The Retreat

by David Bergen

  He tipped his hat then, as if this were a cordial goodbye, and he said that when he got back to Bare Point, he would send the empty boat out full throttle into the lake. “Maybe’ll it come right back at you. Wouldn’t that be a surprise.” He turned and went to the boat and climbed in. The waves were large and they tossed the small craft. Hart spent a few good minutes trying to restart the motor. The boat floated away and then came back with the waves. Finally, the whine of the engine lifted into the sky and was picked up by the wind and the boat disappeared, both sight and sound.

  Raymond remained on the log. The snow and sleet drove against his back and neck and slid down under his jacket and shirt. He had, in his pockets, his cigarettes and matches. His wallet, which held the cash from his last cheque. His ID, a driver’s licence. The keys to his pickup, but this had been incidental, because the pickup was back at his cabin, broken down. He’d hitchhiked to town from the golf club, a fact that Hart had made certain of. He stood and looked out into the darkness to gauge the island’s size. He walked away from the wind and came to a rock that descended towards the shore. At the base of the rock was a gully of sorts, out of the wind, but with no protection from the sky. He sat in the dip and pulled his jacket over his head. The wind came down around him. He blew onto his hands and feeling the numbness in his feet he stood and stumbled up the rocks back into the driving wind. He eventually found a stand of spruce and poplar and in that place he dug a shallow hole and attempted to light a collection of small branches and bark. His matches burned briefly and then went out. The branches were wet, the bark would not catch. He scraped together some moss and laid it down in the hole, and then he curled up in the shallow dip and covered himself with more moss. He was shaking severely. He pressed his hands between his thighs and blew warm breath down the inside of his jacket. When dawn arrived the rain had halted but the air was colder. In the grey light he finally started a fire in the hollow that he had slept in, and he stoked the fire with dry moss and dead branches. He warmed his hands and feet and bent towards the flames like a requester who sees the possibility of salvation but is too abject to cry out.

  He kept the fire going throughout the day, studying the lake for boats, but it was late fall and most of the boats had already been dry docked and there were no more houseboats or cabin-goers. The water was black and choppy and the shore of the mainland could only be imagined as a thin, dark line many miles away. He was all alone.

  On the third day, hungry and weak, he lay on a rock at the edge of the water and studied the shallows for fish. Minnows appeared and disappeared and a crayfish scrabbled away from his grasping hand. He rose, empty-handed, his arms numb, and he sat in the hollow by his fire and watched a chickadee come and go beneath a scrubby bush nearby. He gathered rocks and he waited for the bird to return. When it did, he took aim and threw a rock. The bird flew upwards and did not come back for a long time. When it did return, it sat on the moss of a rock and hopped slightly, again and again, as if there were a blueprint set out before it.

  As a young boy, Raymond had hunted chickadees and benddowns with his cousins. Using slingshots and rocks, they would kill several birds and then carry them home where the girls would pluck the birds and boil up a soup and then the whole group would squat and eat. Back then, it had been a game to be played; with great ease and nothing to gain but the satisfaction of the unnecessary hunt. Now, all was necessary.

  He killed the small bird in the early evening. The rock he threw was sharp and it caught the bird’s wing and the bird went up and then fell. The bird fluttered and called out and Raymond went to it and picked it up and broke its neck. He plucked the chickadee and then impaled it with a stick and roasted it over the fire. The smell of meat filled his head, but when he attempted to eat the bird, he discovered there was little substance. So he opened the bird up and sucked what he could from the carcass. The following day, in a small pool on the windward side of the island, he found three frogs in the mud at the bottom of the pool and he speared the frogs onto a stick in the same manner he had done the bird, and he roasted the frogs over the fire and ate them delicately, one at a time.

