by Mary Lawson
“Constipation?” Ian offered.
“Nope.”
“Your toes?” Ian’s father said.
“Nope.”
“Maybe you’re just out for a walk,” Ian said. “It’s a nice evening.”
“Nope. I came for a reason.”
“Heart leaping about again?” Dr. Christopherson said.
“Nope.”
“Memory?” Ian said. His father frowned at him but the old man thought it was funny.
“Ha!” he said. “Nope, memory’s perfect.” He thought some more. “Maybe I only came for a checkup.”
“You’ve just had it,” Dr. Christopherson said. “You’re in better shape than I am.”
“Where’s Molly?” Ian said, suddenly realizing that she wasn’t there.
“She went around the back of the house,” the old man said. “Probably dug a hole under the fence, miles away by now. You owe me a quarter.”
But as he spoke she came galloping around the corner of the house. She’d found an old gray sock and was killing it savagely. They watched her shake it violently back and forth. It flew out of her jaws and into the air and when it landed she crouched down and waited, panting and delighted, hoping it would move so that she could kill it again.
“Wonder where she found the sock,” Ian said. He didn’t recognize it as one of his or his father’s.
As if she heard him Molly pounced on it again, seized it in her jaws and brought it proudly over to deposit at his feet. It was only then that they realized it wasn’t a sock.
“That’s pretty damned quick,” Mr. Johnson said grudgingly. “Catchin’ a rabbit at her age—even a little ’un. Pretty damned quick.”
“You two have to get a move on,” Mr. Hardy said. It was Monday morning and he had summoned both Ian and Pete to the school to see him, despite the fact that they were now on vacation. “You need to get your college applications in now. By the time the exam results come out it will be too late. I want both of you back here tomorrow morning—you, Christopherson, at nine; you, Corbiere, at half past—decisions made, pens in hand.”
They cycled back to the reserve, went straight down to the dock, got into the Queen Mary, puttered around to Hopeless Inlet and tossed the anchor overboard. It was raining, a quiet, gentle rain, dotting the surface of the lake with a billion tiny circles.
Pete picked up his jigger, stuck a bug on the hook, and dropped it over the side. Ian attached a lure to his line, cast it out across the water, and began slowly reeling it in.
“So,” he said.
Pete nodded.
“Decision time.”
“Seems so.”
They fished. Pete caught a trout. He dropped it in the bottom of the boat and said, “Thought you’d made your decision. Thought you were going to be a pilot.”
“I am,” Ian said. “It’s your decision we’re talking about.”
“Why didn’t you tell Hardy?”
Ian didn’t know the answer to that one. “I will. Tomorrow.”
The rain was trickling down the back of his neck. He looked around for a hat, or something to use as a hat, but there wasn’t anything. The rain was warm, though, and not unpleasant. Pete was twitching the jig up and down in the water. Ian said, “If you don’t tell me what you’ve decided to do in three seconds flat, I’m going to throw you overboard.” He felt nervous, and didn’t know why.
“I’m not going on,” Pete said.
Ian looked at him, sure he must have heard him wrong. Pete let out a little more line from the jigger.
“What?” Ian said.
“I’m stayin’ here. Me and a couple of the guys are going to set up a little fishing business for the tourists. Make sure they don’t catch all the good fish. I think we can make a pretty good thing out of it.” There was a tug on his line; he hauled in another trout and knocked it on the head. He glanced over at Ian and said, “You better keep reeling, man. You’re gonna snag your hook.”
Ian’s line had sunk down into the water. The hook would be down on the bottom, wrapping itself in bits of weed and waterlogged driftwood. He didn’t care. He put down the rod, let it drape over the side of the boat. “When did you decide this?” he said.
“A while ago.”
“How long is a while? A month? A year? Ten years?”
“Why does it matter?”
“I’m just curious.”
