Читать книгу When Fenelon Falls - Dorothy Ellen Palmer - Страница 14

I know it’s merely Scottish superstition that a bad beginning seldom makes a good ending, but I often wonder if all the late and unappreciated arrivals in the early days of that summer added up to something so heavy that they pushed time out of joint, if we somehow jinxed the whole damn thing. Better late then never? Now there’s a proverb never uttered by a March.

As we came over the Rosedale Bridge and pulled off the highway on to March Road, the crunch of new gravel under Tessie’s tires announced the first thing we’d missed: the Rock Concert. That’s what the uncles had taken to calling the laying of fresh gravel on our winding road from the highway into March. By dictum of the Arrival Protocol, it got refreshed each summer at the crack of dawn on the first Saturday. We look like this: Hezzy – you’ll meet him in a minute – shows up with a load of gravel from Fenelon rock-’n’-rolling around in the flatbed of his ancient truck Bessie B. The uncles debate the division of the bill and pay him for it. Hezzy drives slowly with Bessie’s crib open. All male Marches bigger than a shovel display their shirtless manhood, flinging gravel as if the swamp were gaining on them. The scrunch of stone, the scrape of metal shovels on metal bed, the bellowing of Bessie B, all makes for some decidedly discordant music. Dad played backup shovel and he’d left his band shorthanded.

So when we landed in Rosedale that Saturday the 28th of June, we weren’t in Toronto anymore, but only Grandma was over the rainbow to see us. The rest of March, who probably liked Ms. Garland well enough but saw no reason why her death should change anything, had marched as ordered on Friday. They stood primly at attention beside budding red roses, glaring at our rusty brown Ford and radiating indignation. We’d better have a darn good reason. When they judged it, and us, inadequate yet again, they eyed Tessie’s overflowing trunk tied half shut with binder twine. Tessie, named after Bessie, didn’t know she wasn’t a truck and obliged MC by hauling a rig’s worth of cottage accoutrements. Knowing it would take us all day to unpack alone, knowing that the Arrival Protocol dictates that a March always helps a March settle in, they asked themselves if they owed that courtesy to a Johnny-Come-Lately March? Hmm … Maybe not. Grandma hugged Jordan and kissed her ear. Aunt Elsbeth, who had boys but no girls, smiled at her and lifted a box or two until Uncle Gavin hollered at his wife to go back to their place to get him a beer. As uncles drifted off, they each had to remind Dad that he’d missed the Rock Concert. Dad’s name got nicked by gravel that day; Uncles called him several versions of Lazy Bum, with commiserating eye rolls in the direction of the whip cracking in the kitchen.

One might expect forgiveness. One might even assume that spending all summer, every summer, cheek to jowl with every living member of March would produce a strong sense of clan, of identity and belonging. Good ones. Logical but wrong. Proximity is not intimacy. We drove north to face thirty-odd Marches with whom we shared little more than a last name, all shoehorned into our Group of Seven cottages, so many cousins we didn’t know what to do. And we’d just done the one thing March could not forgive: we’d snubbed tradition. Again.

It goes way back. My grandparents came to Balsam Lake in 1921, before my dad, the baby, was even born. The local Anglican parish couldn’t afford a year-round minister, but in summer, their ranks swelled with the owners of catamarans, they could. They offered my schoolteacher-minister grandfather a summer job on the condition that he accept in payment what was then worse-than-worthless: seven acres of undeveloped Kawartha lakefront. Hezzy’s father, the farmer who offered it, had no use for it. It had no road, much of it was swamp, and he’d lost too many calves, some to snappers and some to the misguided bovine belief that their kind could swim across the bay and live to tell the tale. Grandpa quickly accepted.

He spent a decade burning bush and building March One, painting it in English Countryside like his church, snow white with forest-green trim. He planted the same cedar seedlings and English primroses around both, hardy and red. He put in a gravel road and spent a summer up to his neck in warm water, lugging much bigger rocks into a crib for his dock. The very day he mortared the last rock in the rustic stand-up fireplace, legend has it, he stood up, keeled over and died. Grandma’s cottage had been hers alone for forty years. High on a promontory that jutted into the bay, surveying the lake from three angles and her vast Victory garden from the fourth, she had the coldest well and the best breeze.

