Outside the truck window a chirruping din filled the air. In the beaver ponds and road-side puddles the frogs were getting noisy and restless. There was a panicky note in their voices. The three-day blow was dropping the water levels. So much around here depended on the transformations of water – freeze, thaw, flood, evaporation. They were better guides to the year than the names of seasons.
And then the voices suddenly vanished. All the other sounds did too. Without warning, my father had turned down the old track towards the swamp house. I felt like the frogs; as though the medium of my world was changing, was dropping perilously backwards and downwards. My voice would have been as panicky as theirs if I’d said anything, but I couldn’t. My father remained as silent as me.
The track was in no shape at all. It was barely a track any more. We crashed through some saplings until we came to a blown-down poplar and had to stop the truck and walk. A few used shotgun cartridges were strewn on the deeply rutted gravel, left there by grouse hunters, and in some inexplicable gesture of housekeeping I tidied them away into my pocket. My father didn’t notice them. They weren’t the sort of thing he noticed.
The swamp, as far as I could tell, had moved at least fifteen feet closer to the house. My father had once planted a few lilacs out in front, around the area where the deck would have been, had it ever been completed. This, as it now turned out, had been his one successful piece of gardening; they’d grown thickly into bushes; the air was heavy with the scent of their blossoms. But the swamp had already begun to over-run the furthest out of these bushes. You could see their spindled tops reaching thinly out of the brown water.
As if to accommodate the expanding waters of the swamp, the house itself had shrunk. To an extent this must have just been the optical illusion or adjustment that attends all returns to childhood homes, but in this case there had also been an actual physical diminishment: a fallen poplar had flattened the small extension which had once housed my room. Elsewhere, the poplars and alders were already crowding around it, jostling it back into the bush.
I tried to think of significant dates, birthdays, anniversaries – reasons my father should choose this day to come back here as opposed to any other. But I couldn’t think of any.
‘Do you want to come in?’ he asked. It was the first thing he’d said since we’d turned off the highway. He was stooping to look through the front doorway (the door itself had long since been wrenched off its hinges).
‘I don’t want to,’ I said in a voice that sounded strange to me, that was somehow at once too small and too large for my mouth. I didn’t want to go into the house. Like the alders and poplars, I wanted it to be ushered as quickly as possible back into the realms of a vegetable kingdom. I wished it only the swiftest of ruins. And in some ways I’m sure that wish has come true. There is a good chance not a single part of it remains these days, or at least no visible one.
What does remain is the image of my father stooping awkwardly through its absurdly small-looking door. I can’t remember a time when he fitted easily into anywhere. He was constantly bumping his head on ceilings and door jambs, or else stubbing his toes on chairs and tables that seemed, miraculously, to have altered their positions and jumped in front of him. Our cupboards took a fearful beating from stray elbows. When he walked into a classroom the pupils at the front would surreptitiously move their desks a few inches backwards.
I sometimes imagined a time, before we moved up here, when my father had glided effortlessly through a world that was perfectly in proportion to him – or at least that he was perfectly in proportion to. I had few memories of our life before we’d moved, and no clear ones, and so the basis for this thought must have been a photograph that once sat on a dresser in the swamp house (whether it was still in there that day I have no idea). In this photograph he was standing outside Hart House in Toronto, dressed in something tidily creased and tweedy. My mother wasn’t in the picture; it was her that had taken it, and perhaps this explained his pleased, rather goofy, smile. In most ways he looked exactly the same as I remember him, with his thick round glasses and high forehead and wispy brown hair, but he also – in a way it has taken me many years to put my finger on – looked entirely different. He looked, and I can think of no better or more exact way to put this, in place.
Of course, in one sense he was. He’d been born and bred in Toronto, the only son of a once well-to-do merchant family whose fortunes had steadily deteriorated as he’d grown up. There’d been enough left to put him through college, and then to start work on a post-graduate degree in history. I often imagine him tucked away in the carrel of the library, sifting through the records of trade exports and tariffs like some dusty, ink-fingered chronicler of an ebbing empire, pondering the roots of his family’s decline. It was during this period that his parents died – in a yachting accident of all things – the one last hazard of their disappearing wealth and gentility. It was also when he’d met my mother, who was working as a trainee in the college library.
But it was more than just him being on familiar ground. In that photograph there was something comfortable, confident, even slyly jaunty, about him – in the way he stood, how his arms were folded, the angle of his chin. And yet whenever I picture him in the swamp house or the cabin at Sitting Down Lake it’s as though he’s been stuffed into a frame that doesn’t quite fit. He’s forever trying, and mostly failing, to find some quiet, uncluttered corner to accommodate his long, gangly self. He looks like a shy and gentle spider, suddenly exposed, trying to scuttle into some new place of safety.
While he was inside I closed my eyes and let the wind blow on my face. I tried to picture all the places I’d go to if I could. I pictured corral islands and mountain ranges, jungles and deserts, I even tried to imagine looking out from the lighthouse in Lamar’s photo at the slate-blue and endless ocean, but try as I might the swamp kept creeping up to the edge of whatever landscape I conjured. And when I opened my eyes, there it was. The three-day blow hadn’t evaporated a molecule of it.
