At first I thought it wise to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t mention the dresser and tried my best not to look too obviously at the walls. Eva had rolled her map out on the floor and was marking circles on it with a red felt-tip pen. She pressed so hard in one spot the tip went through the paper. The outline of the old railway bridge in town edged its way into the corner of my eye. A rickety fire tower seemed to fall right into my line of sight. It was hard not to look. It was hard not to ask. I picked the easier question.
‘Why do you take pictures of stuff like this?’
‘Because I like to,’ Eva replied testily. ‘Why do you trap leeches?’
I could see a pile of mouldering logs beside a creek. Some ancient-looking stumps. A few pieces of rusty wire leaning twisted around the remains of a plank.
‘Holy crap,’ I exclaimed, as if I was her.
She glanced up from her map.
‘Where’d you take that?’ I asked, pointing to the photo.
‘Just outside of town. Why? What’s so special about it?’
‘It’s the farm.’
‘What farm? It didn’t look like a farm to me.’
I doubt it would have looked like a farm to anyone. I doubt it had ever once looked like even a possible farm to anyone; except, briefly and long ago, my great-grandfather – when he paid a token price for its hundred acres and dragged his young wife and son up north to join him on it. It’s a difficult task examining and accessing the decisions of your ancestors – after all, the sum total and result of those decisions is you – but the fact is my own had something of a knack for making poor ones.
So while all the other new arrivals in Crooked River had tried to find gold or iron or jobs with the railroad and logging crews, my grandfather’s family had tried to start a farm. I can’t imagine what they were thinking. There was a good reason those other settlers had pinned their brightest hopes on what lay under the earth rather than on what they could raise out of it. There was no earth, not to speak of. The glaciers, like a bad tempered army in retreat, had scoured the most of it away. It wasn’t farming country. This was Abel’s land. And if you’d listened carefully it was the blood from Cain’s scraped and weary knuckles you’d most likely have heard crying from the ground.
How they must have come to curse it, that one hundred acres. They held on there for almost exactly one calendar year. My grandfather, if he spoke of it at all, described it month by month, as if reciting some drear and doleful almanac.
They arrived in May, with the ice just off the lakes and piles of snow still sitting in the shady places. They waited for it to melt and the land to dry. June came and almost went. And still they waited. And still it didn’t dry. My great-grandfather came into the tent one day with a handful of bulrushes and tears in his eyes. Half the land was a swamp. The black flies, who knew better, arrived there to breed. My grandfather said their faces swelled up so big and red and round it was as if children had drawn them with crayons.
The other half of the land was granite and spruce and sand and moss. The whiskey jacks got fat on the grass seed that wouldn’t grow. The slugs ate the green beans. At night they could hear muskrats slipping into the creek.
In July an eagle took the first of the chickens. Not knowing what might thrive best in this place they’d hedged their bets and brought a few of everything. There were two milking cows, three goats and four pigs. There were sixteen chickens and half a dozen geese. There was a black and white collie and a ginger tomcat.
In August a fox took the rest of the chickens. The tomcat got into a fight with a lynx and lost. In the small patch of land my great-grandfather had cleared and burned over, the grass lost the swiftest of battles to the mullein and thistles and fireweed. The cows lowed disconsolately in their makeshift canvas barn. Their milk had stopped. In desperation they’d started munching on Labrador Tea. The mosquitoes wreaked a quiet and itchy havoc on their udders.
September saw two of the pigs light out for the territories. They may or may not have been the smart ones. The other two contracted strange fevers from rooting through the swamp. The log cabin they were trying to build kept slanting alarmingly to the left and there were so many gaps in the walls it didn’t need windows. One of the goats got crushed by a falling tree.
On the tenth day of October a wolf ate the collie. And then, seeing as there wasn’t anything left to watch and herd them, the rest of the goats.
In November the geese decided to join their wild brethren and flew south. Nobody had got around to clipping their wings. They were definitely the smart ones. It started snowing the day after Halloween that year.
Three days before Christmas one of the cows froze to death.
He never even mentioned January and February and March. They were like those suspicious blanks and elisions in my father’s explorers’ accounts: empty spaces haunted by unspeakable things.
On the fourth day of April the second cow slipped through a thin shelf of remnant ice at the edge of the creek and drowned. The creek was only four feet deep, but the poor creature was so thin and starved it seemed to just lie down. She’d given up, my grandfather told me. She’d had enough. And a month later the rest of them had too.
Before leaving my great-grandfather pulled all the nails out of his ramshackle cabin and useless fences and sold them. For the first time in a year he actually made some money. It was better than farming. Around here anything was better than farming. The dry goods store opened within the year.
‘Jesus,’ Eva said after I’d told her all this as best I could. ‘I guess they were pretty unlucky.’
‘That’s exactly what they would have said,’ I told her. Whenever my grandfather talked to me about the farm he’d always said how unlucky they’d been. But how unlucky is it if an eagle eats a chicken? Isn’t that, given the circumstances, in all probability quite likely to happen? I’d never been able to figure out if thinking you were unlucky led you to make bad decisions, or if it was the other way around. Why people chose to do what they did. It was something I’d thought about a lot – and spent a lot of time trying not to think about too.