And the rest of us? It was an era of romantic wood-burnt names, of letters blackened into slabs of heavily varnished yellow pine, sliced like thick bananas, still sporting bark: ‘Kawartha Hideaway,’ ‘Rose of Rosedale,’ ‘Cozy-cat Cottage.’ More signs than I could count stole Fenelon’s nickname and proclaimed themselves ‘The Jewel of the Kawarthas.’ March disdained signs; we named by number or, as Jordan put it, only halfway joking, by rank.

Second in command, stationed just down the hill from Grandma, sat Aunt May’s March Two, built like a mini Eiffel Tower, an exact but scaled-down replica of March One. Technically our great-aunt, Grandpa’s sister and therefore Dad’s aunt, Aunt May crossed the pond during the war to avoid the bombs. In double disappointment, not only did she fail to go back across the pond in time to get hit by one, she never returned at all. When Dad asked Jordan why she wouldn’t call her ‘Great-Aunt May,’ Jordan looked him dead on and answered smooth as Brylcreem, ‘But, Dad! The Reverend Southwell says a lie can imperil your immortal soul!’

In the fifties, Grandma’s five children, now with their own growing families, planted their roses and their white-and-green cottages in birthright pecking order, all identically replicating the curve of the bay. From out in Grandma’s canoe, we looked like teeth with spinach trim.

March Three was the only custom-designed cottage, home to cousins Grayden, Cranston Jr., Gavin Jr., Dexter and, of course, Derwood. Dad’s only sister, Aunt Elsbeth, had ‘married well’ by ‘snagging’ Uncle Gavin, who made a fortune in post-war construction. I had visions of a big cartoon hook like the one that drags Snagglepuss offstage. Jordan laughed and quoted Mom: A rich man’s wooing need seldom be a long one. She said the real hook was Grayden’s birthdate. That Uncle Gavin had been a war buddy of Uncle Howie. That Uncle H felt sorry for his pal when he had nowhere else to go one Christmas, so Uncle H brought him home for turkey and his sister. Uncle G had been so grateful to marry into March that he became one. His last name wasn’t his anyway. At ten, he’d been sent over from Wales to some farmer out in Belleville who’d used him as a hired hand and a punching bag, stashed him in the barn and beat him senseless on a nightly basis for no other reason than because he could. Uncle G flatly refused to give his kids ‘that bloody bastard’s last name.’ So, presto, everyone in March was one.

In March Four, Uncle Percy and Aunt Evelyn had custom-made triple and quadruple bunk beds: the triple in the boys’ room, the quad in the girls’ – that’s seven cousins and the first set of twins: Trent and Severn. Uncle Sloan and Aunt Penny in March Five had six cousins and the second set of twins, both named after Uncle Sloan’s best war buddy: Alexander and Alexandra. The cottagette, March Six, had no cousins. It sat back on the road into Rosedale, empty except on weekends, reserved for Uncle Howie and insert name of current squeeze here.

Is this too much Marching for you? That’s exactly how Jordan and I felt. At least you don’t have to keep them all straight. Just know that there were litters and litters of them, all hanging with their sharp, genetic claws on the edges of our ‘Almost’ lives.

That’s us, Almost March Seven, clinging literally and figuratively to the edge of March. Each summer, as MC walked in the door to survey what havoc wintering mice and raccoons had wrought, she sighed and said the same thing: ‘Home is home, though it were never so homely.’ A fitting saying for a squat pine box on cinder blocks squashed against a swamp. Almost had a view of duckweed. Almost had bedrooms the size of beds, a single couch in the picture window, a dining table touching the back of said couch and a kitchen you couldn’t swing a cat in. But Dad could quite rightly and did frequently respond, ‘Yes, a poor thing but mine own.’ He’d built it all and had the film footage to prove it, of the framing, the wiring and the plumbing. He’d bricked the chimney and lived to film the flames.

Far from a haven, at best our cluster of cottages offered us a separate peace. That’s Jordan’s second favourite book, A Separate Peace, so I had to get it in at least once. And March was separate for certain, fanned around the bay a stone’s throw from the lake and each other, hemmed in on one side by Peace’s swamp, which separated our land from Hezzy’s farm, and on the other by the water’s edge that curved south from Grandma’s, ran down the canal, past the trailer park at Lock 35 and into Cameron Lake. More than tourists but not quite locals, caught betwixt and between, we didn’t live on the land, but neither could we see or hear Highway 35 as it tore past Yogi’s cage in the tourist section of Rosedale. With a foot in each camp, you’re traitor to both. There’s no place like Almost.