Though he wasn’t curious, he was angry, and getting angrier as it sank in. Angry, and somehow betrayed. He knew Pete was smart, maybe smarter than any of them, though mostly he kept it hidden. Smart in ways both broad and deep. He thought for himself, questioned things, took nobody’s word for anything. And though Ian had never been able to imagine exactly what Pete might end up doing, he had always been sure that it would be something impressive. He would show them all; Ian had been certain of that.
Pete shrugged. “I guess quite a few months.”
Something big grabbed Pete’s line, then spat it out again; Ian thought he saw a long dark shape drifting away. “Shit,” Pete said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Ian asked. That was almost as upsetting as the decision itself. Neither of them was given to talking about personal things, but this was different; there was no reason why they couldn’t have talked about this. And they should have. They definitely should have.
“I guess ’cause I knew we’d end up having this conversation,” Pete said. “I was putting off the evil day.” There was, at least, a note of apology in his voice.
“I don’t get it,” Ian said. “Why did you take the exams?”
“My grandfather wanted me to.”
“Doesn’t he want you to go to college?”
“Yeah, but he understands.”
“Well I don’t,” Ian said. “I do not understand.”
A pair of Canada geese flew low over the water and skidded to a landing twenty yards away, feet turned up like water skis, then settled, shuffling their feathers.
Pete said, “I can’t leave this place, man.”
Ian looked out across the lake to the rocky shore and the woods behind. The rain had stopped and the surface of the lake gleamed like pewter. He said, “Okay. Sure. It’s going to be hard to leave, I know that. But it will all still be here. It isn’t going anywhere. You can come back to it, if you want to. But you can do other stuff first. I don’t see why you can’t do other stuff first. I think you’re making a mistake. A big mistake.”
Pete hauled in his line. He dropped the jig in the bottom of the boat and sat, his elbows on his knees, looking down into the water. After a while he said, “I don’t know how else to put it, man, except to say that everything I care about is here. Everything that matters to me is right…here.”
“But that’s because it’s all you know!” Ian said. “Jesus, Pete! You don’t even know what else is out there!”
“No,” Pete said. “But I know what’s important to me. And I know I don’t have to go anywhere else to find it.”
They sat in silence. It passed through Ian’s mind that it was the first time he had ever seen Pete sitting in the boat but not fishing. He supposed it showed how seriously Pete was taking the conversation, but that did not mollify him. He was too frustrated, too disappointed, to be mollified by anything.
He said bitterly, “People are going to think you’re scared to try. You know that, don’t you? They’ll think you’re scared you can’t make it out there.”
Pete turned his head and looked at him. He said mildly, “You care too much what people think, man. That’s your biggest problem. You think I’m making a mistake? At least I’m not doing something I don’t want to do just to prove a point.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ian said, hot with anger now.
“You know what it means.” Pete picked up the jig and dropped it over the side again.
“No, I don’t.”
“You’re dumber than I thought, then,” Pete said, still mild as milk. “Go work it out.”
He dre
amed of his mother again, the second time in a week. They were sitting in the living room, just the two of them, and she was looking through an Eaton’s catalog and suddenly she looked up, her eyes wide, and said, “Listen!”
He listened, but there was nothing to hear but the faint dry rustle of the wind in the trees. He said, “I can’t hear anything.”
She said, “That’s right. That’s because there’s nothing to hear. Nothing! That’s what I can’t stand about this place. I can’t stand the nothingness!”
He said, “I’m here, Mum. It isn’t nothingness if I’m here, is it?”
She smiled at him and for a moment he almost thought she was going to say no, you’re right, of course you’re right. But instead she said, “Go work it out.”
On Tuesday morning he had his appointment with Mr. Hardy at nine o’clock, so he was late getting to the farm. Jake and Carter were in the farmyard when he arrived. They were standing beside Jake’s car; the hood was up and Carter was headfirst inside the engine. Jake was looking as he always did when he was dealing with Carter—half bored, half amused. He liked the fact that Carter was so impressed with the car, though; you could see that. As for Carter, he was a different kid nowadays. It was as if he had been waiting his whole life for someone to talk to about cars. Or maybe just someone to talk to, period.
