano from Skookum Airways directly to Ghost Lake. He found the point where the piano crossed the Skat. With his finger he followed the hairline that was the River Skat all the way down to Intervalle.

  The night of the bowhunters, Burl marked in the Maestro’s cabin on the north shore. He stared at the map for a long time. Long enough to start taking down the shutters in his mind, air the place out. He couldn’t stay at Skookum. Gord had recognized him. He was hunting now but when he got back he would tell Cal. Burl was sure of it.

  But it wasn’t just Gord that was on his mind. He was worried about the piano. He had promised the Maestro he would take care of things.

  He had stopped at the hardware store in Intervalle a few days earlier and talked with a guy there about woodstoves. He had thought about trying to get the little woodstove down from the miner’s cabin, but the task seemed almost impossible. Getting a woodstove to the cabin would be hard however he went about it unless, maybe, he could get Palmateer to fly him in. For some reason he couldn’t imagine asking Bea. It would be summer before he would be able to afford a flight. And what good would that be?

  Burl had been making a list of supplies: stovepipes, the tools he would need to break through the roof, and the stuff to patch up around the hole he made. He had some skills at carpentry, but the task seemed way too hard. The man at the hardware kept giving him more and more information until he thought his head would burst.

  And there was no use heating a vaulted cabin unless he threw up some insulation between the rafters. That wasn’t a hard job—the guy at the hardware had explained it to him —but it was another trip on the Budd car. Then there was food and supplies, ice-fishing equipment, a rifle…Burl knew, growing up by the railroad, that you could take just about anything in on the Budd car, but the path from Mile 29 to the cabin included steep hills. He would need a sled to drag stuff in once there was snow. He would also need muscles of iron—he wasn’t sure where you bought those.

  There were things he could collect from home. Things that were his. There was his canoe. Somehow, some time, he would have to get that. But even if he were able to get his own stuff, he still needed cash. Bea’s advance for clothing and food was the only money he had seen from her. He wasn’t in a position to protest.

  She never mentioned anything about Gow being his father. He wondered if maybe she had come to realize he was lying. Still, she looked at him in a funny, calculating kind of way.

  He had asked Palmateer when he might get paid. Palmateer had shrugged. “She’s got her own way of doing things, but don’t worry, she won’t cheat you. She had to scramble herself when she was a kid.”

  Burl worried anyway. If he had to go in a hurry, he’d sure like to have some money on him.

  He dreamed about the Maestro. Burl was following him through a forest. “I’ve got the Revelation,” he kept saying, but even though the Maestro looked back, he never slowed down.

  Burl got up, unable to sleep. It was before midnight. He stared out at the bay, choppy under a relentless north wind. There would be snow on the wind’s tail. That’s the way Palmateer put it. The full moon cut herself free from the straggly clouds now and then. Burl could see the planes bobbing at their moorage. Soon they would be hauled up, the pontoons replaced with skis.

  Burl headed over to the couch. The Reader’s Digest Complete Do-it-yourself Manuallay open on the coffee table. It wasn’t half complete enough, but it gave him something to dream about. There was a cup of instant decaf that he had been drinking earlier. He tasted it but it was stone-cold.

  The door opened. It was Bea.

  “Don’t lay an egg!” she said.

  “You scared me.”

  Bea sat down on the arm of the couch. “You look like a fox just entered the coop.”

  Burl managed a tight little smile.

  “I’m glad you’re up,” she said, taking off her gloves. Burl closed his book and waited. He watched her eyes reading the title of the book on his lap.

  “There was another show about the late Nate Gow on the radio.” Bea undid the buttons of her coat. Then she rooted around in her purse and came out with a pack of cigarettes. She lit up. “Darn inter
esting,” she said. “Reminiscences, bits of interviews—that kind of thing. It’s funny listening to people talk about someone you’ve met. Guess it’s the first time I’ve ever known anybody famous.” She looked straight at Burl. It unnerved him a bit.

  “I read all I could in the papers, Macleans magazine. Watched a special on the TV, even. Nobody ever mentions any family. I mean, immediate family. No wife or kids.” She paused. “Know what I mean?”