But Almost didn’t get its diminutive from being separate, smaller or shabbier. Dad had not married well. When he introduced Mom to Aunt May, thinking to break the ice, he proudly asked if Mom didn’t look just like Della Street, you know, the TV star from Perry Mason. Aunt May, who nursed a none-too-secret spite for all things Scottish, replied, ‘That aging sweater girl with the big cow eyes who has to type for a living because she can’t get a ring on her finger? Why yes, Tommy, I do see the resemblance. It’s almost as plain as the nose on her face.’

They married anyway. In 1951. There must have been a grace period – not one I remember, but I’ve seen the footage. Mom in a bikini and flip-flops, her curls swept up in a movie star head scarf. The uncles raising our roof. Mom planting lipstick kisses on a new washing machine. All of March on our lawn toasting the successful installation of our space heater, each with a beverage of choice in hand. Jordan’s there with a bottle dangling. Incontestable cinematic evidence that Almost began its life in white and green as March Seven. It even had the requisitely prim roses. But a new broom sweeps clean, and in 1964, my mother grabbed one. Legend has it she got out of the car, grabbed a shovel, dug up Grandpa’s roses and planted petunias before she even unpacked. She made Dad cut down the ancient hedge of lakeside cedars. She bought a second dog; nobody had two. Even if her second one was cast-iron and nailed over the door. It was still a Scottish terrier, known in March as a Rat Dog, a rat snarling bold white letters: ‘Caroline’s Clan.’ To March it read ‘Keep Out.’ So they did.

Intent on further mutiny, Mom drove herself into Fenelon, filled her trunk with leftover poorly mixed paint from Canadian Tire and handed Dad a brush. Grey paint. Pink trim. Aunts pursed their lips. Uncles came over and told him to straighten up and fly right. They yelled, drunk and sober, insisting he paint it back. They offered to paint it back. They offered him good money to do so. When it became clear who wore the pants that held the wallet that paid the painter, they demoted our cottage, and our dad, to Almost.

That was 1964. Yogi’s first summer. I was ten, Jordan nine. The separate pieces summer. For reasons I didn’t understand until I read Jordan’s diary, my parents had not wintered well and only my father managed to knock himself more or less back together. It took a frenzy of hammer and nail, a frantic effort to please Mom or to avoid her, God only knows. She spent most of that summer in her room; he worked alone and at night. It must have been odd without his brothers. Ordinarily, when someone proposed the building of anything in March, uncles discussed it, scrapped drunken plans and drew sober ones, got them approved – not by the township, but by Grandma – then built it together. That summer, none of them would have agreed to help had he asked, because everything my father built in 1964 amounted to one thing: a kick in the teeth.

It started with the dock. Low to the water, a mere yard wide, it gave a good swift boot nonetheless. No one had their own dock. We used Grandma’s; Grandpa built it. Enough said. Dad said it was for Jordan, to make it easier for her to get into the water, but nobody believed that for a nanosecond. We all saw Mom slip into the waves at odd hours, now without having to walk past all those blooming roses. Her reason for digging up ours? ‘March fecundity! Give them an inch and they’ll plant a baby every mile! Time they got a bite of their own bridle.’

That explained everything. So Dad kept hammering.

He built an addition, not on the back where the uncles had obligingly put theirs, but at the side, a choice even more affronting than a dock. It made Almost bigger across its face than all of them, even March One. He built out to the swamp, so close he couldn’t walk around it. He fell in trying. He waded out of the ooze and chased Jordan over the front lawn roaring like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. In the end, he had to frame the room square on the front lawn and tow it over rollers into place with Bessie B. He jacked the room on cinder blocks, glued it to the cottage and cut an adjoining door with his chainsaw. Mom cowered, clutching her ears, as the invading blade carved through the wall where the Welsh dresser had been. Despite Mom’s protests, Dad let Jordan cut the last inch, his big hands over hers.