‘Why do you want to know where Sunset County Outposts is?’
Eva scratched her neck for a second or two. Then she looked carefully at the photographs on the walls, as if the answer were in one of them somewhere.
‘You know what happened to my parents, don’t you? It seems like everyone else around here does.’
I told her that’s what Crooked River was like. I told her I’d heard some things but I didn’t really know – not all the details. There was a picture of a derelict motel behind her. ‘Live bait and ice’ it said in cracked paint on a sign outside. I kept my eyes focussed on this.
I couldn’t quite hold Eva’s gaze, which was concentrated and intense and angry.
‘Well, I want to know.’
‘Know what?’
‘I want to know where,’ Eva said, brandishing the map at me. The pen had gone through in a few places now. Tiny pin-pricks of light were shining through the holes. ‘I want to know exactly fucking where.’
The day before, as we’d checked the leech traps, I’d asked Oskar about the accident. I didn’t much want to hear about it but had asked anyway, thinking that now Eva was around it was something I should probably know more about. Oskar had seemed unusually glad to talk to me about it (I knew he was leery of the area in which it had happened and tried to avoid it if possible). He’d kept adding details whenever I’d strayed onto other subjects, like the prison for instance.
In any case, this is what he’d told me. The plane in which Eva’s parents had died had gone down somewhere north of Sitting Down Lake. It hadn’t, according to those who knew about such things, been a straightforward crash. They’d found pieces of the wreckage scattered over an area of about fourteen or fifteen square kilometres. Apparently, the pilot had attempted an emergency landing on a small lake and, when this first attempt failed, had taken the plane back up and begun to circle in search of another
place to land. It was then, for reasons no one could be one hundred per cent sure about, that it had exploded in mid-air. They’d found the propeller and the nose and the floats. They’d found the remains of the pilot. They’d even found some of the Spillers’ luggage. What they’d never found were the bodies of Mr and Mrs Spiller. There were three small lakes in the area, as well as numerous swamps and ponds and creeks. They’d searched the area for two weeks. They couldn’t dredge all of it, Oskar told me. They couldn’t search for ever.
I didn’t tell Eva I knew any of this.
‘Will you help me look?’ she asked. Her voice had become gentle now. ‘Could you get me somewhere near there?’
‘Near where?’
‘There,’ she said, pointing to the small blue patch that represented one of the un-named water bodies. ‘I think it was there.’ There was a hole from the pen tip right in the middle of the blue.
I didn’t know why she thought it was there, or why she’d want to go there, but I said I would if I could. I wanted to help her, and I wanted to please her too. But secretly I was thinking I didn’t really know if I could or not. There were no roads anywhere near it. And in the bush things looked a lot different than they did on a map.
‘Okay?’ she said.
‘Okay,’ I said.
And then without a word she walked over to the dresser, reached inside, and took out the brown curly wig.
‘Turn around,’ she said.
The next thing I knew, she was standing beside me wearing it. We sat down together on the floor, resting our backs against her bed. For fifteen minutes or so we just sat there, not saying anything. Now and again I’d steal a glance at her face expecting, because she’d mentioned her parents, to see something there. After my mother died I’d thought for a long time that I’d been physically marked or altered by it in some way. I’d thought there was a transparency in grief: that it made you horribly visible, like a body turned inside-out. I hadn’t learnt then how it was the opposite that was true.
‘What happened to your Mom?’ Eva suddenly asked.
‘She got sick.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘There’s no need to be,’ I said. ‘It was a long time ago. She was just unlucky.’
Pictographs
Lamar was out near the creek when I left. He was standing with his back to me, in front of a large pile of lumber which had been delivered the day before. A spare, lean man, he appeared frail before it and much older than his fifty or so years. There was something indescribably sad about the way the fabric of his pants crumpled around his thin buttocks.
I was trying to slip past him towards the culvert, in order to avoid the awkwardness of a meeting, when he turned abruptly around. His half-grin of dismay must have been exactly mirrored by my own. We no longer had Eva as a mediating presence, and were too close to each other not to say anything.
Lamar wasn’t an easy man to talk to. My father sometimes joked that he needed some version of talk with a much smaller denomination than just small. At the edge of adulthood I’d worked out my default conversation pieces for most of the situations I found myself in Crooked River. They were seasonal:
The ice was late/early going out this spring.
The snow was going to be early/late this fall.
The real winter cold was coming/here.
It was a bad summer for bugs.
‘The bugs are pretty bad this year,’ I said.
‘They are,’ he said.
He swatted several from his forehead, as if to further confirm this. We stood there. I began to edge my body around with tiny steps so I’d be facing towards the culvert; to turn fully around and start walking towards it would have required another sentence. Lamar was rubbing the knuckle of one thumb with the other thumb so hard you could see it beginning to redden.
‘I like your boat,’ I suddenly blurted.
His face stilled; his eyes relaxed and brightened. He stopped rubbing his knuckle.
‘It’s an ocean boat,’ he said.
We both turned to look at it.
‘Have you ever been to the ocean?’ he asked me.