  Burl glanced up. He had no fringe of summer-long hair to hide behind. Now would be the time to tell her. But he kept his silence.

  “Don’t you think it’s about time we talked?” she asked.

  “About what?”

  “What you plan on doing now that he’s gone?”

  Burl looked into Bea’s eyes for a clue as to what she was getting at. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  She leaned forward and stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray on the coffee table. She leaned back, ran her fingers through her hair, shook her head a bit to get the dampness out, smoothed her hair back down.

  “On the radio show tonight some old friend was talking about how much Gow enjoyed the north. He liked to drive up this way. Liked to get away from it all. Just hang out in a motel somewhere for a few days where no one knew him.” She turned her gaze on Burl again. “Is that how it happened?”

  Burl looked down at his book. He had been rereading the section on insulating a ceiling. He wished she would go and let him daydream about stapling up foam sheets, covering them with quarter-inch ply.

  “You see pictures of him ten or twenty years back. Handsome guy. Energy just popping out of every pore.” She glanced at Burl again. “I got to thinking. A young woman—a pretty young waitress, for instance—stuck in some dead-end whistle stop out on the highway—seeing nothing but truckers and salesmen all day. Then suddenly this guy steps out of a long black limo and heads in, starts to talk—could that man talk when he got his revs up! Takes a room in the motel for a few days… “

  Maybe it was the smoke in the room, but Burl began feeling moths start whirling around in his head, his whole body. He wanted to go out into the wind, get a good hard whack of it in his nostrils.

  Bea leaned a little closer.

  “Who’d blame her, Burl? He’d be irresistible. Funny, sensitive, obviously well-heeled, even if he weren’t dressed the part. It wouldn’t be a crime. I mean, it’s only human nature, what happened.”

  “What happened?”

  “Jeez, Burl. For a sixteen-year-old, you’re pretty wet behind the ears.”

  Bea picked up a cushion and poked him good-naturedly in the side of the head. Burl pushed the cushion away. He was beginning to put it together: Nathaniel Gow and some imaginary waitress falling in love.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” he said.

  “Oh, come on, Burl,” she said. “I think you need to talk this out.”

  “There isn’t anything to tell. I mean, no one ever really told me how it happened.”

  “But somehow,” said Bea, careful now, seeing his distress. “Somehow you got back together. Somebody contacted somebody. All I was trying to get at was that if you are his love child, that’s not such a big deal these days. You don’t have anything to be ashamed of. You know what I mean? And, if you are, you do have some rights, Burl. Or you ought to”.

  A love child. Burl had heard that expression before. Funny, how a child born to parents who were married was just a child. Out of wedlock it was a love child. A love child reunited with his father.

  “A person’s got to stand up for his rights,” she said. “You see why I’m concerned?”

  Burl had not put this idea in her head. When he told Bea he was Gow’s son, he was only confirming her suspicions. He couldn’t tell her the real story. Anyway, he wanted to hold onto this dream for a bit longer. Like when you walk around in the department store holding on tight to something you can’t afford, but it’s yours to feel and smell and hold as long as you don’t step out the door.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

  “Well,” said Bea in a self-satisfied way. “Maybe that’s where I come in.” She slid down from the arm of the chair onto the seat. She was all business now. Burl moved away from her a bit.

  “I’m not sure anyone down there in Toronto knows about that cabin of yours—you see where I’m going with this, Burl? Gow let me know, more than once, that privacy was of the utmost importance to him. Believe me, I know when I’m being told to keep my big mouth shut. I got the feeling that maybe not even his nearest and dearest knew about it.”

  “He called it his folly,” said Burl.

  “Exactly,” said Bea. “Maybe not his first, either.” She raised her eyebrow again. Burl turned away, embarrassed.

  “Anyway, there it is and here you are. And dammit— even if you don’t get another red cent—that place should be yours, my friend.”

  She sounded indignant. She got up and walked over to the door to look out, almost as if maybe there was someone coming up the driveway right this minute with a deed in his hand.

  “He built that place for you,” she said. She sounded as if Gow himself had entrusted her with this fact. “What kind of arrangement did you two come to about the cabin?”

  Burl put the book off his lap. “All he said when he left was not to chop up the piano for firewood.”

