Читать книгу Barefoot at the Lake - Bruce Fogle - Страница 6

Sometimes, even when you’re little, you know when life is perfect. You just know. The sun woke me up early and it dazzled off the white clapboard siding on the back of the cottage. It was so clear and it was so bright it almost hurt just to keep my eyes open. Warm rain overnight had left the grass heavy with wet and the black soil in the vegetable patch near the gravelled road steamed.

It was my second week at the lake and so far it only rained at night. I walked round to the front of the cottage. The lake looked like an enormous puddle of mercury and it gave such a pure reflection of the cloudless morning sky and the forested shore on the far side I couldn’t tell up from down. When the water looked like that I knew that nothing would happen. Fish wouldn’t bite. Ducks wouldn’t fly. Only dragonflies enjoyed that nothingness. I wasn’t surprised my uncle was there, motionless in a lawn chair only yards from the shoreline facing the lake. He was always looking out at the lake. Sometimes he’d sit there in his pyjamas all day until my mother would tell him to get dressed. This time I wondered whether my uncle had died during the night and I was the only one to know.

I didn’t move. For a long time I just stared, watching to see if he was breathing but somehow he knew I was there.

‘I’ve been looking down towards the bridge. It’s too far to see now but when cars had their lights on earlier, they looked like tiny fireflies slowly gliding across the water.’

He paused and again we were both silent. That wasn’t unusual. Sometimes Uncle Reub let his silences stretch out and I didn’t mind that.

‘What do you think of this morning?’ Uncle eventually asked but I didn’t answer. I knew what I thought. I knew a lot but I didn’t always talk about it.

‘I’m going to frog bog,’ I finally said, not as an answer but as a fact.

‘With Robert?’

I never did anything with my big brother. If we played together we ended up fighting. We had the same parents and lived in the same house but that was the extent of our shared togetherness.

‘Just me.’

We both looked down the lake, me straining to see a car crossing the bridge, then to my surprise my uncle said, ‘May I come along?’

Uncle Reub didn’t do much at the cottage. He didn’t swim, or even put his feet in the lake. He certainly didn’t take walks on his own like my mother did. He didn’t seem to care much about his clothes. During the first week at the cottage he wore city trousers held up by braces, over a white shirt. Now that it was hotter and more sultry during the day he wore a white undershirt. This morning he was in trousers but still wearing his pyjama top. He always wore black leather city shoes, usually with white socks. To me, my uncle seemed separate from other adults. He listened to me and I was pleased with that attention. I said, ‘Yes.’

Frog bog was part of the dead forest, the part that lay in the lake. I thought there once must have been a great battle with an evil spirit that lurked in the depths of the lake and that the trees gave up their lives and drowned themselves to save their friends in the living forest. Maybe it was just a shooting star that had fallen on them. Most of the trees were cedars but there were willow trees too. I knew that because, out of all that death, some of the fallen trunks had green shoots emerging from them and on those shoots were magical new willow leaves. Each year the muddle of fallen branches and trunks seemed to get more complicated. They sank deeper into the bog, nestling in each other’s arms. This is where I came to catch tadpoles and frogs, painted turtles and water snakes.

Uncle Reub sometimes told me stories when we were alone together but today we walked in a mutual solitude, across the dew-damp lawn, up to the gravelled road that ran behind the cottages. My bare feet were already tough. I never wore shoes when we lived at the cottage, except when my family took me to a restaurant or to a movie in town. Shoes were for city boys. Even on the hottest days, when tar melted on the road to Bridgenorth, I only ever experienced a satisfying warmth in my bare feet that made me feel I was connected to the land, that I understood it, that it was part of me.

We walked up the point, past silent cottages where not a single curtain was yet drawn. In the fluorescent yellow light of early morning, all the cottages looked and smelled as if they were freshly painted. They probably were. I was only a boy but I understood how proud the cottagers were of their summer homes. Each garden was perfection, lush green lawns, pink granite stone and concrete pathways from the gravel road to the cottage door, petunias and begonias in a constellation of marshalled perfection. It was as if the cottagers challenged the wild around them, that they vied with each other to be the best at taming the surrounding forest.

Passing Dr Sweeting’s clapboard grey cottage, a dog barked and a wiry brown mink darted from the stand of white pines the cottage nestled in and across our path. I was glad Angus wasn’t with us. He would have killed that mink. We walked on in a complicated silence until the road and the cottages ended and the woods began.

‘Is this your secret place?’ Uncle Reub asked.

I thought that was a childish question but I didn’t say so. It wasn’t a secret. Everyone knew where the living woods and the dead forest were.