I didn’t answer for a long time. It was so unexpected. I’m not sure Lamar had ever asked me a question before.
‘No,’ I said. ‘But I’d like to.’
‘It’s quite the thing.’
We continued to look at the boat. We were in unprecedented conversational territory – and had already come to the end of it. Lamar turned and gestured to the lumber as though it was waiting for him. I nodded towards the culvert and started walking.
I wished I’d had another answer. The closest I’d got to an ocean had been a journey we’d made when I was eight along the northern shore of Lake Superior. We’d gone to look at some Ojibwa pictographs that my mother had seen more than a decade before and was keen to revisit. It was a long drive and it was already dark when we arrived at our campsite.
The next morning, before anybody else was awake, I crawled out the door of my tent and slipped through a fringe of pines. On the other side of it a long, sandy beach spread out far to my right and left. For a moment I stood transfixed on the sand. The exhilaration of the wide horizon, of the open, sunlit space over the water: it was exactly the feeling you would have got from first seeing the ocean. Afterwards I ran as far as I could along the firm, damp sand at the water’s edge.
I could have stayed on this beach all day but my mother was eager for us to set out so we could get to the pictographs. But the closer we got the more this eagerness appeared to morph into a kind of anxiety; it was almost as if she feared that, after all this time, they might have been rubbed or eroded from the rock. She spoke about the first time she’d been there. She’d spoken about this trip the day before, as we’d been driving, and much of what she said now was only a repetition of the same details – how she’d travelled there with two college room-mates; how they’d stopped to swim in a nearby river; how the car had broken down and the great adventure they’d had getting back – except that the warmth of the previous day’s nostalgia had been leached out of them. There was a hollow, coldly ritual sound to what she said now, like the recitation of a liturgy no longer quite believed in.
When we arrived she set off quickly down the trail towards the lake, my father and I following behind. The trail was rough and stony and eventually descended into a steep, sheer-sided ravine. The light barely reached us down there. It was gloomy and damp, with slabs of wet stone for steps. Above us was a huge boulder that had fallen into the ravine and, after a few feet, had become wedged between its walls. And though it must have been there for centuries, it appeared worryingly recent and precarious, threatening at any moment to continue its fall and block our exit. Keeping our footing on the slippery rock must have been difficult, and our progress slow, but my overriding impression is of my mother’s hair bobbing reassuringly out in front, leading us through this place like a flame.
It was a relief to reach the lake. The sun was shining on the pale granite cliffs, which were lapped by water that was a soft turquoise in the light before it dropped off and away into a deeper, darker blue. To reach the pictographs you had to make your way along the cliffs by way of a narrow, downward-slanting ledge. Beyond the cliffs you could see a headland jutting out and some wooded islands sat out from the shore. Several heavy ropes had been attached to the edge of the ledge and dangled into the lake below, for mooring boats I supposed.
My mother was still in front and began to make her way along this ledge, with me close behind and my father coming last. Twice he managed to slip on the smooth surface of the granite and ended up manoeuvring himself on his hands and feet like some gigantic and prehistoric insect. The ropes, I realised, weren’t there for boats but in case anybody fell into the lake below (which didn’t seem to perturb me; as I’ve mentioned before, I was less afraid back then).
The pictographs were painted a rusty red, similar to the dust of Crooked River. Like my mother’s sculptures, some were quite naturalistic
while others were more strange and fabulous. I recognised a caribou, a bear, and some men in a canoe, but it wasn’t until glancing at the information sign as we returned to the trail that several sinuous, flowing shapes were revealed to me as a turtle and a heron.
There was one creature that had looked to me like a Stegosaurus with the head of a buffalo. ‘That’s Mishipeshu,’ my father had said, pointing to a drawing of it on the same sign and reading the explanation written below. ‘…the great water lynx…’
‘Please, can you stop,’ my mother said as she came up behind us. My parents had exchanged places for the trip back and she was lagging some way behind us, her anxiety replaced by an uncharacteristic listlessness. She’d been silent the whole while we’d looked at the pictographs.
‘Stop what?’
‘Can you stop reading that sign,’ she’d said, as if exhausted. ‘Just let them be what he wants them to be.’
As we were leaving the parking lot and rejoining the highway my father took one hand off the steering wheel and wrapped a long arm around my mother’s shoulders. As the car gathered speed their whispers came at me in bits and pieces before they were swallowed up in the whoosh of air through the windows.
‘But aren’t they the same as before?’ I’d heard my father ask.
‘But that’s the problem! They are the same. Don’t you understand that?’
I’d switched my attention to what I could see receding through the back window: the wooded islands off the shore, the wide, empty horizon; the high, open sky above the glittering water; the headland, the pale cliffs, the darker rocks at their base.
Now, as I recalled these scenes, I found myself adding certain details from Lamar’s photographs to the landscape – placing a lighthouse on that headland, some seaweed on the rocks, scattering some buoys to bob in the swell. I thought if I could do this, if I could reshape this memory, then in fact it would be as though we had been to the ocean. We had gone there on holiday. What you could change and alter could never be finished or complete or dead. This is what I had been told back then, and what I had tried very hard to believe in since.
Hummingbird Page 6