  “I bet he did,” she said. “Nothing else? Nothing on paper?”

  “Nothing. He was coming back.”

  “Right,” she said. “I tried to figure what he was doing setting up that camp. I mean, he was about as at home in the wilderness as I would be on a concert stage. Then I met you and I began to put two and two together. When I heard that show tonight on the radio—the part about hiding out in the north now and then—the whole puzzle sorta came together. I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts he meant Ghost Lake for you. It makes sense. He knew you wouldn’t be happy down there in Hogtown. And maybe he didn’t want anyone to know about you. I can understand that. So he builds this great camp where he can come and visit whenever he can get away.”

  Burl wanted her to go on and on. He had dreaded having to explain how he came to be the Maestro’s son. Now Bea was doing it for him. All he had to do was nod. Then, suddenly, he realized the story was taking a nose-dive.

  “But now that he’s gone, well, things might be murky on the legal end.”

  “Someone else might get it?” said Burl. The thought of anyone claiming the camp had never even crossed his mind. He went cold all over. It was his place now.

  Bea looked him square in the face. “The thing is, once lawyers start digging around in his accounts in order to settle the estate, they’re bound to come up with something. The deed to the land, for example; some hefty invoices— what does a piano like that cost? Twenty, thirty grand. Huh! I bought the Beaver for that much. Anyway, you can’t spend that kind of cash and not leave a paper trail.”

  “But it was his money,” said Burl. “He could do whatever he wanted with it.”

  “Sure. But he’s gone and now other people have to decide what to do with what’s left behind. It’s not like pocket money, Burl. When an estate is being settled, folks want to know what’s what and who gets it.”

  When Grandfather Robichaud died, Doloris got a gold fob watch on a chain. It had been willed to her; it came in the mail. She let Burl hold it sometimes. Then Cal took it and sold it, and Doloris hit him with a frying pan. That was in the days when she still had some pluck in her.

  “I guess that’s what will happen,” said Burl.

  “So?” said Bea. “What do you plan on doing about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s where Auntie Bea can help.” She winked at him. Then her face got serious again. She picked her words with an uncharacteristic delicacy. “Can you get your mother in on this?”

  Burl’s apprehension showed on his face.

  “Just asking,” said Bea. “I guess she’s not in the picture any more.�
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  “No,” he said, allowing the story to grow but not daring to look at Bea while it did.

  “Do you know if he supported her at all? If he did, there might be records.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No support payments, eh? Didn’t want the world to know about his little misadventure. Some backwoods chicky gets herself knocked up and claims the father is a big celebrity—who’s gonna believe her?”

  “It wasn’t like that!” cried Burl.

  “Okay, okay. Don’t get your shorts in knot.” Bea levelled off her voice.

  “She never told him about me,” said Burl. “Not until she got sick. As soon as he heard he came.”

  “She got sick?”

  Burl nodded. “She died. This summer.”

  “I see,” said Bea. Then she was quiet for a moment. Respectful. “So there is no one, just like you said. His people should know that.”

  His people. The idea hadn’t really registered on Burl. Gow may not have a wife and family, but he would have people. All he knew about was a friend named Reggie, and he seemed harmless enough. But people—the way Bea said it—they might try to steal the cabin from under his nose.

  “Burl?” Bea was leaning close. “Listen to me.” She seemed uncomfortable. “I see these crazy cases in the magazines sometimes. Rich relatives squabbling over who gets the cutlery. It’s enough to make you sick. But if you are Nathaniel Gow’s child—illegitimate or not—his family ought to know about it. You have a birth right.”

  Burl slumped back on the couch. He was exhausted.

  “You look beat,” she said. “We’ll talk some more tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” said Burl. Tomorrow sounded good.

  She headed for the door, buttoning up her coat. She let in a great swirling eddy of snow-laced wind.

  “You never know,” she said, turning towards him. “Now that he’s gone, the family might really be pleased to know there’s something of him left behind. Something more than records, I mean.”

  19

  The Plan

  THE NEXT DAY THERE WAS WORK TO DO AND Bea wasn’t around much, not so you could take her aside and look her in the eye.