by Mary Lawson
“Thanks, Mr. Corbiere.”
“Catch a big one.”
Ian grinned. “I’ll try.”
Once he got down to the shore it took him only a few seconds to spot the Queen Mary. She was across the bay by the sandbar at the entrance to the river—a good spot for pike, especially in the spring. By some trick of the light the old rowboat seemed to be hovering just above the surface of the water, as if it were a ghost ship or something out of a dream. He watched it for a moment, and Pete’s motionless shape within it. The evening was very still and the water gleamed a dull silver.
He cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled. The sound flew out across the water and the figure in the boat moved, and lifted a hand in acknowledgment. Then there was a distant putputput from the little outboard and the boat turned toward him. Ian walked out to the end of the dock.
“How’s it going?” he said when Pete was close enough. The smell of gasoline and fish rose up from the boat, luring him in.
“So-so,” Pete said.
The boat sidled up alongside the dock and Ian jumped in, avoiding half a dozen glistening trout in the bottom. Pete pushed off and headed back across the bay. When he reached the sandbar he cut the engine. The smooth swells of their wake caught up with them, rocked the boat gently, and moved on.
“I can’t stay long,” Ian said absently, picking through the tackle box for a suitable lure. “I should study. We’ve got that biology test tomorrow.”
Pete stuck a mayfly on his hook and dropped it over the side of the boat. He said, “You got your priorities wrong, man.”
“I know, I know.” The tackle box was in a similar state to Pete’s bedroom, lures and weights and hooks and bits of fur and feathers all over the place, with the odd dead bug tossed in for good measure.
“It could be a hundred years,” Pete said, giving his line a sharp jerk and hauling in a perch, “maybe two hundred, before you get another night as perfect as this for fishing. But there will always, always, be another test.”
“Too damned true,” Ian said. He was still going to have to go back in time to have a look at the textbook though. He and Pete shared the same policy, developed and fine-tuned over the years, of working just hard enough to keep out of trouble; but in Ian’s case, being the doctor’s son, the teachers’ expectations of him were irritatingly high.
They fished. Pete used a jigger—a stick with fishing line attached and minnows or bugs for bait, or sometimes just a weighted hook with a bit of deer fur on it. Ian used his fishing rod, which was a good one, a birthday present from his parents. If tonight was like other nights, and it would be, he would catch one fish to every four or five caught by Pete. If they swapped equipment, Pete would continue to pull them in and Ian would continue to get next to nothing. It was a fact of life and he had accepted it long ago.
They’d met through fishing—Ian wasn’t sure if he actually remembered it or if his father had told him the story at some later date. It was before they’d started school, so they would have been about four or five. Ian’s father had been teaching him how to fish and had taken him around to Slow River Bay, and over by the sandbar at the mouth of the river they’d seen another boat, which had turned out to contain Pete and his grandfather, also in the middle of a fishing lesson. Ian’s father knew Pete’s grandfather the same way he knew everybody within a radius of a hundred miles, and he drifted over to say hi, and the two men started talking. Pete and Ian had eyed each other up and down, their fishing lines hanging in the water, and while they were busy doing that both lines were grabbed. There had been a few minutes of chaos—Ian did remember that—spray flying, boats rocking wildly, both men trying to help without looking as if they were helping, and when the fish were finally landed and held up to be admired, Pete’s was a fourteen-inch pike and Ian’s was a four-inch sunfish. Neither boy had been able to figure out why the two men laughed so hard—Pete’s grandfather had tears running down his cheeks. But the boys held up their catches triumphantly, grinning at each other across the gunwales of the boats, two skinny kids with their bellies sticking out, fishermen for life. The fact that from then on Pete had continued to pull in the big ones and Ian had continued not to was just one of those things.
Ian reeled in his line, checked the lure, and stood up to cast again. He whipped the rod back and forth, listening to the hiss of the reel as the line played out, and let it fly. The lure sailed out over the water and then dropped down, light as a raindrop. Not a bad cast. He began slowly reeling it in, the line drawing a delicate V-shape across the surface of the water.