‘It’s the woods,’ I answered.

We followed a track that all the children on Long Point and Cedar Bay had made, through the maple and birch trees, down to the lake. ‘That’s frog bog,’ I told my uncle, pointing to the shambles of tree trunks, branches, weeds and reeds that lined that deep and hidden bay on Lake Chemong.

Uncle walked to the edge of a bank of sweetgrass and looked out over the stillness. I sometimes did that too. In its quiet and calm that scene, that view of the rushes and reeds and the forested far shore of the lake and the turquoise sky, that picture, even to me as a young boy, was perfection. I looked at my uncle standing there, as still as a totem pole, and for a moment I thought he might suddenly march forward right through that sweetgrass into the sparkling still water – without taking off his shoes or rolling up his trousers – that he might forge a path through the pickerel weed and water lilies then let them close together behind him. But he didn’t.

‘I didn’t know there was sweetgrass here. I bet muskrats think this is paradise.’

‘I’m going over there,’ I replied.

I walked along the straight trunk of one fallen cedar tree and then another out into the marsh, to an open pool of clear water. Along the southerly shoreline of the bog, bulrushes were all standing to attention, their tops like thin little bearskin hats on skinny green soldiers. The water lilies were all shut tight. They wouldn’t expose their hearts until the sun was much higher. Later in the summer, if all of July was hot and humid, the water in the pond would get covered in bright green algae but now, in early July, it was crystal clear and you could see absolutely everything in it. Streamlined silvery minnows were easy to see but if you looked harder there were tiny, long slender dragonfly larvae that looked like they’d got baby leaves stuck to their tails. At the edges of the pond that’s where the tadpoles were.

Uncle walked slowly along the same fallen tree trunks. I thought he looked quite ridiculous, with his arms straight out to keep his balance, like Christ on the cross, I thought. He reached where I was and joined me where I was kneeling on a stump looking into the water.

‘Is it interesting, what you’re looking at?’

I knew my uncle couldn’t see what I saw. Grace and Perry, Steve’s younger brother, could but grown-ups couldn’t. Giant water bugs were stabbing the tadpoles to death. It was scary to watch and I didn’t like it but also I did like it and always watched.

All that my uncle saw were iridescent green dragonflies, like phosphorescent toothpicks, hovering over the pond, and on the water, long-legged water striders skating gracefully over the surface, never sinking.

‘Are you wondering how those insects can walk on water?’ my uncle asked.

Other grown-ups never knew what was in my mind but my uncle sometimes did. I really wanted to know why the water bugs were so mean to the tadpoles but I’d also wondered why water striders didn’t sink when they stopped skating.

‘They’re lighter than water so they don’t sink.’

I thought for a moment.

‘But ducks are heavy and they don’t sink either,’ I said, not so much as a question but as a fact.

‘You’re right. Good thinking. What ducks do is they trap air in their feathers. The trapped air makes a duck lighter than water and that’s why a duck doesn’t sink. I really should have explained it better. Water striders do the same as ducks. They trap air on their legs just like ducks trap air in their feathers. Shall we catch one and see?’

On his knees on the log, balancing himself with one hand, Uncle Reub reached down to the water, trying to grab a water strider and show me its legs. As he leaned out over the pond his glasses case, in the breast pocket of his pyjama top, slid out and plopped into the water. It sank almost immediately, just like the Titanic I thought, raising its stern to the sky before dying. Uncle pulled himself upright and rested on his knees. It was easy to see his glasses case, shiny and silvery, nestling in the black leaves and guck a few feet away at the bottom of frog bog, but I could see the concerned look in my uncle’s eyes.

‘I’ve got my shoes on. Can you go in and get it?’ Uncle asked.

‘No,’ I replied, not because I couldn’t but because I didn’t want to get into frog bog.

Uncle Reub paused for a while then said, ‘OK then. Let’s see if we can fish it out.’

He walked back along the logs, this time faster, with his arms more like you’d expect from a grown-up, over to a willow tree and took a knife from his pocket. Grown-up men all carried penknives in their pockets. My father’s penknife, in his pants’ pocket whether he was in trousers in the city or shorts at the cottage, was made from brown tortoiseshell and had two blades that my dad kept razor sharp with a small pumice stone. Black electrical tape kept the tortoiseshell from falling off. My uncle’s knife was completely different. It was a small single blade, thicker than a penknife, three inches long with a horn handle. The blade was in a soft tan leather sheath covered in white and red and black beads. I thought it was the most wonderful knife I had seen.

