Ragged Lake

by Ron Corbett

  In the summer there are more than a dozen people working at the Mattamy, not counting the guides, but in winter there are only three. A bartender, a cook, and a waitress who also works as a maid. I do not like going to the lodge in winter. I went once, a year ago, and ended up sitting in the bar while Guillaume was in the kitchen bartering with the cook. The lights were turned off to save energy and there was no sun that day so the room was filled with shadows and gloom, the bartender staring at me even after I said we didn’t need any drinks. Just staring until I felt so uncomfortable I shifted Cassandra on my lap so she was blocking his line of vision. Even then he kept staring at us.

  “Do you like living out there?” he asked eventually.

  “I like it well enough,” I answered.

  “Seems silly building a cabin way out there. We got abandoned cottages right here in town.”

  “We like the lake.”

  “You don’t like people?”

  “I like people fine. I just like the lake, too.”

  “I suppose. Do you never get lonely?”

  Just then the waitress came in — a young girl, perhaps still a teenager. She came over and made a silly face for Cassandra, who cooed and held out her hands to be picked up. Guillaume came in from the kitchen a minute later and I stood to leave. I gave the waitress a quick hug and she hugged me back with enough force to make me think it had not been a coincidence, her walking in the room when she had.

  . . .

  Ragged Lake holds the key to the trouble we are in. I know it. It was a mistake to have gone back there, and I need to figure out the connection.

  When it comes to actual homes where people still live and still have Ragged Lake as their mailing address, I count three. John Holly has one, a fishing cottage by the lake. An elderly couple has another cottage. The man is a former mill hand, the woman someone I remember from Five Mile, an old woman even back then.

  The third house is Anita’s. I am not sure I would have said — had I been asked before I returned to Ragged Lake — that Anita would still be living here, although I think I might have. There is logic to it. An unfolding I can easily imagine. When I stumbled upon her cabin, high on a bluff overlooking Ragged Lake, I was not surprised, nor was I by the old woman who walked out of it.

  “Hello Anita,” I said.

  “Hello Lucy,” she answered.

  We went inside and stayed more than two hours. Cassandra played on the mandala rug I remember from Anita’s Place, the one that sat beneath the circular table with the punch bowls. She is smaller and older than I recall, but she has the same friendly laugh, the same look of mischief in her eyes that I remember so well as a young girl when she would lean over to whisper something scandalous in my ear, keeping a child amused in a room full of adults. I think I was the only girl, or woman, ever allowed inside Anita’s Place. Johnny’s little girl.

  “Things are better for you?” she asked, and I told her they were. It seemed genuine, the smile that came across her face when I said that. I go to visit her from time to time and have told Guillaume about her, this old Cree woman living high on a bluff overlooking Ragged Lake, although I have not told him the whole story. I have come to the conclusion I am not a whole-story-telling sort of person.

  And that’s it. Everyone who lives in Ragged Lake. Everyone who works in Ragged Lake. And everything we have been doing the past twenty-seven months.

  Now I just need to figure out why people are coming back. All at the same time. As though summoned.

  . . .

  The first one came a month ago. It was Lucinda. Johnny’s old girlfriend. For a couple years anyway, before she drowned in the Old Duck.

  So, it was a ghost I must have seen when I was out picking chokeberries, Cassandra having an afternoon nap in the cabin, Guillaume fishing, and there she was, standing beside the trail, dressed in the stained, dark-red evening gown Lucinda favoured for Saturday nights.

  “Well, lookie here, if it isn’t sweet little Lucy. Come here, child, and let’s have a look at you. Your father is around here somewhere.”

  I jumped and spilled the berries, turned my eyes to the ground when it happened, to see them rolling away, and when I looked back up, she was gone. For the rest of that day, I saw flashes of red moving through the forest. A red not the hue of a cardinal or a maple leaf still clinging to a tree but the dirty red of Lucinda’s weekend dress, a colour I would recognize anywhere, no other colour quite like it in the world, not even the blood-red satin you find sometimes inside a coffin — and if anything were to come close to Lucinda’s party dress, it would be that.

  The next day, she came back. While I was by the shore of Cap, Cassandra again having a nap. This time Lucinda did not run away after startling me. She stayed and talked.

  “How long has it been, child?”

  “Twelve years.”

  She was smoking the clay pipe she always had, dressed this day in her work clothes, denim overalls with large metal buckles, good leather hiking boots, a straw hat.

  “There’s no one living at Five Mile anymore?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “They’re all gone.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t even live at Five Mile. Why you living at Cap and not at Five Mile, or back in Ragged like you did with Johnny?”

  “I like the lake.”

  “You got the river at Five Mile.”

  “I prefer the lake.”

  “You got a man and a child now, too. Your husband ain’t from here?”

  “No.”

  “Why would a man who’s not from here ever want to live here? No one ever came back here. Why you come, Lucy?”

  “I got tired of living in the city.”

  “Your man?”

  “He got tired, too.”

  “How old is the girl?”

  “She’s staying away from you, Lucinda. She’s never talking to you. You’re dead.”