“Got a job today,” he said after a while.
“Yeah?” Pete said.
“Yeah. My dad said I should work this summer. Saturdays too.”
“You still have time to fish?”
“Oh sure. I’m working eight till six. I’ll still have evenings free.”
Pete nodded. He looked after the store in the summer while his grandfather acted as a guide for tourists who fancied themselves woodsmen and loved the idea of a real, live Indian guide. “Found this old Injun up in the woods in Northern Ontario,” they’d say to their friends back in the manicured suburbs of Toronto or Chicago or New York, nodding casually at a bear’s head nailed to the rec room wall. “Knows the country like the back of his hand.”
“I’m working on Arthur Dunn’s farm,” Ian said offhandedly. He reeled in his line, checked the lure, and cast again. He was aware of Pete looking at him curiously. “I thought it would beat being cooped up in town. There’s a job going in the drugstore, but I didn’t fancy standing behind the counter all summer long, listening to people complain about their headaches.”
Silence from Pete.
“Or listening to women complain about…women’s stuff,” Ian went on, and then paused, suddenly wondering if that could be his mother’s problem. The menopause. He’d read about it when looking through his father’s books in search of something—anything at all—to do with sex. The whole business had sounded gross. But his mother was too young for that sort of problem. She was nineteen years younger than his father and had produced Ian when she was only twenty. “Or old guys complaining about their ingrown toenails. I get enough medical crap at home.”
More silence. The problem with deceiving Pete was that they had known each other too long. A friend who has known you since you were four years old really knows you, whereas your parents only think they do.
They fished. Across the bay they heard the drone of an outboard, the sound gradually dying as it rounded a point of land. Silence settled again. Then two loons started calling to each other, laughing at some melancholy joke of their own, their cries shimmering back and forth across the water. The color was ebbing out of the trees lining the shore, turning them from somber green to black.
Pete said, as if ten minutes hadn’t elapsed, “Standing behind a counter is just standing, man. Working on a farm is work.”
He twitched the jig, paused a second or two, and then jerked the line sharply. A trout broke the surface ten feet away. He hauled it in and dropped it in the bottom of the boat. “You could’ve got a job at the sawmill,” he said, rebaiting his hook and dropping it over the side again. “You’d get a job there easy as nothin’. Every guy there’s had bits of himself stuck back on by your dad sometime or other. They’d make you foreman in three days flat, you’d be running the place in two weeks. Good money, too. More’n Arthur Dunn can afford.”
“Yeah,” Ian said, “but who wants to spend the summer working for Fitzpatrick? I’ll take Arthur Dunn any day.”
Pete hauled in a four-inch perch, too small to keep. He unhooked it and tossed it back into the water. “You could’ve got a job waitin’ on tables in Harper’s. Put a cup of coffee down here, pick a cup of coffee up there. Good money, easy work…. Or the library…. Or the gas station.” There was another tug on his line. It was the tiny perch again, the hole in its mouth from last time clearly visible. Pete raised it to eye level and said, “Where’s your brains, man?�
�� The fish gaped in astonishment. Pete tossed it back over the side. “Or the hardware store. Woolworth’s. The post office. Any of them’d be better than a farm. ’Specially Arthur Dunn’s farm.”
“The farm’s okay,” Ian said mildly. “The horses are kind of fun.”
“The horses?” Pete looked at him, slitty-eyed. Then suddenly, he grinned.
“What?” Ian asked defensively.
“Nothin’,” Pete said. “Nothin’ at all.”
They fished for another hour or so but the pike weren’t interested, and when Pete caught the little perch for the third time they gave up and went home.
His parents were both in the living room when Ian got back. His mother was sitting in front of the television, though for once she wasn’t watching it, and his father was standing in the doorway. When he came in they both looked around. There was a moment’s pause, and then his father said, “You’re home early. Fish not biting?”