  That evening, at dusk, a motorboat passed by the island and he ran towards the sound, calling out and waving his arms. As he reached the shore his right foot caught in a small crevasse and he fell hard and his ankle popped. The sound of the motorboat disappeared. He sat up and examined his ankle. The foot sat at an odd angle, and when he tried to stand, his leg could not support him and the pain was severe and he fell sideways onto the rocks, cursing. He crawled back to his fire and spent a sleepless night struggling out into the bush for fuel and then back to the fire, dragging his bad leg and fallen branches behind him. At one point, he must have fainted from the pain and when he woke his back was against the rock. The heavens rose above him, pierced with pricks of light, and much later the moon appeared, fat and yellow on the horizon; it slid upwards into the sky and threw down its glow onto the island and onto Raymond and he held his hands out in order to see them in the brightness, in order to verify his own existence.

  He did not consider that rescue would be imminent. He believed that he might be on the island until the ice took hold and he could walk his way back to the mainland, though he was not certain which direction he would take. He would not be missed. He had finished work at the golf club; he lived alone and often went for days without seeing anyone. Alice would not hunt him down until much later, if at all. He did not pity himself nor was he resigned to death, though he imagined that death was possible. He suffered from constant hunger. He dreamed of fried eggs and a chicken roasted on a spit. Great mounds of food marched across his vision: hamburgers, potatoes, slabs of butter, Klik and Velveeta cheese laid out across stacks of bread. By the seventh day he was eating grass and sucking on bark. His leg was badly swollen and he had fixed a splint from two branches and bound them at his ankle with the shoelaces from his runners. Only once did he experience dread, and this was late one night when a storm came out of the west and extinguished his fire and left him shivering and frozen. In the morning, snow covered the island and the trees and the rocks. Seen from above, the land mass upon which he lived would have appeared as a white comma drawn against the dark roiling paper of the lake. And inside that comma he existed. The dread arrived with the image of blankness and the understanding that he could not be seen even if someone were looking. That night, in a dream, his grandmother came to him and called his name and then sat beside him and moaned words that he did not understand into the fire before them. One of her hands was withered and crooked and she held it out over the flames as if to warm it. Then she leaned into him and whispered that he should go home. “Go home,” she said. He woke from this dream and looked about, and he thought of his brother Nelson, whom he had not seen in nine years, and he thought of the night he was alone just after Nelson had been taken away, and how his chest had felt hollowed out, and that after a while he could no longer remember what his brother looked like, or the sound of his voice, his shape, or his smell. The wind had stopped and in its place was the sound of his breathing, irregular and thin.

  On the ninth day he stood weakly on one leg by the rocks at the edge of the island, peeing into the water, when a barge that carried propane from cabin to cabin along the lake’s sinuous interior came out of the light fog. Raymond lifted a hand and lowered it and then lifted it again and tried to call out, but his voice had disappeared. He lifted both hands to the sky, and from the deck of the barge a man in a red coat lifted a hand in return greeting. The man’s mouth opened but Raymond did not hear a sound. The barge charged on. It appeared that the greeting was a simple hailing hello from boat to island and back again and that there was nothing unusual about a shrouded figure on a blank island. And then the barge slowed and turned and hovered off the leeward shore while a small boat was lowered from the deck. Two men clambered into the boat and rowed towards shore and it would have appeared to any literate onlooker that this was a re-enactment of the discovery of a new
land.

  Raymond hobbled across the rocks and then slid on his bum to the water’s edge where he leaned forward, his face tilted towards the approaching boat. So logical and wise and right was this rescue that there was nothing to be told. And no one to tell. And so he relayed a fiction, a heroic story of sorts: his boat had capsized nine days earlier and he had swum to shore and survived on a few frogs and a bird, and he had drunk the water from the lake and sung songs to his ancestors, who sent the Canadian shipping barge bearing propane across the water to pull him from this grave.