  I stared at the apparition in front of me, wondering for a moment if I were having a dry drunk, the way people talked about having such things in the meetings, having all the crazy, disconnected mania of a week-long drunk, but you’re stone-cold sober. Your body just remembering how it used to be, something tricking your mind into remembering. That would explain what has been happening. If I were a drunk again.

  “Why you actin’ so uppity, Lucy? I was just askin’ ’bout your little girl. Your dad is around here somewhere. Maybe he’d like to meet her, too.”

  “You’re not ever coming close to my little girl. Same for my dad.”

  “Oh, child, he loves you. You know that. Anyway, I’m not here for that,” and she laughed.

  “Why are you here, then?”

  “I think you know.”

  She laughed one more time, hiked up her overalls, and walked away. I watched her go deeper and deeper into the forest until I lost sight of her, could only hear her voice singing an old shanty song:

  WHERE YOU GOING, MY CHILD?

  TO THE PINES, TO THE PINES

  WHERE THE SUN DON’T EVER SHINE

  WHERE YOU GOING, MY CHILD?

  TO THE HILLS, TO THE HILLS

  ’FORE MY BABY COMES TO KILL . . .

  . . .

  It made sense, Lucinda being the first to come back. She was with us at the beginning, coming in a locked-oar skiff from Kes’, travelling the western arm of a great Atlantic Ocean bay and then down the Francis River to the northern tip of Ragged, another week of rowing after that to reach the mill.

  After Johnny got hired, we stayed with one of his cousins in Five Mile. Lucinda was drunk all the time, Johnny and his cousin when they weren’t working, so half the time. The cousin’s wife despised us for the chaos we brought to her house. Most mornings she would run out of food before she reached my bowl. Her two daughters were ugly and stupid and never spoke to me. Her four boys, when t
hey noticed me at all, would try to pin me down and put their hands down my pants.

  Johnny caught them doing it one day and was so enraged he beat them silly, stomping the oldest boy’s head until I thought it was going to pop. The cousin was angry when he came home and learned what Johnny had done, but after he was sure the boy wasn’t going to die, he agreed his son had done wrong. No one bothered me again, and no one spoke of it.

  No one except Lucinda, who for days afterward said it had been my fault the young boy almost got killed.

  “It’s the girl that done it,” she would scream at my father. “You can’t have a girl like that walking around boys and drinkin’ men.”

  “What do you mean ‘a girl like that’?”

  “Are you blind Johnny? No, you ain’t blind. That’s why you nearly killed that boy.”

  “Since when do you care about boys?” and Johnny would grab her, Lucinda laughing and hitting his chest with feigned punches. “You quit worrying about boys and quit worrying ’bout my daughter. I’m enough for you to worry about.”

  Johnny was protective like that. Or, he was for a long time. Longer than most men in his position might have been, and it’s hard to fault him for some of the things that happened later, because I never saw another single dad at Five Mile. I think Johnny was the only one who could have pulled it off. Always a little quicker than the next guy coming up the road. Always a little ahead of whatever game was being played. I don’t think I was ever a burden to him. I don’t think much in life ever was.

  By the time Lucinda went and drowned herself, we were living in Ragged Lake. We were the only Cree to live full time in the village and we moved after Johnny got promoted to foreman, the only Cree to have that happen as well.

  We moved into a cottage on the shores of Ragged Lake, which was just goofy, having a place like that. Our neighbours were the VPs at the mill, the railway agent, the family that owned the Mattamy back then. Even the O’Hearns, when one of them came up to Ragged Lake, would stay at the cottages.

  Shortly after Lucinda left us, we started having what Johnny called “cocktail parties,” which was just drinking at home, like I had always seen it, except the liquor was store-bought and there was ice in a silver bucket with tongs people were supposed to use and normally did, until the third or fourth drink. The railway agent was a bad drunk and always came to Johnny’s parties. One of the VPs was single and usually came, although the other VP had a wife and two daughters and came only occasionally. Once he brought his two daughters, but the girls looked like they wanted to run away and wash their hands as soon as they arrived. They stayed hidden in the corner for most of the night like bad furniture. The O’Hearns came from time to time, the old man and his son, always polite, always staying until the last drink. I served the drinks, dressed in a skirt and white shirt, my hair pulled back in a ponytail the way Johnny taught me.

  I’ll always remember those cocktail parties. The way Johnny would drink and slap the backs of the drunken railway agent, the timber company VP, the government Indian and Northern Affairs bureaucrat passing through, all those men sitting in our living room laughing at anything Johnny said, my dad dressed in a jacket and tie some Sport had given him, the tie with a flying duck pattern on it. I am just Indian enough to think that may be the strangest sight I will ever see.

  . . .

  Then one day the mill closed. And just like that the world changed.

  There had been warning signs it might happen, but nothing anyone took seriously. Shifts had been cut back, sure, but the same thing had happened in the recession of ’92, and in the early ’80s, even further back than that some people said, although no one could remember when that might have been. It seemed unlikely anything like that had happened in the ’60s and ’70s, when everyone read newspapers and newsprint mills may as well have been banknote companies. When did all that start to change? That feeling of invincibility everyone used to have around here?