“Nothing worth hauling out of the water,” Ian said.
His mother was looking vaguely down at her lap. There must have been a crumb or a bit of fluff on her skirt—she picked it off carefully, studied it for a moment, and then dropped it on the floor.
TWO
TORONTO BOARD OF TRADE VISITING NORTHERN ONTARIO
CATTLE RUN AMOK—MEN CHASED TO LUMBER PILES—RIFLES USED
—Temiskaming Speaker, March 1925
Arthur’s earliest memory was of standing in the doorway of his parents’ room, looking at his mother as she lay in bed. It was the middle of the day but nonetheless she was in bed, and Arthur didn’t know what to make of it. The bed was very large and high and Arthur could only just see her. She had her face turned toward the window. Then Arthur’s father called from the bottom of the stairs that the doctor was coming, and she turned her head, and Arthur saw that she was crying.
Then old Dr. Christopherson came, and with him Mrs. Luntz, Carl’s mother, from the next farm. Mrs. Luntz patted Arthur on the head and told him to go downstairs and she and the doctor went into his mother’s room and shut the door. Later, cries came from the room. During all of this, Arthur’s father sat in the armchair in the kitchen with his large lumpy hands spread flat on his knees. His hands looked very strange, lying still like that. Normally if he was sitting down they were busy mending something.
In his memory Arthur had only the one picture of this scene, but from piecing things together later he knew that it must have happened more than once. Three times at least.
Then there was a long spell when his mother was in bed though she didn’t look sick, during which time his father got the supper after coming in from the fields in the evening. Most days Mrs. Luntz and other ladies from neighboring farms dropped by with food in big covered dishes, so all he had to do was heat things up. This wasn’t a bad time, as far as Arthur could recall. He remembered his father giving him a dish towel and passing plates down for him to dry, and telling him he was doing a good job. He remembered carrying his mother’s supper very carefully up the stairs and taking it in to her, and her smiling at him and thanking him.
He couldn’t remember what he did during the day, while his mother lay in bed and his father was out in the fields. He was too young for school so he must have played by himself. But he clearly remembered the day he heard his mother calling him from her room. He would have been just five at the time. He remembered hearing the panic in her voice, and the feeling in his stomach—a cold tightness, like the grip of a hand—as he ran up the stairs. His mother had her knees drawn up under the blankets. She looked afraid. Arthur had never seen fear on an adult’s face before, but he had no difficulty recognizing it for what it was. “Go get your father,” she had said. “Tell him it’s coming! Run!”
Here there was a picture as well as a memory: a picture of himself, flying along the edge of the fields, his feet stumbling on the clods of heavy rain-soaked earth. “Dad! Dad!” Terror in his voice. What was coming? Something terrible, terrifying, and his mother all alone in the house with no one to protect her.
And then some hours later, when it was dark and the doctor had come, along with Mrs. Luntz again, and they were with his mother, it became apparent from the screams that echoed down the stairs that they could not protect her any more than he or his father could. Arthur wanted to go to his father and climb onto his lap but he was afraid of the look on his father’s face and of the appalled silence between the screams. He wanted to go to his room and get into bed and cower there, but to do that he would have to go up the stairs and pass the door with the dreadful sounds behind it. So instead he curled into a tight ball in the other armchair and stayed there, until many hours later the screaming finally stopped. And then there was another sound, a bawling, like a cross between a crow and a sheep, and he knew that whatever it was had come at last, and had triumphed, and his mother was dead.
Except that in the morning there she was, not dead at all but sitting up in bed, smiling, holding a bundle and saying to him, “Come and see, Arthur! You have a brother! This is your brother! His name is Jacob—isn’t he lovely? You can call him Jake.”