“So what’s the news?” Jake said when Ian got off his bike. “Hear you were called in to the school.”
“Just some paperwork,” Ian said. “Nothing important.” His mind was still on his conversation with Mr. Hardy and he didn’t feel in the mood for chitchat. Hardy had smiled his know-it-all smile when Ian told him what he’d finally decided to do, and although Ian had known that he would, it was still extremely annoying. Pete had been waiting in the hall when he came out, but Hardy had summoned him in straightaway, so there hadn’t been time to talk. Given how they’d parted last night, maybe that was a good thing.
“What’s this thing do?” asked Carter from half-inside the engine. Jake went over to have a look, so Ian was spared further questions. He went to the stable and harnessed up Robert and Edward and when he came out, leading the horses, the car was pulling out of the drive with Jake in the passenger seat and Carter behind the wheel.
Ian took the horses out to the fields. It was oats they were harvesting; Arthur cut oats early and let the grains ripen in the sheaves. It was heavy work and by noon both they and the horses were in need of a break. They unharnessed the horses and left them to graze on the long grass at the edge of the field while they went back to the farm for dinner.
Jake’s car was just driving into the farmyard as they arrived, Carter still at the wheel, his face flushed and happy. “We got her going a hundred and ten!” he said as he got out. He was aiming the comment at anyone in sight. “Boy, you should have seen us! She goes like a bomb!” Jake smiled tolerantly.
They all washed at the pump and filed into the kitchen and sat down and waited for Laura to serve them, which she did. Carter was still going on about the car, asking Jake endless questions. “So if the road was paved, how long would it take her to get from zero to sixty? And if it was downhill? Say it was paved and downhill, how long would it take?” Julie and March were bickering, as they always did at the table. Arthur was silently plowing through his dinner. Laura was trying to help her father get the food from his plate to his mouth without spilling it all down his front.
Ian wasn’t paying much attention to any of them. Random thoughts were floating in and out of his mind. He was thinking that when he reached the stage where someone had to help him to eat he’d shoot himself; and that Jake was surprisingly patient with Carter, given that he wasn’t a patient kind of guy; and that last night it had taken him almost an hour to reassure his father that he was not going into medicine only, or even partially, because he thought it would please him. He was thinking about Pete’s decision, wondering why it had felt like a betrayal, and whether he just wanted Pete to make the same choices he did; and about his own decision, wondering whether he had, in fact, made it, or whether everything was decided for you at the moment of conception and there wasn’t a thing you could do about it. And he was thinking that it was since his mother’s letters had stopped that he’d started dreaming about her, and the dreams were worse than the letters because you couldn’t chuck them away unread. The sick anger left over from the last dream was still lying in the pit of his stomach. He knew it was irrational to be upset about something someone said in a dream, but the fact was, even if she had never said it, the gist of it was true: he and his father hadn’t mattered enough to her, when weighed against the “nothingness” she hated so much. Given the choice between them and some other life, she had chosen some other life.
He was thinking all those things when suddenly Julie took a break from tormenting March and said, loudly, “Mummy, you keep dropping things.”
Ian glanced at Laura. She was retrieving a serving spoon from the floor, and when she straightened up her face was flushed. He saw her look at Jake, just a quick look and then away. Ian looked at him too and saw that he was watching her. That was when he remembered what he’d seen on Friday night. He’d forgotten all about it until then.
“I know,” Laura said. “I seem to be clumsy today.”
“You must have something on your mind,” Jake said.
She gave a little laugh, not looking at him. “No,” she said. “Not really. I’m just clumsy.” She took the serving spoon over to the sink and rinsed it under the tap.
Maybe if the shadow of the dream hadn’t still been with him, Ian wouldn’t have thought anything of it. As it was, though, a whisper of suspicion drifted into his mind, just enough to make him wonder if there might be another interpretation of what he had seen. He wouldn’t put it past Jake, but Laura? No. He rejected the thought, and the normal to-and-fro of dinner time washed over him again and carried it away.