My room, crushed beneath the poplar, wasn’t the only one that had disappeared. There was another missing, although that had been missing for many years. After my mother died my father had dismantled the bathroom, taking down each panel of the insulation siding before removing it plank by plank, tile by tile, board by board. It wasn’t such a huge alteration. The room itself had only been added – as had my bedroom – as a kind of annex to the original building (there was already a small shower and toilet off the kitchen). Unlike the sculptures, he hadn’t thrown these boards and planks into the swamp and their remains lay over to the left of the lilac bushes. They were still visible there, although so heaped now with shed needles and leaves and dead branches they seemed to bulge above the earth like some ancient and mysterious mound or dolmen.
The interior of this bathroom has long since become obscure to me; it is murky and flecked in my memory, as though it was a berth in a shipwreck being entered by a diver. As for the door into it, well that is another matter. After my father had dismantled the room the door remained. It was almost directly opposite the front entrance and was one of the first things you saw when you came in. To this day, I don’t know if he ever sealed or nailed it shut. I never tried the handle to check. But I sometimes imagined the surprise of some visitor, opening it and finding themselves staring directly out at the woods and the swamp. Perhaps it was a good thing we didn’t have any visitors.
I remember the last time I saw it when it still led into a room. It would have been late in the winter, towards the middle of March, a month or so before ice-out. It was a school day. That morning our class had been taken down to the river where Mr Strum, under his occasional guise of outdoor safety instructor (otherwise we knew him best as the owner of the town’s gas station) spent at least half an hour walking up and down the bank, shoving his leg through the needling ice for our edification.
‘You see,’ he kept saying.
We all saw. And to make things even clearer he then launc
hed into his extensive, and well-aired, repertoire of drowned children stories. It often seemed a wonder to us after these lessons that any children from Crooked River had ever managed to grow up.
We’d reached the bridge near the town museum when someone let out a cry and began pointing across to the far bank. Mr Strum took his leg out of the river and looked over. We all did.
There it was, just to the edge of some frost-bent reeds: a duck. This duck had been frozen into the ice. The snow must have melted enough that week to reveal it. While its head, thankfully, was bent downwards and embedded out of sight below the surface of the ice, its tail feathers were sticking up above it, as though the freeze had caught it unawares as it surveyed the river’s bed. It must have been there since December. There was no telling whether it had been injured and unable to fly or if the ice – which had come suddenly that year – had indeed trapped it. We broke out into the usual children’s chorus; a mixture of giggles, sighs of muted sympathy, exclamations of curiosity, questions. Seeing no way to incorporate it into his lesson – which after all was about the ice’s treacherous fragility – Mr Strum simply observed ‘That’s one unlucky duck’ and ushered us quickly past it and further along the river bank.
Or most of us, at least. I lingered there for a good while longer, staring at the duck, long enough for Mr Strum to have to return and lead me back to join the rest of the class. I saw it then, as I have seen it since, as an ill and unfortunate omen.
By some twist of irony or cruelty or chance, we actually spent that afternoon in the library. We’d been meant to have some after-school reading event or other but the person meant to lead it never showed up and so we’d ended up just milling about the place. Mr McKinnon, my mother’s boss (it wasn’t one of the days she worked), had taken great pains to acknowledge our connection by taking me aside and pointing out various shelves of natural history books. He must have assumed I shared my mother’s interests.
There was one in particular that caught my attention, called ‘Creatures of Fancy’ or some such thing. It was about legendary animals and the real ones that had possibly inspired them. It worked mainly, as far as I can recall, by juxtaposition. So, for example, on one page it had a slightly comical illustration of sailors spying on mermaids and a man in a medieval smock selling a unicorn’s horn, while on the page opposite there were photographs of a manatee and a narwhal. I was still looking through this book when, eventually, my father arrived. He’d arranged to pick me up on his way back from the school.
There would, I suppose, have been an hour or so of daylight left, although the cloud had got progressively thicker during the day and it was already quite gloomy. We drove down the street flanked by mounds of snow that had, by this time of the year, grown into almost unfeasibly huge piles, as though the whole visible town had been dug out of it, like an ancient city excavated out of mud. This snow was depressingly pocked and dirty; a chimney-sweep’s face sort of snow – coated with salt and oil and exhaust smoke.
When we got back to the swamp house I went immediately to check on the two bird feeders my mother had set up near the edge of the swamp that winter. As the birds had slowly started to return she’d begun giving me a nickel for each new kind I spotted. I didn’t see any that day. I looked for about fifteen or so minutes before giving up and heading back to the house.
I was surprised to find my father sitting out on the boards of our unfinished deck. He gestured for me to join him and so I did. I must have asked him something but he didn’t reply. How long we sat there for I’m not sure. He kept staring at the deck.
