Eye Lake

by Tristan Hughes

  Every summer back then in the long-gone days they’d have a picnic out on the south shore of Red Rock Lake – right where I was sitting, nearly. Pretty much the whole township went, as well as some of the Indian families who lived nearby. They’d set out first thing in the morning, carrying cobs of corn and guns and fishing rods, and when they got to the lake the women would dig pits in the sand and start fires and some of the men would head out in canoes to fish, while the others would go back into the woods to search for game to shoot. There was one picnic that was especially famous: the one where the wolf man and the circus guy came. It was Jim who told Virgil about that. Jim, with his quiet, chuckling smile and the thin red veins criss-crossing his nose. I missed him being about. He was part of my own long-gone days now.

  The wolf man came from Minneapolis. He’d been in Crooked River for a week and was trying to kill wolves, except he wasn’t using a gun or anything – he was using an axe and a suit made out of nails – and he wasn’t having much luck. They’ve got a photo of him in the museum, with his suit on and his axe in his hands. The suit was made of leather and the nails were shoved through it so they stuck out all over like porcupine quills. Jim would get to chuckling whenever he mentioned him. ‘Who knows what made him come here,’ he’d say. ‘Who knows why people do what they do.’ The wolf man told everyone who’d listen that he was planning to make a living off all the pelts he was going to get, but he’d never even seen a wolf, Jim said, and he wasn’t going to neither in that getup. People had funny ideas about the north woods back then, he said. All sorts of funny ideas. Jim was just a boy himself and used to follow him into the woods and do wolf howls and make him run in circles through the bush holding his axe up ready, with sweat pouring down his face and mosquitoes buzzing around his head and his hands full of holes where he’d tried to swat them and hit the nails on his suit instead.

  The circus guy arrived on a night train two days before the picnic. Jim said he’d seen him step out of the caboose, wearing a sharp suit and a hat, followed by a woman who was wearing a fur coat, even though it was summer. They walked together down the street to Clarence’s hotel and Jim ran over to where the caboose man was leaning against his caboose, smoking a cigarette and waiting for the train to be loaded with coal and water.

  ‘Where they from?’ Jim asked. They weren’t used to men in sharp suits getting off in Crooked River.

  ‘From Chicago,’ the caboose man replied.

  ‘Is he a gangster?’ Jim asked excitedly. The caboose man chuckled to himself.

  ‘Well, sonny, if he’s a gangster he ain’t been too forthcoming about it. He says he owns a circus. But then again,’ he said with a wink, ‘he says that there woman is his sister, too.’

  The first good look anybody got at them was the next day at lunch, in the dining room of the hotel. The man was still wearing his suit but the woman had changed out of her fur coat and was wearing a white silk blouse and a long black skirt and a black hat. There were pearls hanging from her ears, almost as white as her skin, and her lips were redder than any woman’s in town. Usually all the people who stayed in the hotel sat together at one long wooden table for lunch and helped themselves from two big bowls that sat on either end of it. (Mostly it was rabbit stew, said Jim; Clarence used to pay him a few dollars a week to snare them.) But on that day Clarence had had a separate table set for the man and his sister. ‘Because there’s a lady present,’ he informed the dining room when all of them at the long table saw the separate table. And he cooked a chicken for them too, said Jim – so he must have reckoned it was a real special occasion.

  All through lunch Clarence made a fuss of them. He didn’t have much in the hotel kitchen – just what would do for the rail and lumber men – but what he did have he brought out. ‘Perhaps you’d like a few oranges for dessert?’ he asked, and over at the long table the men’s eyes popped out some. He sure kept them hid, a few of them mumbled.

  The man in the suit talked loudly all through his lunch, as if he were speaking to an audience. He told Clarence how they’d come from Europe with the circus as children, him and his sister. He hinted that they’d come from high-born blood but tragic circumstances had led to their father and mother’s early death and they’d been cheated out of their inheritance. He stopped for a minute when he got to the part about the tragic circumstances and pulled a white handkerchief from his breast pocket and began dabbing his eyes with it. His sister put her hand across the table and clasped his. ‘What a bucket of moonshine he was selling,’ Jim said. ‘And nobody in the Pioneer Hotel was buying a drop of it.’

  ‘Except my father,’ Virgil said.

  ‘I don’t think he was buying into it either,’ Jim said. ‘With respect to you and your mother, Virgil, I think it was her he was buying into. Or not even that. It was the idea of her – if you get my meaning right. Crooked River was a rough-and-ready place the wrong side of nowhere and we didn’t get so many women visitors. And we got even fewer who wore silk and lipstick. Your father must’ve thought she was just about the finest lady who’d ever set foot in his hotel.’ ‘Why were they even here?’ Virgil asked.

  ‘Well,’ Jim said, ‘when Clarence finally got around to asking, the man replied they needed a bear – for their circus. The old one had died and they needed a cub, a living cub, to get trained and take its place. “So how might a man go about getting himself one of those in these parts?” the man asked, loudly enough for the whole room to hear.

  ‘“How much you willing to pay for it?” one of the railroad men at the long table asked.

  ‘“Fifty American dollars,” he said.