If March allowed my father the illusion that the paint, the dock and the addition were his ideas, we all knew the final kick at the clan – the deck – was pure Mom. A deck like those of the rest of March would, normally and logically, have faced the bay, good for dinner at sunset and the moon at night. But then March could see us eating. They could see what we ate. Could see us chew. ‘And that,’ said my 1964 mother, ‘went beyond the pale.’ So our, read her, deck got built on the far side, out of sight, cantilevered out from the addition over the swamp, like a nature walkway in Wye Marsh or Presqu’ile Bay. It stuck out like a sore foot. When snapping turtles caught their dinner, we saw fronds thrashing. Dinner died screaming. Truth be told, there were twenty-plenty dead things out there, and they didn’t all die naturally.

Whatever other religious beliefs my father may have had, after his duckweed baptism of 1964, he clearly believed that from swamp we are born and unto swamp we shall return. He decided to help his God along, hurry him up a bit in the Firmament Department, so he made land for himself, from scratch, from litter, from any and everything he could find, terraforming long before Star Trek. If historians ever need proof of how the Depression marked my parents’ generation, Almost is sitting on it. Simply put, there is no such thing as garbage. There is only landfill. Like offspring, it comes in two varieties: yours and not yours.

Anything ours, as in any item given to or paid for by my parents, endured a circuitous journey to its landfill destiny. No item ever deviated from this itinerary. It went from the store to the main floor of 26 Delma Drive, Toronto 14, Ontario. Once chipped, scratched or stained, it retired to the basement. If the rec room already held a similar item, the cheaper of the two got sent to the cottage. Note: not the older, more worn or broken – the cheaper. Even when something became unarguably unusable – defeathered archery arrows, a clock on permanent midnight – if the parents had paid ‘good money’ for it, it didn’t qualify as landfill. That took years, possibly decades. That hibachi with a hole in it might be just the ticket someday. You never know when you might need an empty croquet rack or an empty crib. You can move it near its eventual grave, but you can’t bury it. Treasures on their last legs got propped up in the pump house. No room? Make room. Only when the obligatory death watch had fully elapsed, only when Dad and MC regretfully released each other from the sacred duty to attempt an item’s salvation, then and only then did my parents inter it or, perhaps more fittingly, grab it by the throat and drown it in duckweed.

The other kind of landfill, any offspringings not ours, as in anything not purchased by or for my parents, any item regardless of condition, quality or cost that someone else had paid their good money for and was subsequently fool enough to discard at curbside or into a public dumpster, those castoffs – praise the Lord and pass the ammunition – became landfill immediately. We tossed better stuff into the swamp than we used in the cottage.

So the swamp got filled with the expected trash, paint cans, tires and rusty lawn chairs, but also with the unexpected. Uncles were forever skulking over in the dead of night, when they thought no one was watching, to let fly some secretive personal refuse. In daylight, in reverse Conspicuous Consumption, they competed to chuck the most the most often. The undisputable winner, Uncle G, had contributed a cracked fibreglass canoe, two couches and a dead ride-’em lawnmower. Dad, intent on outcrapping them all, asked the existential questions: When junk is scarce and time is fleeting, why not take a truck and wander forth? Why not boldly go where no garbage picker has gone before? Carpe detritus!

And where do you find the best detritus to carpe? Dad circled one day on his calendar: Victoria County’s Big Garbage Day. He borrowed Hezzy’s truck, loaded up the uncles with a two-four of Carling Red Cap barley refreshment, and flew into Fenelon like a Bizarro Santa collecting presents: washers, dryers, freezers, fridges, couches. Ho, ho, ho, but no joke. In ’67, Centennial Year, he snagged the Big One, the find he boasted about the way fishermen brag about the one that got away. His catch wasn’t a muskie, but he did stuff it. Twenty double-wide red leather seats from a wrecked school bus, stuffed in the swamp.

Remember that crackpot artist in the nineties who wrapped a shoreline in pink cellophane to represent the intrusion of mass production on the environment? Dad’s Centennial project had him beat by thirty-some years. Let’s call his 1967 installation When Chaos Meets Cottage or So You Think Life’s a Movie? For personal reasons, not the least of which is my undying love of the Muppets, I want to call it It’s Not Easy Being Seen, but enough said. As Dad’s personal outdoor theatre, the name that stuck was The Rosedale Roxy, but no matter how many movies he made, not one premiered there. Imagine raspberry-red seats pitched randomly off the deck like a giant set of Pick-up Sticks. They land helter skelter in a lime-green swamp: end to end, perpendicular, vertical, facing each other or face down. With no hope of a movie, the Rosedale Roxy immediately began its decent into obscurity. For a time it had patrons. Sunning snakes and turtles congratulated each other on finding such soft leather logs. Confident frogs leapt from one colossal red lily pad to another, and we got the scathingly brilliant idea to do likewise.