  II

  The Retreat

  The Byrd family left their home in June and drove east across a country that was flat with fields newly planted. The sky was deep and whitish blue and the towns they passed through were small and isolated. Early that first morning, when everyone was sleeping except for Lizzy and her father, Lizzy bent and smelled the head of the smallest kitten. Her father had just told her what had to be done. He was telling her because she was seventeen. She needed to understand, and if she understood, then she could help the younger children understand. He said that her mother agreed. In fact, it had been her suggestion. The Doctor didn’t allow animals at the Retreat and they couldn’t leave the little things for two months or more, how would they survive, and this was a humane act, a work of mercy. “Your mother has her heart set on this place. You know that. She believes that she will be happy there.”

  Lizzy had listened. She hadn’t argued. She asked how.

  “Painless,” her father said. “Don’t worry. They won’t suffer.”

  This was near Brooks, just after they had left Calgary. That night, they took a room in a motel by the side of the road, outside of Regina. Using the small hotplate, Mrs. Byrd cooked spaghetti and served it with ketchup. It was raining and the boys sat with the kittens and tossed them from bed to bed and watched them land right-side up. At night, Lizzy woke and lay listening to the radiators bang and she heard the slow breathing of her three brothers and her mother and father. Fish called out. She heard him the first time but willed him away. If he knew she was awake, he would want to sleep beside her. He was barely four and he liked to curl up against her stomach and steal her warmth.

  “Lizzy?” he said again.

  She waited.

  “Lizzy,” he whispered. “A dream.”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  “A bad dream. With death and God.”

  “It’s okay. Come here, I’ll hold you.”

  He came to her bed and pressed his nose to her neck. His face was hot, his knees clamped her leg.

  “Daddy was drowning.”

  “It’s just a dream.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Here.” She placed a hand against his back and rubbed. Went “shhh” and then said, “It’s okay. Go back to sleep.”

  “Uh-uh. I’ll dream again.”

  “Not the same dream. It doesn’t happen that way.”

  “I don’t want to dream at all. God had a big hand and was holding Daddy down. God’s hand was big and Daddy’s head was small.”

  “God wouldn’t do that.”

  There was silence. Lizzy heard someone move, perhaps her mother.

  “I don’t want to die,” Fish said.

  “You won’t, silly. You’ll live so long.”

  “Forever?”

  “Yes. Go to sleep now.”

  And he did, finally. His breathing slowed and his chest, narrow beneath Lizzy’s hand, moved up and down slightly, and then his hand twitched and finally his foot jumped as he startled. Lizzy slipped out from between his scissored legs and lay at the edge of the bed, away from his heat. The rain fell against the window. Lights from a passing car passed over the wall above Lizzy’s head. Her father snored lightly. One of the kittens climbed onto Lizzy’s chest and lay down, tapping her face with a paw.

  In the morning, the rain had stopped. Mr. Byrd was shaving. While he shaved he sang and then he spoke of omelettes made with special cheeses and how, when he was twenty, he had worked on a farm in the south of France, and he had risen at four every morning to milk the seven special cows. Friesians, he called them, and he said, “Oui, mes amis, how incroyable, ce que le farmer and his wife prepared for breakfast. Fresh croissants so buttery they melted in your hands before touching the mouth, and whole milk with thick cream, and muesli from the Swiss Alps, and then, after étouffing ourselves, we sat by the fire and smoked une pipe. Oh, man. That was the life.” He paused. Inspected his chin and his nose and said, “I’ll go out into this little village we’re perched by and I’ll forage for a nice breakfast. How about it?”

  He left. Half an hour later he returned with tiny cereal boxes and a carton of milk and plastic spoons and he laid everything out on the small table and rubbed his hands and pronounced breakfast prepared. “Not the fare of my youth, but fuel nonetheless.”

  Fish wanted crescents with butter.

  “I looked, son. Believe me. This isn’t France, this is Canada. No culture here. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. We have white bread and Jiffy Pop. The world would be a sad place if my children stooped to graze on Jiffy Pop. Hey, come along. Here.” And he held Fish on his big lap and pulled out a jackknife, opened it and handed it to Fish, and said, “Slaughter the beast.” The boy happily stabbed at the small box. William, who was nine, and Everett, fourteen, climbed onto chairs and joined in. When the boxes were gutted and laid open on the table their father poured milk and looked at the two women in his life and said, “Et voilà.”