  Suddenly three shifts were cut to two, the second became an on-call shift, and then there was only one shift left, and before anyone had much time to think about it, O’Hearn closed the mill.

  Everyone was summoned to a meeting at nine in the morning. It was a Tuesday in early September and as soon as the men walked onto the mill floor, everyone knew something extraordinary was happening. I heard about it later from Johnny. The presses were not running. The vats were not burbling. There was not a piece of machinery in the entire mill that was making a sound. A silence no man had heard before. So foreign and disorienting they were immediately struck mute, and the human resources man who had flown up from Springfield for the announcement didn’t need to use the PA system that had been set up for him.

  “Newsprint isn’t coming back,” he said after talking for a few minutes about commodity prices and the state of the newspaper industry. He shrugged his shoulders and added, “I’m afraid this is the end of the road, boys.”

  Each man was given two weeks’ pay for every year worked. The men queued for their money, forming three lines that arrived eventually at a foldout card table with a woman sitting behind it who had also flown up from Springfield that morning. The men gave their names and the woman searched through stacks of envelopes, eventually giving each man an envelope with his name on it.

  “The company bank,” the human resources man continued saying, marching in circles on the dais, looking a bit like a television evangelist on a slow day, “will stay open until the end of the week. Same for the company store and the bunkhouses. Anyone wanting to use the train has free passage until the end of month.”

  . . .

  The night they shut the mill, I lay in bed listening to Johnny arguing in the kitchen with another man. My father was talking quickly. Already hustling. Johnny wasn’t fooled. He knew that mill was never going to reopen. The other man shouted at him.

  “It’s a little fucking late in the game, Johnny.”

  “It’s whatever time I say it is, Tommy. Maybe you’re forgettin’ some stuff.”

  “I forget nothing.”

  “Then you know we have a problem. I’m not fuckin’ off back to Kes’. Is that what you think I’m doing?”

  “I don’t know what you’re doing, Johnny. I don’t know why I should give a fuck what you’re doing. There is no more fuckin’ mill. Maybe we can get to that, Johnny. Why am I still fuckin’ here?”

  “You know damn well why you’re still here.”

  “You’re a bastard.”

  “We need to reach an understanding. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Before long, I put my hands over my ears and tried not to hear. Johnny was just trying to survive. I knew that. And I loved him for it. A feeling of love came over me right then that I think could have washed me away like a spring flood if I had let it, me loving Johnny for not being deceived, for thinking ahead, for everything he had done since my mother left, for raising me. I have wondered sometimes why he did that. Was I some exotic thing he liked having around? Like his Tony Lama boots and his $1,000 watches? I’m not sure. It’s probably best not to think about some things too much.

  I kept my hands over my ears until I fell asleep and by then I had my plan. Knew what I had to do if I was going to survive, if I was going to put my father’s problems behind me and have a life of my own. For a while the plan seemed cold and frightening and kept me from sleeping, but then I asked what my father would do if the roles were reversed, and I never came up with any answer different than mine. Sleep came just as the man in the kitchen was leaving, telling Johnny he would see him tomorrow.

  Four days later, a truck driver was letting me off in front of the YWCA in Cork’s Town. That’s how quickly it all happened. The last person I saw before leaving was Anita. I had my rucksack on and was heading to the train station. She was in the low meadow running between Five Mile and Capimitchigama, picking herbs for the potpourris she hung around Anita’s Place.

  �
��You’re leaving, Lucy?”

  “I am.”

  You’re a smart girl. That mill is never going to reopen.”

  “I know.”

  “The boys are fooling themselves.”

  “Johnny says the same thing. Will you be leaving, Anita?”

  “No. I have money saved, and I’ve been here a long time. I don’t know where else I’d go.”

  That day it was sunny but the sky was stuffed with high cumulus clouds, so many clouds the sun was constantly being blocked, and shadows moved across us like slow rain.

  “Where are you going to go, Lucy?”

  “Springfield.”

  “I didn’t think Johnny cared for Springfield.”

  “He’s not going.”

  “Well, my heavens, so you two are finally splitting up. Where is Johnny going?”

  I didn’t answer right away. I hadn’t expected to run into Anita or ever hear the question. A world of strangers awaited me that afternoon.

  “I think O’Hearn is getting him a job at the bush camp on Lake Simon.”

  “Lordy, things are moving quickly. Where were you just coming from?”

  “I wanted to have a look at the headwaters before I left. I’m going to be travelling down the Springfield. All the way to the Kettle Falls. Did you know we used to pray to the gods at those falls?”

  “Not just us. The Algonquin, the Iroquois, the Long Hairs. We all did.”

  “Nothing unusual about what I’m going to do, then, heading down that river.”

  “Nothing unusual at all.”

  Anita offered me some herbs, a few of which I took for the journey, and in a cheery voice she wished me luck.

  . . .

  A week ago someone else came back. Not a ghost like Lucinda. Not a friend like Anita.