With that knife, Uncle Reub cut two green branches from near the trunk of a willow so that both were the same thickness and each had two fingers at their ends.

‘When I practised general medicine in Mandan, North Dakota, a good friend of mine showed me how to do this. What we’ll do is get the ends of these branches under each side of the case. They’ll act like two forks and we’ll slowly lift it up and out of the water.’

Uncle and I walked back along the tree trunks. First we acted as a team, with me pushing one branch under one side of the metal case and my uncle doing the same with the other, but each time we tried to raise the glasses case the branches bent too much and the case slid back into the black leaves and stirred up the guck at the bottom of the pond. Or my uncle and I couldn’t coordinate what we were doing and the glasses case slipped back to its murky home. Uncle tried using both branches himself but with no success, and now the water was so murky it was almost impossible to see where the glasses case was. I wanted to give up and go home. When I was young I found that easiest to do. My uncle knelt on the tree trunk. He was a small man and sometimes reminded me of Humpty Dumpty but now he looked even smaller and I felt sorry for him.

‘Are you sure you can’t get it for me?’ Uncle Reub asked.

I felt embarrassed. I was in my bathing suit. I loved the lake. There was nothing better in the whole summer than floating in hot sunshine buoyed up by the warmth and the strength of a truck or car tyre’s inner tube. But getting into the bog was scary. I didn’t mind the goo on the bottom. In fact I liked the squishy feel. I didn’t mind the frogs or painted turtles either and the water snakes always hid when Grace or Perry got into the bog, but there were snapping turtles in there too and the year before I was bitten when I caught one. It was horrible. I was carrying it back to show Grace and hadn’t noticed that the snapping turtle’s head had slowly emerged and turned upside down over its back. At the instant I saw this the snapper crushed its jaws into my forefinger. It didn’t let go until I put it back in the bog and it swam off.

I never talked about that. I certainly wouldn’t have told other adults but Uncle Reub was different so I said, ‘I’m frightened of the snapping turtles.’

‘They are frightening. You’re very sensible. Now I’ve got these sticks and I’ve got my knife, and Edgar, my friend in Mandan, taught me how to throw it. I can knock the right eye out of a rattlesnake at ten paces with this knife so if you get in there, I promise, nothing will come near you. You’re safe with me.’

The sun was higher. It was almost nine o’clock and I felt its warmth heat my bare back. With my uncle’s assurance I slid off the log until my feet felt the mushy bottom of the bog. The water was colder than I expected and came to the top of my bathing suit. My shoulders lifted and I squeezed my arms against my sides.

‘You don’t even have to look at what you’re doing. We’re a team,’ Uncle said. ‘Now, open your fingers and bend your body over to your right.’

I obeyed. In slow motion I leaned over to my right, reaching down towards the bottom of the bog until my whole arm and shoulder were in the water. I didn’t like what I was doing but I said nothing.

‘Over a bit more. Now forward. Keep your fingers open. Down. There. Can you feel it?’

I could. I grasped the case, together with some leaves as black as coal, and, still not smiling, raised it all out of the water and handed everything to my uncle, who opened the case and emptied it of water. I hoped there’d be a tadpole in it, stabbed to death by a water bug, but there wasn’t. Now, standing up, I felt warmer, and quite satisfied with myself. I actually felt like going for a swim but I climbed out of the pond, onto the log and with my uncle walked back to the shore.

Before we left the woods for home, Uncle cut a handful of sweetgrass with his knife.

‘The next time your father makes a barbecue, let’s put this on the embers,’ he said.

‘Will it make the hamburgers taste better?’ I asked and my uncle replied, ‘Better than that. The incense from this sweetgrass will relieve us all of our weariness. And yes, the meat will taste better too.’

We walked back through the trees and just before the gravel road and cottages on Long Point became visible, Uncle Reub said once more, ‘Hold on for a moment.’

Again he took his knife out of its beaded sheath and deftly cut two bands of bark off one of the surrounding birch trees. ‘When we get back we’ll soak these in water. I’ll show you how to make an unsinkable birchbark canoe.’

By the time we got back to the cottage, my family was already having breakfast. ‘Where’d you go?’ Robert asked me.

‘Nowhere,’ I answered.

‘What were you two doing this morning?’ my mother asked Uncle Reub.

‘Not much,’ replied her brother.

‘You’re not going to tell us anything?’ Mum asked.

‘Brucie and I were discussing the meaning of life,’ Uncle Reub answered.

I smiled inside me. I loved that we had a shared secret. We finished our breakfast all together, white toast, butter tarts and milk.