by Bruce Fogle
‘I want to go home,’ I replied and I picked up the oars turned the boat around and went back to the cottage.
That evening the fathers returned from their fishing trip to Buckhorn, reddened by the sun and the bottle of rye they took with them. I heard that not a single father had caught a single fish. That made me feel a bit better.
FISHING
FOR BASS
I didn’t go fishing for almost two weeks after that but one morning, while Mum was getting breakfast ready, I wandered down to the end of the dock, looked into the still lake and saw a fat, green bass amongst the usual sunfish and perch. I couldn’t help myself and felt a thrill and excitement all over. It didn’t matter if a fish felt pain. I had to catch that bass. Then Mum called me for breakfast.
There were rules at the cottage, rules set down by my mother. She set the table but my brother and I always had to clean up afterwards. Our father and Uncle Reub were never asked to do anything, and never offered, although when he was there Dad barbecued every evening meal: thick, fat steaks, hamburgers and hot dogs, and also any big fish he caught. That week was my turn to clear the table and dry the dishes while Rob washed them, and by the time we were finished Uncle Reub was sitting on his lawn chair with his handkerchief on his head looking out at the lake.
It was another hot day with a sapphire sky. On days like that I imagined I was a lizard, basking on a rock, soaking up energy from the sun, but today I had a mission, to catch that bass.
I went to the icebox and got some worms I’d collected with my father two nights before. I was good at catching them, better than Robert who always gave up after a few minutes.
‘The easiest to catch are the ones that are stuck together,’ Dad had explained, and while I worked the dew-covered grass at the front of the cottage, Dad did the same at the back, each armed with a flashlight with a white handkerchief wrapped over the beam to dull its brightness. We brought our catch back to the living room, dumped them all on newspaper, counted them, discarded the ones we had accidentally torn, packed twelve at a time in moss-filled cardboard boxes and stacked the cartons in the ice box between the milk and watermelon.
‘Why are there worms? What do worms do?’ I once asked my uncle.
‘All the soil in your garden has passed through those worms. That’s what they do for a living. Pass earth through and make it more nutritious for grass to grow in, or your dad’s tomatoes.’
I returned to the dock. The sunfish and perch were there, as they always were, but the bass was nowhere to be seen. If I cast out only a little ways those small fish would swim out to his bait and that’s all I’d catch. I enjoyed catching pan fish, especially sunfish that put up the best fight. I felt responsible and grown up when my mother told me to go catch fish because she wanted to make fish soup. But right now I didn’t want to catch small fry, I was after that big green bass, so I cast my bait as far as I could then gently reeled it in, pulling the bait faster over weeds or through the shallows where the sunfish and perch were visible. I did this again and again casting over arm from the dock with no luck, not even a nibble, but then, on one of those casts, I let the line slacken before I should have and instead of arcing over my head, the worm-baited fishing hook snagged in my bare back.
I knew exactly what I had done and felt embarrassed and foolish. If the hook had been somewhere else on my body I could reach I’d try to get it out myself before asking an adult for help, but I knew I couldn’t so, carrying my fishing rod over my shoulder, I went inside and told my mother what happened.
Mum tried to be calm but from her voice I knew she was very upset. Briskly she took me by my arm back outside to her brother. Uncle Reub examined how the hook had entered my skin. It didn’t actually hurt me when he moved the hook. It just felt tight – like I was attached to something rather than something was attached to me.
‘Kid, get me some Mercurochrome,’ he told his younger sister and my mother went off to get it from the medicine cabinet.
He pinched my browned skin hard between his thumb and forefinger.
‘Everyone make mistakes,’ he said, ‘when we’re young. When we’re not young. Take a deep breath then hold it until I tell you to breathe again.’
I held my breath, like I did under water, felt my uncle tugging on my skin, then the tugging stopped.
‘You’re free,’ he said, as his sister returned. He painted where the hook had penetrated my back with the dark red dye from the tiny bottle. ‘At the Mayo we called this “monkey blood”,’ he said, looking up at his sister as he handed her back the small brown bottle. Without saying a word she took it back inside.