  Mr. Byrd was not as cheerful as he appeared. His French farming stories, his singing, his banter, all of this was a form of bravery; he was trying to please his wife. The week before, his foreman had finally agreed to let him take the summer off and he had pulled his children around him and said that the family would be travelling to Kenora, to stay at a place called the Retreat. They would stay the summer. This is what their mother wanted. She had read an article about the place in a liberal Christian magazine, made a point of seeking out the man who ran the Retreat, and in him she discovered the possibility of her own salvation. Ever since Fish’s birth, Norma Byrd had suffered deep anxiety and a prevailing sense of her own demise. Lewis was aware that her children floated about her like so many extra limbs, and if she could have, she would have lopped them off. She was searching for the promise of freedom and the Retreat appeared to offer that assurance. It would be a place of harmony and friendship; ideas would be discussed and food would be grown and gathered and collectively shared. No one person would be better than another.

  At first, when Lizzy heard of the plans, she refused. She said that she and her boyfriend Cyril were starting a band, and she planned to work, and besides, she hated camping.

  “There are comfortable cabins with screens on the windows,” Mr. Byrd said. “Work, and Cyril and the band, all of this can wait till fall, when you go back to school. You’re young.”

  Everett, who had been sitting beside Lizzy, was conscious of her silence and of how she bit her lip. The light fell into the room through the large front window onto her hands. She had painted her nails just the day before, and Everett had watched her, and then he had painted his own nails and it had given him a feeling of pleasure.

  Their mother said that the trip would be educational. Broadening. A chance to get lost in nature, to let loose their wild side. Mrs. Byrd had spoken softly, her mouth moving quickly. She looked at Everett and said, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Everett? Go wild for a bit?” And he had lifted his shoulders and then finally nodded, because he loved her and wanted to please her.

  Miles further, just on the other side of Winnipeg, where the highway curled through hills and past lakes, Mr. Byrd pulled to the side of the road. While he slept, the children sat on rocks by the edge of a lake and ate peanut butter sandwiches. Their mother poured water from a glass jar and offered apples and pecans and raw wieners. Fish took off his shoes and socks and waded in the shallow water, trying to catch minnows. He fell
forward into the cold water and came up grinning. Mrs. Byrd called out, “Don’t go too deep, the lake drops off.”

  Lizzy was sitting higher up on the rocks, holding one of the kittens, and inspecting her bare legs. She was wearing a short skirt and it hiked up high on her thighs and she kept turning her legs towards the sun, hoping for a tan. She had left a boy behind, a boy who had loved her madly. She tried to imagine a world without disenchantment, but this thought was fleeting. Earlier, in the car, she had written a letter to Cyril, her boyfriend. The looping script, the promises she would never keep, this had induced in Lizzy a brief longing. She had already forgotten the shape of Cyril’s mouth. Fish had been at her feet. Everett was sleeping on the back floor. William was in the front between their mother and father. He was prone to carsickness and had already thrown up into a plastic bucket and the car still smelled sour. Trees and rocks passed by. A tractor-trailer shook their car with its backdraft. The kitten in Lizzy’s lap woke and stretched. Yawned. Lizzy saw the skeleton of the kitten’s pink mouth.

  At the edge of the lake now, waiting for their father to wake, Everett was skipping rocks. William had two of the kittens, one in each hand. Mrs. Byrd was lying on her jacket, looking up at the sky. She was wearing sunglasses to fend off her headaches. A green skirt down to her knees. Lizzy had legs like her mother, long and tanned.

  Then their father appeared. He stood high above them at the top of the road. He was rubbing his neck and he carried a large gunnysack. He descended towards his family, his feet sliding on the shale. Fish squealed with delight as a small rock bounced down and landed beside him in the lake. “Boom,” he cried.