Afterward, when he looked back on the events of that afternoon, it seemed to him that there was an inevitability about them, as if fate had arranged a number of trivial little incidents—a series of them, like stepping-stones—without any one of which everything would have turned out differently. After dinner, for instance, when he and Arthur settled down in the armchairs for their post-dinner digestion time, March came in from the farmyard. That was the first stepping-stone. The children were supposed to stay out of the way while the men rested, but Laura had gone outside to bring in the laundry (so maybe that was the first stepping-stone) and March slipped in. He was carrying what turned out to be an old billhook that he announced he wanted to sharpen. Probably he had seen his father and Ian sharpening the scythes that morning and thought it looked like fun.
“That looks kind of dangerous,” Ian said, frowning at the billhook. “Let’s have a look at it.” March handed it to him. It was old and rusty but still sharp enough to be a bad idea for a not-quite four-yearold.
“Where did you find it?” Ian said. Tools were never left lying around. He glanced at Arthur to see what he thought of it, but Arthur’s eyes were closed and his mouth was open and a faint sighing snore was drifting out with every breath. He was having a proper post-dinner break for once, like he used to before Jake arrived, which Ian suspected had something to do with the fact that Jake had gone outside after dinner, instead of joining them.
“I was digging a hole,” March said, anxiously hauling his T-shirt up and down over his belly, afraid that all these questions meant that he was going to be stopped, as usual, from doing anything that might be fun. “Out by the barn. I was going to bury my truck, and it was there.”
“Well I’ll tell you what,” Ian said. “This is your dad’s and it’s a tool for cutting things, so it wouldn’t be a very good toy,”—a huge sigh of exasperation from March—“Hang on, hang on, what I was about to say is that we can sharpen it together, if you like.” He dug around in his pocket for the sharpening stone. The scythes needed frequent sharpening, so the stone lived permanently in his pocket at the moment.
>
“Can I do it myself?” March asked, stretching his T-shirt down to his knees.
“Yes. I’ll show you how and then you can do it yourself. I’ll just hold it and you can do the rest. You see the billhook has one flat side and one rounded side? Well you don’t sharpen the flat edge, you just smooth the stone over the rounded edge like this….”
So he showed March how to rub the stone over the bevel of the blade, and March had a go at sharpening the hook himself, and then in the middle of the task Julie burst in, highly excited because there was a huge bird—a bald eagle, as it turned out—sitting on the top branch of the white pine at the corner of the hay barn. March rushed off to see it and Ian put the sharpening stone and the billhook down on the kitchen counter, thinking that they’d come back and finish the job in a minute, and followed them out. Then Laura came around the corner of the house with the laundry basket and a minute later Jake appeared from the same direction. And then Arthur, presumably wakened by the excitement, came out as well, and they all stood around with their heads tipped back, gaping up at the eagle, who was looking down at them in utter disdain.
How many stepping-stones? Laura going out to collect the laundry, March finding a billhook where a billhook shouldn’t have been, a bald eagle sitting in a pine tree, the billhook and sharpening stone on the kitchen counter. Such small, unimportant events.
After a while the eagle flew off and Laura told Julie and March she wanted them to come in and wash because they were going to play with friends straightaway. Arthur said, “Might as well get back to it,” and he and Ian set off down the track to the fields.
They were starting on a new field and it was Ian’s job to scythe the edges so that Arthur and the horses could get the binder around. It wasn’t until he picked up the scythe that he remembered he’d left the sharpening stone on the kitchen counter. Arthur didn’t have one with him, so there was nothing for it but to go back to the house and get it. That was the final stepping-stone.
They were in the kitchen. Laura had her back to the wall and Jake was standing directly in front of her, very close. He had one arm against the wall beside her and with the other hand he was lifting her chin. She had her arms up, hands flat against his chest as if she were going to push him away, but she wasn’t pushing him away. That was what Ian noticed. That and the look of horror on her face when she saw him in the doorway.
