‘I think it is. I’m pretty sure it is.’
She brushed some twigs out of her hair and took a long hard look at it.
‘It looks exactly the same as the last two beaver ponds we passed,’ she said.
‘What were you expecting,’ I said.
‘I don’t know. The name hardly gives much away!’
She was right. It wasn’t much to look at. It was barely bigger than a pond and had a single, stony island in its centre, and growing in the centre of this a single tree; a stunted, ragged-looking birch, hardly more than a shrub, that’d probably taken a thousand years to grow that big out of the three grains of dirt it had for its roots.
That was the last thing Eva said for a while. We searched the shoreline for about two hours and found nothing. I wasn’t even sure what exactly it was we were meant to be looking for. Old wreckage, luggage? Bones? I didn’t want to ask. We carried on this macabre beach-combing in silence.
Once we’d been around the entire shoreline Eva stopped and took off her pith helmet. She looked up at the sky and then around at the spindly spruces growing nearest us.
‘This is useless,’ she said.
I didn’t say anything.
‘Fucking useless,’ she said and then started wading into the lake. She’d got in up to her thighs, and the water had soaked her beige shorts, when she leaned over, reached down into the water with her arms, and began parting the lily-pads and their stems as if they were curtains. Her black bangs were wet. Her nose was almost touching the surface. I didn’t know what it was she wanted to see down there. I didn’t follow her. The water was murky and tea-bag dark, like it was beneath the drop-off.
And then she started diving. She dove and dove until I could see she was running out of strength and breath. Her wig had come off. It was floating amongst the lily pads like a dead animal. Her real hair was cropped so short you could see the pale, exposed skin of her scalp.
‘Hey,’ I shouted. ‘Why don’t you rest for a bit?’
She didn’t take any notice. Her head disappeared, resurfaced and then disappeared again.
‘Hey,’ I shouted, rolling up my pants and wading in up to my knees. The dark water sucked at the hairs on my shins. This time she resurfaced only a few feet away from me. She was breathing hard and her skin was a pale, sickly blue.
‘Why don’t you give it a break?’
‘Why don’t you fuck off,’ she spluttered.
The next time she resurfaced there was water trickling out of the corner of her mouth. The water was up to her waist and her shorts and shirt were clinging heavily to her body. She could barely keep standing.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘we can try again another…’
And then I stopped.
Whatever it was Eva was seeing and hearing in that moment it wasn’t me – or not exactly me. She was staring blurrily ahead and, seemingly, straight through me. Her head had begun to sway and tilt and her gaze was oddly quizzical and dilatory, like a bird in slow motion eyeing some distant trinket or bauble. For a few seconds her lips appeared poised on the precarious edge of speaking, like somebody who was very drunk trying to say something without slurring; as if the words were obstacles and her breath an intricate and half-forgotten path around them.
‘We can try…’ I began again.
She looked directly at me and then to my right and then up into the sky, as though she was trying to figure out where this voice was coming from, as though it was emanating weakly from another dimension – the whisper of a ghost; the mysterious knocking of a poltergeist. I was the shadow of a shadow. I was invisible. I wasn’t even there.
I remembered then where I had seen this expression before. And for a second it was as if the sun had dropped out of the sky and the clammy green light that once fell through the windows of the swamp house was now falling here too. Why didn’t she see me? Why didn’t she hear me?
‘Eva,’ I shouted with as much breath as I could fit in my lungs. ‘Eva, please!’
She went to dive under again. She only just had the strength to break the surface. But she seemed to find some extra when I reached over and tried to grab hold of her arm.
‘Eva,’ I shouted again.
She ripped her arm out of my grasp and then swung around and pushed me over. For a moment I floundered, shocked, the water lapping my chin, and then I pushed myself forward and grabbed hold of her waist. And then we were rolling around and around in the water. I caught glimpses of sky and leaf-litter and lily stems. I could see the island close to us, and its single lonely tree. And then it was just the murky, tea-black dark. I could taste the earthy rot of vegetation. We stopped rolling when I began throwing up the water I’d swallowed. It was Eva who hauled me ashore.
We’d ended up on the island. After I’d got my breath back, we sat down together between two small boulders. I leant against the one nearest me; its smooth granite surface had been cracked and fissured by the slow expansions and contractions of ice, by the transformations of water. We sat in silence for a long time. The sun was getting gradually lower. Eva had rubbed the side of her neck so much it was bleeding. Her cropped hair was matted with mud and pond weed.
‘What’ll we call it?’ I suddenly asked.
‘What are you talking about?’ Eva said. Her voice was softer now. She could see me.
‘We should give it a name.’
‘What?’
‘The lake.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. That’s just what you do – like with new ships and stuff like that.’
Eva looked at the water for a few minutes.
‘Let’s call it Hummingbird Lake,’ she said.
‘Why that?’ I asked, assuming she’d say because of the ones we’d seen in the Burn.
And then for the first time, and the last too, Eva told me the story of how she was orphaned.