Unfortunately for us, but perhaps fortunately for the planet, Darwin’s theories can’t be accelerated by pubescent desire. Compared to frogs, we humans lose every time. We have little of their accuracy, none of their agility and weigh, what, a few thousand times more? Did that stop us? What do you think? In that uniquely teenage blend of stubborn, hopeful arrogance, we practised Olympic thishful winking. We kept jumping and, as it should have, the planet laughed at us. So did my father. His jumping films jump themselves, his usually steady hand bumping with laughter. He offered strategies, directed moves, even drew us a hopping map, showing how he thought it might be done. ‘Don’t show your mother!’ He’d cheer us on until he heard her coming. We never told her, but for reasons obvious, stilettos on a wooden deck are like a machine gun – you heard her aiming for you every time. Leaving us the courtesy to be reamed out in private, Dad would film a few more seconds, snap his lens cap and vamoose.

Our amphibian aspirations were likewise short-lived. While we might pretend to be frogs, the seats refused to be lily pads. They met our far-from-graceful landings with lurching indignation. They chortled, they tipped us into the big green swim. There’s no quicker cure for pride than the suck of swamp slime in your shoes. We should have known better. Renaming fools no one, especially not the renamed. Ask Yogi. Ask Jordan. Those bus seats asserted their identity, registered a protest, and then like all things consigned to a swamp, they sank.

But spite floats. And apparently it winters well. It was late Saturday night by the time MC finally signed us off as being officially unpacked as per Arrival Protocol. We’d heard cousin laughter for over an hour – the first summer game of hide-and-seek. Never planned or discussed, at twilight we all simply materialized before the big cedar at March One. Last to appear was It. Uncles joined in. Jordan and the aunts watched from kitchen windows doing dishes, because bad legs and ill wives should stay home. For me, missing hide-and-seek was bad enough, but now the Saturday bonfire was well underway, and to miss both was treason.

Every Saturday night, and I do mean since 1921, March held a bonfire, a ceremonial burning of bush to mark the further wresting of habitable land away from the maw of godless wilderness. Attendance compulsory. All the Whos down in Marchville, the large and the small, metaphorically joined hands. My father, no doubt grudging every cubic inch that went up smoke instead of down in swamp, smiled his lips shut. But Mom wouldn’t play the Make Nice game. She who may have once looked like Della pouted a Grinchy pout. Legend has it that she once tottered into the bush clinging to Dad’s arm, announced that the slime was ruining her shoes and made him take her back. Her heart did not grow three sizes that day or any other. She issued standing orders that light supper makes long life, and forbade us to touch the Who Feast of toasted marshmallows and swampwater. No, of course we didn’t drink swamp. It’s a hybrid concoction of double sugar: half root beer, half orange Freshie. Once Mom pulled the addition curtains, Auntie E always passed us a cup and Dad always filmed us drinking it.

So whether it was an apology, another broom, or a thumbed nose saying I-can-be-as-late-as-I-bloody-well-want-thank-you-very-much, when MC broke her own protocol that first Saturday night, produced see-through snap-on boots in the shape of high heels and tugged them over hers, we just stared. She unfolded the impossibly small see-through emergency raincoat she kept in her purse, put it over her pink silk ensemble, got out to the fire under her own steam and sat down on a dirty overturned stump. No one spoke. Not word one. Until Uncle G pointed a smoking marshmallow stick in Jordan’s direction and casually asked, ‘So, Caroline, you all settled in? You and your little Almost family?’

‘Enough said, Gavin.’ Grandma shot back, ‘Jordan became a March, just as you did. At least she didn’t have to pay for it.’

I imagine even Grandma never saw the irony in that statement until it was far too late. But I repeat: we should have known better. We were sitting in a swamp. A swamp with rules – how March is that? We all knew what belonged there, and who didn’t. Mom stood up.

‘I’m sorry, Caroline … ’ Grandma started, but she didn’t know how to finish it.