‘I never finished it,’ he said eventually, running his hand along the boards.
That was the only thing I remember him saying before the ambulance and police car arrived minutes later.
As one of the officers led me away to his car (my father was waiting by the ambulance) I broke away from him and ran towards our front door. I must have reached it because I remember prising it open before he managed to grab hold of me. For a few seconds I stood on the threshold. The living room was as it always was: the table in the centre, the orangey brown Chesterfield beneath the window, the giant moose rack on the wall with its tines tapering away into strange creatures. On the far side of it the bathroom door was closed.
And that is all. It was no more than a few seconds before I was led away. And yet – and I don’t know if I felt it then, or if it was something I began to feel afterwards – as I stood there looking in I was sure that if it had been one second more I would have begun to feel ice beginning to form and harden around my neck.
My father couldn’t have been inside the house for more than about half an hour but it felt much longer. It was as if I’d been transported back to those long sad days I’d once felt I might never get out of. When eventually he did come out he was carrying a cribbage board, a rusty pancake griddle, and a musty old blanket with a picture of a sunrise woven into it, which was now so grimy with black mould spores it looked like after sunset. He placed these reverently on the ground beside the lilac bushes and sat down beside them.
‘Do you remember this?’ he asked, picking up the cribbage board. ‘Fifteen two and that’ll do. Fifteen four and then no more. Fifteen six and that’s a fix.’ I could feel the alarm beginning to rise up through my stomach and press queasily against my sternum. Of course I remembered the board. Of course I remembered the words. They were the rhymes my parents had used when they’d played. I didn’t say anything.
He was smiling in a crooked, slightly wide-eyed way, the way people do when they’re trying to assure you everything’s normal when it isn’t. And this wasn’t. My father and I didn’t talk about things like this. My mother had taken nostalgia away with her. She’d made it dangerous. It wasn’t something we allowed ourselves.
He patted the ground beside him and I sat uncomfortably down. ‘I don’t know if they even make these blankets anymore,’ he said, fingering the mouldy wool of the sunrise. He kept running his other hand through his thin hair. Strands of it were sticking up, as though alarmed by the sudden attention.
It was as if he was trying to pretend we’d discovered an old trunk in our family attic and were sorting fondly through its contents. Ah, look at this sweater. Do you remember wearing it? A wooden tennis racquet, a gramophone. Can you believe we used to use this stuff? I tried my best to play along. But just as my attempts to conjure deserts and jungles had failed earlier, so now did my ability to see what was in front of me any other way. It was what it was. We were sitting in front of a rusty pancake griddle and some old blanket and a board with one hundred and twenty holes in it.
What it was my father was seeing I have no idea. After about twenty minutes he jumped abruptly up and began throwing them into the swamp.
‘Fuck,’ he shouted, hurling in the cribbage board. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ he shouted and the blanket and pancake griddle were gone. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ he shouted and started pulling up the lilac bushes and throwing them. ‘Why did you bring me here? Where the fuck did you go?’ I’d never heard him swear before. I never would again.
Afterwards he knelt at the edge of the swamp.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
I couldn’t tell whether he was speaking to me or to the things he’d thrown or to my mother or to the water itself.
North by North-West
‘What do you think?’ Eva asked.
‘Where’d you get that?’
‘My uncle’s got loads of weird shit lying around.’
‘The bugs will eat you alive.’
‘Oh, Zachary Taylor,’ she said, putting on a southern accent and glancing big-eyed at me over her shoulder, ‘isn’t that just what a lady likes to hear.’
She was wearing a pith helmet and a pair of baggy beige shorts.
‘We better get going.’
‘Yes, sir!’ she said, saluting. ‘Time and leeches wait for no man, sir!’
I was beginning to wonder if it was such a good idea taking her.
On th
e way out we passed Lamar, who was by the banks of the creek hammering away at a wooden frame made with two-by-fours. The sun hadn’t even touched the horizon yet.
‘Another No Trespassing sign?’ I asked.
‘Don’t ask,’ Eva said.
The Oldsmobile was parked over by the far side of the cabin. I didn’t ask about that either.
‘It’s like Avalon,’ Eva said as we made our way along the shore.
I’d never imagined the lake that way but I could see how you could. The three-day blow had passed and it was as still and flat as I’d ever seen it. Out past our dock a solitary loon dipped smoothly below the surface and such was the silence and stillness I could hear the faint splash of its dive and see the ripples circling out into the bay. A mist hung over the water, snaking up in slow, hushed swirls and eddies. Eva was right. On a morning like this you could half believe in secret worlds and hidden borders, passages into other dimensions.
‘That’s the Toad,’ I said as we passed the rock at the end of the point.
‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Toad,’ she said.
When we arrived, the mist was still hanging over the shaded ground beneath Oskar’s place.
‘What’s with the tree house?’
‘It’s a Finnish thing,’ I said.
‘Holy shit, what’s with that?’ Eva said as we passed beneath the first bear skull.
‘It’s a Finnish thing.’
Hummingbird Page 9