She’d lived in Winnipeg back then, she told me, although she only vaguely remembered what it’d been like there. Her family’s house was close to the river, which you could see from the bottom of their back yard. It had a long porch, hung here and there with blankets that her mother made, with landscapes knitted into them, mostly lakes at sunrise and sunset. She remembered a loon silhouetted against a perfectly round yellow sun. Her father worked as a printer for the newspaper and came home each day smelling of ink. His fingernails were always slightly black, however many times he washed them.
Her best friend was Alfred Christianson, a boy with one leg slightly shorter than the other. He had a shoe with a block of wood nailed onto the heel.
She knew her grandparents – who’d died before she was born – had lived somewhere over to the east. She knew her uncle still lived there. But she didn’t know the name of the place. She only really knew it as ‘there’ – from her father’s repeated use of the phrase ‘The best thing I ever did was get out of there.’
Every year they went on a holiday with Lamar, who by then had lots of money but no family of his own. He’d plan these holidays months and months in advance. He’d think about them all through the fall and winter. Her father would often get off the phone in November and say things like, ‘Lamar says we should keep July free. And do we like lobster.’ They went to the Rockies, they went to British Columbia. They went to Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia.
The first time they went to Crooked River as a family it was to go on a special trip Lamar had arranged for them. It was supposed to be something to make ‘there’ okay to come back to. They’d driven for eight hours, watching the edge of the prairie become the shield. Eva had sat on the back seat and fallen asleep counting trees. If you stay awake you might see a moose, her mother told her. But it was a long time to keep looking, even for a moose.
The Hummingbird was a float plane. It was used to take fishermen and hunters up to outpost cabins on lakes that were too remote to get to any other way. The Spillers were booked in for a week at a place whose name Eva couldn’t remember, only that the pilot, who had a bushy red moustache a
nd a baseball hat that said ‘Ducks Unlimited’, had told her it was a lake with sandy beaches and trout the size of her father’s leg. ‘In fact,’ he’d added with a wink, ‘some of them are pretty much the same size as you.’
He was showing them the plane. ‘The make’s a Beaver,’ he told them, ‘so I sort of changed her name – you know, to something that actually flies.’
On the door there was a small sticker of a hummingbird. It looked more like an insect than a bird.
‘If you say so,’ Eva’s father said.
They were due to leave the next morning, weather permitting.
That night Eva dreamt of a huge trout pulling her into the water. Under the surface there was a giant insect with a proboscis as long as a swordfish’s bill.
‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ it told her.
‘It’s cold down here,’ Eva replied.
‘It’s always cold down here,’ it said.
When she couldn’t get back to sleep and went to get a glass of milk the floorboards creaked and her mother’s voice came sleepily from behind a closed door.
‘Just count to a hundred and if it’s light by then you can get up,’ she said.
It was what she told her when she got up too early on Christmas morning. But that wasn’t the same as this. She didn’t want the morning to come at all. She didn’t want to go on the plane. She didn’t want to go on the trip. She wanted to go straight back to Winnipeg and play street hockey with Alfred (which she always won), or operation (which she didn’t mind losing).
But the morning did come. And worse – it was a fine, still morning, with the sun as perfect and yellow as one of the ones on her mother’s blankets.
‘You better get your butt in gear,’ her father said while Eva dawdled over a bowl of Cheerios. ‘Those trout aren’t going to catch themselves.’ She tried dawdling some more, lifting her spoon listlessly to her mouth, letting its contents drip back into the bowl.
The pilot was already waiting for them by the dock when they arrived. He was weighing some of their supplies before loading them onto the plane.
‘Hop on,’ he said smiling, pointing down at the scales. ‘You must be an eighty pounder, at least.’
‘I’m not a fish,’ Eva replied moodily.
‘Whoa there, partner. Never said you were.’
‘I’m not a cowboy either.’
The pilot lifted his eyebrows and went back to weighing the supplies.
Lamar had arranged it so his brother and his family would go on first and have a few hours to settle themselves in before he joined them. He waited at one end of the dock while Eva and her parents waited at the other. Her mother had tied a blue ribbon in her hair, to stop it blowing into her face when they were flying.
‘Honey, I’m pretty sure they close the windows when they’re flying,’ her father had said.
‘No harm wearing it just in case,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to miss out on the view.’
‘Think how far you’ll be able to see from up there,’ Eva’s father said to her, pointing up into the cruelly blue sky.
She was beginning to feel like she might puke.
‘Ladies first,’ said the pilot.
Eva wasn’t sure what exactly happened next. Some things stood out clear enough – her father trying to lift her into the plane, her legs kicking out, her lungs with no breath in them, her mother saying, ‘Don’t worry honey, she can come later, with Lamar’ – but the rest was just random detail: her father’s hand on her upper arm, the ink-blackened cuticles of his fingers standing out against the whiteness of her skin; the blue ribbon tying back her mother’s hair; the pilot’s red moustache; the print of the duck’s head on his hat. And even these were all jumbled, forever shifting and re-settling in her memory like crystals in a kalaidoscope. So occasionally when she remembered it, it was the pilot’s cuticles that had the ink on them and it was her father who had his hair tied back with the blue ribbon; or it was her father who was wearing the duck hat and the pilot was wearing the ribbon. Sometimes her mother had a red moustache.