  ‘“You best come to the picnic tomorrow, then,” the man told him.’

  ‘The next morning they set off, most of the township, on the narrow track that led to Red Rock Lake. Clarence led the way, with the circus man and his sister on either side of him. Then there was the Rooney family and Mr. Scheider, who owned the store; and Jake’s mom and dad and Joe Gordon, who was a trapper too; and then … ’ (Here, Jim would go through a bunch of names, some of them that were still used in town and some that weren’t, nodding to himself as he went along, as if by remembering them he was putting the whole long-gone day of the picnic and that world back together, piece by piece, person by person. And even though he never said nothing about anyone going in any particular order, I knew from the pictures and stuff in the museum they were going Crooked River 1, 2, 3, 4 … )

  ‘I was lingering right at the back,’ Jim chuckled. ‘The wolf man had tagged along in his suit and Jake and some of the Indian boys were sneaking through the bush on either side of track, calling out to him like wolves. He must’ve thought them woods was just full of them.

  ‘When they got to the beach the women started digging out the firepits and some of the men set out in canoes to catch lake trout and walleyes, while the others went off to shoot partridge and whatever else they could find. Meanwhile, two of the railroad men, Jake’s father, the wolf man, and two of the Indian boys stayed behind on the beach with Clarence and the circus man. His sister had sat herself down beneath an umbrella – a parasol she called it – and begun wrapping herself and her silk shirt in a plain cotton sheet. “These flies,” she kept saying. “These damn flies.”

  ‘“So what next?’” asked the circus man.

  ‘“We’re heading out to the blueberry patch,” Jake’s dad said.

  ‘“What for?”

  ‘“For your bear.”

  ‘And so off they went – all of them except Clarence – towards the western shore where the best blueberry spots were.’

  ‘And why not Clarence as well?’ Virgil asked.

  ‘With all due respect to you and your mother, Virgil, I think he had other things than bears on his mind,’ Jim winked.

  ‘When the others got to the blueberry patch it didn’t take them long to find a she-bear and her cub. Now you stay back here, t
hey told the circus man and the wolf man, and if she comes at you, you hotfoot it up one of these trees. Then the men crept closer and hid behind some bushes while the two Indian boys tracked around in the opposite direction, until they were on the other side of the bear and her cub. At a signal, the men and the Indian boys stood up suddenly and started hollering and beating the bushes with sticks. The bear and her cub ran this way and that in panic and the men and boys circled them, hollering and beating the bushes, until at last the she-bear would make a run at them and they’d split up and scatter into the woods. Soon enough she and her cub were separated, and then the Indian boys started calling out in the voice of the cub and drawing her further and further away into the bush, crying and bellowing and roaring for what she thought was her baby. The men came back and moved in a circle around the cub. When they caught it they tied up its limbs and snout with rope.

  ‘It all went like clockwork,’ Jim said. ‘Except when they came back to the spot where they’d left the other two they found the wolf man stuck high up a poplar tree, trembling like one of its leaves. He lost heart with his hunting after that,’ Jim said. ‘The day after the picnic Mr. Gordon took pity on him and gave him two wolves he’d poisoned. They took a picture for him to take home, of him standing with his axe raised over one of the already dead wolves, and the day after that he was headed back to Minneapolis.

  ‘Back on the beach the firepits were ready and were heaped full of fish and game. And as they waited for it to cook, they sat down on the sand by the water and the children swam and the men drank from flasks of whiskey and smoked cigars and pipes and talked. The circus man was in full flow then,’ Jim said, ‘stoked up with the whiskey and pleased with his bear – talking about his old country and the lost happy days of his and his sister’s childhood.’

  They lived on the banks of the Danube, he told them, in a castle made of stone that shone almost white in the sun. It had columns and arched doors and a high tower topped with brightly coloured pennants that flapped merrily in the breeze. The gardens sloped down to the river’s bank, dotted with great oaks and elms and beds of flowers and marble fountains where carved mermaids lounged beneath cascading founts of crystal water. ‘Ah, those gardens,’ the man sighed, ‘such a lush deep green they were, and so soft beneath my feet – like carpets.’ In the evenings he’d sneak out and watch the moon rise above the river, and it was such a big moon you’d feel as though you could reach out and touch it. And the stars … they were stars like no others, like a thousand diamonds in the sky. And there were more diamonds in the castle too – on the nights when they had dances and balls in the main hall – shining from the tiaras and necklaces of the ladies as they waltzed beneath the lights of the chandeliers, the twirling satin of their dresses as sweet and soft as cotton candy. ‘What enchanted nights they’d been,’ the circus man said. What a time and world it had been then! Marked by a glamour and beauty he’d never seen since.

  ‘We all sat and listened,’ Jim said. ‘It was a pretty story. And what with the smells of the fish and game cooking in the pits and the mellow warm air of the afternoon, it was a pleasant enough picture to doze off into. The circus man seemed to be enjoying it as much as anybody and once he’d got into his stride I reckon he might’ve even half-believed it himself. The tear in his eye when he got to the tragic circumstances that’d taken it all away was almost real. Except this time there was no comforting hand offered by the sister. She sat through the whole performance – wrapped in the sheet beneath the umbrella – without saying a word, not a single word. I reckon she’d heard it plenty of times already.