Uncle Reub took me by the hand and turned me around so we now faced each other.
‘Brucie, sometimes we don’t recognise our mistakes until it’s too late. Sometimes we’re too tired to try to not make the same mistake. Sometimes we forget we’ve made mistakes. Sometimes we forget we’ve forgotten.’
I frowned. I didn’t understand why my uncle was saying such things. He continued. ‘What are you fishing for?’
‘Bass,’ I answered.
‘Fish bite best when you swing your line out from the side, like a baseball bat,’ he suggested.
THE BONFIRE
Sometimes I was allowed to stay up extra late, until long after dark, and in early summer it didn’t get really dark until long after I usually went to bed.
Perry and Steve from Cedar Bay were staying. Their parents had gone to Quebec City for a week. It rained that afternoon, the kind of rain that came and went faster than my uncle’s moods. Mum entertained us all by reading another chapter of a Hardy Boys book she read to us on rainy days, then gathered all of us around the dining room table for a card game of five-handed solitaire.
‘Reub, come and join us,’ she told her brother. ‘This takes concentration,’ she added, as my uncle became the sixth player, sitting beside his sister who beat him every time they had the same card and needed to get it first on the right pile in the middle of the table. I could see he wasn’t giving in. He really wanted to beat her but her reflexes were faster than his.
We played several games, then Mum told us to clean up the dining room and living room while she prepared dinner. ‘Perry and Steven, you too. When you’re in my cottage you know you follow my rules. Your mother told me you love meatloaf so that’s what we’re having, with fresh mashed potatoes from Mrs Nichols’ farm. Reub, make sure they know where everything goes.’
Everyone talked right through supper. That’s what we did, with Mum starting the talking by telling us about mischief other cottagers had got up to or by asking one of us what we planned to do tomorrow. As he usually did inside the cottage, Angus lay under the dining-room table.
The rain had stopped well before suppertime and after we cleared the table and washed and dried the dishes, as a treat for us Mum made a bonfire in the stone fireplace near the shore and told us we could roast marshmallows in it. She started with dried twigs from beneath the tree house and pine cones Dad had collected in the woods and kept in the tool house. On top of these she placed offcuts of lumber Dad bought from Mr Blewett. She added dried birch bark we had peeled from trees, also stored in the tool house, and scrunched and twisted newspaper. On top of it all she added fresh pine logs, oozing sap. Those pine logs sizzled like steaks on the barbecue and burned for a very long time.
That night, with no moon but under a sky dusted with stars, we turned out all the lights in the cottage and then there was only one electric light in the whole world and it was on the porch of the farmhouse on the hill, a mile away across the lake. Us boys, Rob and Angus and me, Perry and Steve with Uncle Reub and Mum, all sat on lawn chairs around the fire and said nothing. We simply stared at the dancing flames. Myriad thoughts raced through my mind. At one point I heard thunder in the distance and told everyone a storm was coming. ‘That’s not thunder,’ Uncle replied. ‘It’s dynamite. It sounds like it’s coming from up the lake, probably in the water.’
To me, nights like tha
t around the fire were perfect, the stillness of the lake, the warm feeling of the bonfire on my cheeks, the jungle sound of crickets all around, the low voice of a single frog croaking in the reeds under the dock. And then my mother said, ‘Time for bed.’
None of us wanted to leave.
‘Right now,’ Mum said, with a sternness we knew and respected.
‘Kid, I’ll tell them a story first. It will be short. Not one of my interminable ones,’ Uncle Reub said, and in his soft soothing voice, staring into the fire, he began.
‘Boys, those frogs you have around your fort reminded me of this story. Once upon a time there was a beautiful pale queen. She was so beautiful there weren’t words you could find to describe her so I won’t even try. You had to see this woman to see just how beautiful she was. Her voice was as soft as a cloud and, when she walked, the earth sang it was so happy to have her on it. I once saw her and after that I couldn’t do anything but think of her – nothing else.