Then it became a scene. Her watching from the dock; an undulating line of trees at the edge of the calm water; the plane’s engine spluttering as it taxied along the lake; its engine warming slowly up, growing louder and steadier; the burst of sudden speed and noise; the final departing kiss of the floats on the still water. And then the Hummingbird was arcing around the far shore, circling back to tip a wing at her before receding beyond the line of trees, the wake from the take-off slapping against the tyres nailed to the side of the dock, the waves getting smaller, the sound getting fainter.
Then it was just waiting; watching the same horizon from the dock – for one hour, for two hours, for three. And on the fourth Lamar appearing beside her, his hands shaking, his eyes looking in disbelief at the same horizon, as though it were not meant to be there, and then leading her into a small office where moose heads peered down at her and huge trout and pike stared past her with glazed eyes, offering the faint but clear premonition that she’d been dragged abruptly out of one element and would have to learn quickly how to live in another one. And then Lamar banging his head on the wall until his forehead bled and a woman from the office leading her outside saying, ‘Something bad has happened honey, something terrible has happened.’
Eva picked up a stone and flung it through the branches of the little birch into the lake.
‘I should have been on it,’ she said bitterly. ‘I was a coward.’
‘You were only a kid,’ I said. ‘You were lucky you weren’t on it.’
‘That’s what everyone told me,’ she said. ‘And that’s what everyone who knows about it still tells me – and if they don’t say it then that’s what they’re thinking: she’s the lucky one. But most of the time I don’t feel lucky. And sometimes I do stuff, as a kind of test, to see if I am.’
She picked up another rock and threw it.
‘Because sometimes I wish I had been on it, you know. Sometimes I have these thoughts and I can’t bear it that I wasn’t.’
I didn’t know what to say. I looked at the circles expanding outwards from the spot where the rock had landed, moving slowly towards the lonely shore. There was no way of knowing if this was the place or not, no way at all. But for the first time I think I started to understand why she wanted it to be. And I began to wish then that she could have found something, anything at all.
On the way back we hardly spoke. The light was failing and around us in the bush were those sounds of twigs snapping that move your heart and feet a bit faster. This time Eva was more careful. I saw her break some branches and stop now and again to look around.
When we got back she climbed up onto the ridge overlooking the prison site and the creek. In the failing light you could barely make out the remains of the wall or the stove or anything else. The creek no longer appeared as if it could lead anywhere.
‘At least Gunther made it,’ she said.
She sounded glad, as glad as if he’d actually existed.
Diving For Bones
The next day, instead of my father, it was me sitting disconsolately in the shade of the Toad. I felt as though the heavy, inky dark of the drop-off was inside me. All around the air was full of the smell of sweet gale and cedar and the delicate rain-drop scent of fresh poplar leaves, but to me it all smelt like the ashes of the Burn. I couldn’t help thinking about Eva and the look she’d had just before we started wrestling in the water – as though I weren’t in the same world that she was seeing, not at all. It had been same with my father at the swamp house. No matter how close you were to someone, close enough to wrestle with them even, they could be in another place entirely. And you wouldn’t ever know where and what that place was, or what you appeared like to them there – if you were apparent to them at all. And when they were in that place there might not be anything you could do, except wonder if there was something.
Eventually, I saw Oskar approaching along the trail. He had a shuffling maybe of a wa
lk, like Chaplin playing shy. He sat down beside me, leaning his back on the Toad. I was glad he was okay but was so sunk in my misery I could barely say hello.
‘Quite some catch the other day,’ he said.
It’d been dark when we’d gotten back and I hadn’t put the leeches in the pit beneath his cabin, which he called his cellar.
‘I forgot.’
‘You know, I never knew leeches got that big,’ he said and I realised he was talking about Eva.
He took his baseball cap off, ran his hand down the back of his head, and then scrunched his eyes up against the glitter on the water as if it were a bag of spilt needles.
‘You want to play some crib?’ he asked.
Inside his cabin it was cramped and gloomy. An oil lamp sat extinguished on the card table. There were old newspapers taped over the single window, leftover from the winter, and above my head the teeth of some ancient metal traps grinned down from the cross-beams. In the far corner, beside a metal frame bed heaped with coarse, woollen Hudson’s Bay blankets, was a pile of unsold muskrat hides. The whole place smelt of a mixture of fish scales and wood smoke and soot from the ugly black barrel stove that squatted in the corner opposite the bed. There was also a musky, sulphurous odour – a combination of rotten eggs and off meat, with a slight chemical reek underlying it – that must have come from the tanning solvents he’d used on the hides. The sweet gale and cedar seemed a long way away. In here it was as if the day itself had been skinned and tanned and turned inside out.
I tottered a few inches to the right as I approached the card table. The slant of the floor made it like the deck of a listing ship – it took a while to get your legs.
Oskar set our pegs in the holes he’d drilled into the table and began dealing.
‘I’m sorry,’ I blurted. ‘I should’ve asked if I could take her. I wanted to show her where the prison was.’
Oskar finished dealing and cut the deck to see which one of us got the first crib.
‘She likes old places and ruins. Or she likes taking pictures of them anyway.’
Hummingbird Page 11