  ‘Clarence stood up then and, putting on his finest airs and graces, declared: “If I might be so bold as to interrupt the gentleman, as everyone here knows we have a dance of our own here in Crooked River tonight and though we can’t offer quite the finery and luxury of those dances he remembers, I hope we can at least offer our warmest hospitality.” And saying that he offered the sister an invitation he’d written in his very best hand on a small white piece of paper.

  ‘Now the thing was,’ said Jim, ‘we had those dances in Clarence’s hotel every night after the picnics – and once a month through the whole summer too – but nobody had ever needed an invitation to go to them, let alone a written one. Everybody went. You just turned up and walked in the door. So you could see some of the wags from town smiling at this.

  ‘“Clarence,” one of them said. “If I might be so bold as to interrupt, I must declare that I don’t seem to have received my invitation as yet.”

  ‘“Well, I’ll be damned if I haven’t lost mine,” said another.

  ‘“Do they admit two, Clarence, or just the one?”’

  Jim never said exactly what was written on that invitation, but I didn’t ever need him to. It said: ‘You are cordially invited to the Crooked River Picnic Dance. I would be most honoured if you would attend. Yours, Clarence O’Callaghan. Proprietor.’ I knew all this because it was right downstairs in the basement, in his trunk.

  That night at the dance Clarence played his fiddle, the same as he always did. ‘Your father was the best in town,’ Jim said, which Virgil nodded at: he’d always said himself that Clarence was the best fiddler he’d ever heard. ‘But that night he was real special,’ Jim told him. He did the jigs and reels, beating time on the floorboards with his boots, and his fingers were a blur and he never missed a note. He had them dancing so quick their heads were spinning and they hardly knew where their feet were. And then he’d switch to the slow sad Irish ballads and there’d barely be a dry eye in the place. And then back again to the fast stuff before those tears even had time to fall down their cheeks. ‘He made that fiddle sing,’ Jim said, looking as though if he listened hard enough then he might still be able to hear it, like it might jump out of Clarence’s trunk and start playing again, ‘and every one of them songs was like the best you’d ever heard.’

  ‘I don’t know how long that dance went on for,’ Jim said, ‘but it was longer than any of us remembered the other ones going on for. And that circus man, well, he was twirling and jumping and spinning with the best of them and he sure didn’t look like no lord or sir then, like he was pining for those waltzes on the banks of the Danube. As for the sister, well she stayed sitting until almost the end of the night. Clarence was watching her as he played, and I reckon he was trying to tempt her up onto her feet the whole time, trying to play so good her feet wouldn’t have no choice but to start moving. Until finally, right at the end, when the light was almost coming into the sky outside, she got up and walked to the floor. I’m not sure what Clarence was playing then – it wasn’t one of his regular tunes – but there was a swing and a sway to it, a lilting this way and that, and when she started to dance she was moving just the same as it sounded. I’d never seen steps like that before; none of the women in Crooked River danced like that, and it was as if after a few moments you couldn’t tell who was following who, whether she was following the notes or the notes were following her. There was a grace to it, a real grace, like a lily flower floating on a river’s moving water; and watching her for a second you could almost believe in that castle and the moonbeams and the long green gardens going down to the banks of the Danube.

  ‘Yes, they were high old times, those times,’ Jim said. ‘High times. I don’t reckon hardly anyone in Crooked River was awake till noon the next day. I couldn’t have slept more than an hour or two myself because I had to go check my snare lines and deliver the rabbits to the hotel kitchen. I remember walking through town with them – and when I say town I just mean O’Callaghan Street and the road that runs alongside the tracks, where the big roundhouse was where they’d park and fix the trains; there weren’t any other roads in town then; there was hardly any town! – and it being so quiet you could hear the frogs chirruping down by the river and the horn of the eight o’clock train calling in the distance even though it was seven-thirty at most and it must still have been ten or
fifteen miles off. And so I guess I was the only one who saw them leave – the circus man and his sister.

  ‘They were standing out front of the hotel. The man’s suit wasn’t looking half so sharp this time – it was crumpled and stained with whiskey and cigarette ash – and neither was he. His eyes were shot red and the oil in his hair had given up slicking it back and left it to fall over his forehead. Beside him was a wooden crate they’d put his bear cub in and you could hear it in there, whimpering and bellowing for its mother. But the man’s sister, well, she looked just the same as when she’d arrived: in her smooth silk shirt and her hair done up in the back and shining like raven feathers and her lipstick making her lips redder than anyone else’s in town. She was kind of hanging back from the man and the bear, as if she was waiting, and sure enough not five minutes had gone by when Clarence came on out the door of the hotel. He’d managed to get himself scrubbed up some and was wearing his black church suit.

  ‘“Please,” he said. “If I can be of any assistance with your luggage?”

  ‘The eight o’clock train was getting louder now. It would’ve passed the narrows already.

  ‘“Well, I guess there’s this here bear,” croaked the circus man.

  ‘“That’s no problem,” Clarence said. And he must’ve spotted me then because he called out my name.