‘This beautiful pale queen visited children but only at night, when they were asleep in their beds. Children who she visited in their sleep always woke up the following day feeling fantastic – that life was wonderful, that life was really worth living, although they never knew exactly what it was that made them feel that way. It’s just what happened.
‘But, boys, if you woke up from your sleep, and looked at the beautiful queen, there was nothing she could do about it, she turned instantly into a frog, like the one we’re listening to in the reeds or the ones at your fort in the woods. And forever more you could never tell her from any of the other frogs on the shore.
‘Boys, that’s why, although a frog is ugly and they feel clammy and you may not think a frog means much, when you pick one up, you should be kind to it. You should respect it. Because every single night, when the pale queen visits children, one child or another always wakes up and looks at her. And every morning that means that one more frog is really an indescribably beautiful woman caught forever in the body of a frog.’
A CANOE
PADDLE
When I wanted to be alone with my thoughts I would pick up Angus and take him to the canoe where we both did nothing. Just sit.
My father had found Angus sitting beside the highway one evening two years before. Angus was a thoughtful dog. That’s what I felt. At night he slept in a wicker basket in my clothes cupboard and stayed there until I got up for breakfast. When he first arrived he never tried to get on my bed but now that was his favourite place to sleep, on cold nights under the covers. When he was inside the cottage he was content to spend his days in his basket. When he was outdoors he had two different personalities. On still, sultry days when the sun sizzled and Angus’s back felt as hot as the shellacked bow of the motorboat, he was a calm dog. He would walk into the lake, sit, and for ages look down towards the bridge. On days like that he always kept his feelings deep in his own heart.
Then there were times when he behaved like an animal. I could tell he was looking for mischief by the way he walked out of the cottage, his ears perked, his tail high. That’s when he’d go off to our neighbours or into the woods and come back covered in burrs or smelling of skunk. When he was sprayed by a skunk my mother would open a large can of tomato juice and hand it to me saying, ‘He’s your dog. Take him down to the lake and wash him with this.’ There was one occasion when I was in the boat and he followed me into the lake. Grace was rowing over to her cottage. I was sitting on the stern of the rowboat with my feet dangling in the lake when I saw Angus swimming after us.
‘Stupid dog!’ Grace exclaimed. ‘What if I was rowing to Kelly’s Island?’
After Grace stopped rowing and Angus reached the boat, I pulled him in by his collar. He shook his curly hair getting Grace all wet and then he just sat and looked over the side at the far shore.
‘I want to go home,’ I told Grace.
She didn’t say anything except ‘Stupid dog!’ but she turned the rowboat around and rowed back to my dock.
Today I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. I picked up Angus and carried him to the canoe where we both sat in our own worlds. Then Uncle came over.
‘You know, Angus is a grown-up. Does that mean the two of you are going for a paddle?’ he asked.
‘No he’s not and no we’re not,’ I answered.
‘There’s a farm auction near Lakefield. Your father asked me to ask you if you want to go.’
I didn’t answer. I lifted Angus and put him on the dock where the dog stayed. Then I got out of the boat.
‘Angus! Come!’ Uncle exclaimed and he got down low and spread his arms wide. The dog’s tail lifted and wagged and he walked over to my uncle.
‘See that smile? He’s happy your family has given him a safe place to live.’
Sometimes I liked being with Angus and sometimes I liked being with my uncle. Right now I wanted to be alone with my dog but I knew I had to go with my parents. I didn’t say anything. I picked up my dog and carried him into the cottage then went to the car and stayed by it until my parents and my uncle joined us and we drove to the auction.
The sale was on a concession road that was never oiled. Looking out the back window of the car I watched the rolling clouds of dust obliterate everything in sight. Evil spirits were chasing me. The spirits continued down the road when my father turned our car up the track to the farmhouse.