Was that where it all started, then? Before Jake was even born, with the loss of those other babies? So that when Jake finally arrived, the outcome of all that pain and fear and grief, he would be so precious to his mother that she could hardly bear it? She carried him around with her all day, holding him tightly, fending off death with the crook of her arm. She loved the new baby—oh, Arthur knew that!—but her love seemed to consist mainly of an agonized anxiety. Arthur would see her looking at Jake with an expression almost of despair, as if she expected him to vanish at any moment, torn from her arms by some dark force. It didn’t help that Jake was a sickly child, prone to colds and high temperatures. Or maybe he wasn’t really sickly—maybe it was her fear. One cough from the baby and she sent Arthur’s father to fetch the doctor, and the doctor’s old car would come lurching its way down their driveway, windshield wipers battling against the snow.
“Babies are tougher than they look.” That was what Dr. Christopherson said. He said it many times, patiently, attempting to reassure her. But she was not to be reassured. Each new phase of Jake’s development brought a whole new host of dangers, so many of them that Arthur wondered how he himself had ever survived. Once Jake started crawling, life became more perilous still. “Did I fall down those stairs, ever?” Arthur asked his mother after she had scooped Jake up from the top of the stairs—he had been some yards away, but from his mother’s face Arthur could see that it had been a near thing. But she had her face buried in Jake’s neck and didn’t hear his question.
But he, Arthur, had probably been a big tough baby. If he had fallen downstairs he’d probably have bounced. Whereas Jake would certainly be killed.
The day Jake took his first step, Arthur was formally recruited to the battle against the forces of fate. From now on, and Arthur knew this was a long-term assignment, his first and foremost job in life was to protect his little brother. In fact, he didn’t need recruiting. He already knew that his mother’s happiness depended on Jake’s well-being. Adoring her and needing her as Arthur did, what choice did he have?
Here was another picture: himself and Jake, aged about nine and four, playing in the farmyard. Beside the barn there is a pile of empty boxes, lightweight slatted crates that their father uses for carrying lettuces and tomatoes and other row crops to the market in Struan. Arthur is building himself a castle of crates, an impressive, many-storied structure. Jake has dragged one crate away for his own purposes. Something—a sense of unease—causes Arthur to look up, toward the house. He can see the kitchen window from where he is, and he sees that his mother is standing at it, staring out at something. On her face is an expression of horror. Arthur’s heart leaps in panic. He looks in the direction of her gaze and sees that Jake has pulled the crate over to the water trough and has climbed up on it in order to see what is inside. Arthur scrambles out of his castle and flies, shouting as he goes, “Get down! Jake! Ge
t down!” Still feet away, he launches himself at his brother, knocking him off the box and sending him sprawling and howling in the dust.
The water in the trough was no more than nine inches deep. A mouse might have drowned in it—in fact, from time to time one did—but surely not a child. That was what Arthur’s father said—or maybe didn’t quite say, maybe just looked a little puzzled at the fuss—when he heard about the incident that evening. To Arthur, still glowing in the warmth of his mother’s gratitude, it was an academic question, since he had acted not to save Jake’s life but to rescue his mother from her fear. But in any case it turned out that his father was wrong to doubt the seriousness of the incident. A child could drown in an inch of water; Arthur’s mother had read it in a magazine. An inch of water. It had happened.
His father didn’t argue, though Arthur could see that he had some difficulty visualizing it. He frowned to himself and narrowed his eyes. An inch of water? He studied his boots. But he didn’t argue. He bowed to his wife’s superior knowledge. Fatal accidents to children fell within her area of expertise, even Arthur knew that. There were subjects his father knew about, such as the farm, and subjects his mother knew about, such as everything else. He knew that his father admired his mother for her intelligence. She read the Temiskaming Speaker from cover to cover, every week, and on the rare occasions when the Toronto Daily Star made it all the way up to Struan, she bought that too. She was the one who wrote letters if they needed writing, and paid all the bills. Arthur’s father could read things provided they weren’t too complicated, and he could add up all right, but when it came to writing, his fingers were clumsy and the letters and figures didn’t come out as they were supposed to.