The field by the barn was filled with dusty pick-up trucks and I knew that our car was the only one that brought summer people there. There were plenty of strangers, all men, outside the barn looking at farm equipment – a red front-end loader Massey Ferguson tractor, a three-furrow plough, a green International Harvester pick-up truck with a snow plough attached, manure spreaders, water troughs, hay feeders, pig-farrowing crates, oat rollers, a post hole auger, hay, straw.
My family walked over to the front lawn of the farmhouse and moved up and down, back and forth, inspecting everything laid out with numbers on it. There were snowshoes, hockey sticks, meat saws, cast-iron radiators, kerosene lamps, tractor chains, milk cans, fishing nets. I thought the farmer must have a tool house even bigger than my father’s.
‘Morris, we could use those wooden wheels for the sweet peas to climb on.’
‘Good,’ Dad absently replied, looking at a barrel smoker, opening and closing it, seeing how it worked.
‘Do you think he heard me?’ Mum asked me.
‘Let’s have a look in the barn,’ Uncle suggested, and we walked over to it. Dad stayed to inspect tools and machinery on the lawn.
Outside the barn there were big pigs, snorting and wallowing in rich, black mud.
‘Darling, you see why we don’t eat pork?’ Mum asked.
‘They’re just having fun,’ I answered.
‘Good clean dirt never hurt anyone,’ Uncle added, to no one in particular.
Inside the barn I could hear cows mooing but, at first, in the darkness and with so many big men in front, I could not see them.
My mother took me by my hand and we walked through the crowd until we were by a stall filled with cows.
‘What type of cows are they?’ I asked my mother.
‘I don’t know.’ She paused for a while. ‘Don’t they have the most beautiful eyes? Ask your uncle.’
‘They’re shorthorns, Brucie,’ Uncle said. ‘When you see black and white cattle they produce milk. Black ones are for meat but these brown and white do both. There must be a milking parlour somewhere here because of those milk churns outside, but these look like they’re for meat.’
I peered through the wooden slats, wondering how my uncle, who knew everything, knew these animals would make steaks for the barbecue, not milkshakes for Dairy Queen.
‘They’ll auction the livestock and equipment first, so let’s have our picnic now,’ Mum said, and we returned to the car, except my father who continued to tinker with items on the front lawn.
Mum used the station wagon’s tailgate to lay out smoked salmon sandwiches for the adults, tinned salm
on for me because I didn’t like smoked salmon, homemade almond cookies, Kool-Aid for me, and a thermos of hot tea for the grown-ups. As we sat on the tailgate and ate, the farmer’s yellow dog cautiously approached.
‘He’s hoping we’ll give him something,’ Uncle said.
‘Shoo. Go away,’ my mother scolded.
Watching the dog slink off I said, ‘If they’re shorthorns, why don’t they have short horns?’
‘They do, Brucie,’ Uncle replied. ‘The farmer saws their horns off when they’re young so they don’t injure him with them. That dog probably enjoyed chewing on those horns.’
‘Why would they want to injure the farmer?’ I asked.
‘It’s not that they want to. Cows are big and clumsy and horns are sharp.’
‘Did it hurt, cutting them off?’ I asked.
‘I’m sure it did,’ my uncle replied, ‘but they look fine now.’
‘I think they’re better the way God made them,’ I said.
From our car we could hear the auctioneer asking for bids although we could not make out what he was saying. Uncle went back to the barn to watch and listen. I stayed with my mother who closed her eyes and turned her head to the sun. ‘I bet Noah’s Ark was like inside the barn,’ I said to Mum.
‘Yes it was, dear,’ she answered.
By the middle of the afternoon the auctioneer had sold everything in the barn and moved to the veranda of the farmhouse. I could see the crowd was now much smaller and they were mostly talking to each other and not paying much attention to what the auctioneer was saying. My mother and father and uncle were. During the afternoon, Dad bought three canoe paddles, some chain, a set of old wood chisels and a box of rusty ten-inch spikes. When he failed to buy the barrel smoker he turned to me and said, ‘I’ll make one of those.’ At the very end of the auction, when the auctioneer got to the contents of the cardboard boxes on the veranda, he bought two handmade quilts for twenty-five cents each.
