Providence Island

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Gregor Robinson. Providence Island

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Providence

GREGOR ROBINSON

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The next day, despite my protests, my aunt sent me out to St. Andrew’s United Church. St. Andrew’s-in-the-Fields, my father used to call it: the church was at least four miles back from the lake at crossroads in the middle of hay fields, a place called Merrick Centre. “Centre of what?” I used to ask. Even when I was a boy the other buildings of the hamlet had long since vanished; even the railway through Merrick Station, one concession road to the east, had been torn up.

I remembered driving this road with my parents the first summer we came to Merrick Bay and getting a flat tire in the middle of nowhere. My father couldn’t get the bolt off the wheel. The road was low and spongy, just above the muskeg it seemed to me, as though we would gradually sink into the earth if we didn’t get out of there, and by dusk no one would be any the wiser. The swamp water was black and I imagined alive with tiny creatures. We stood there in the hot sun, listening to the frogs, the drone of insects, diseased bubbles gurgling up from the swamp. Finally a car came, an ancient black Ford sedan with a sloping trunk. When the man and the boy got out, I saw that the floor of the car was rusted right through; you could see the dirt of the road below. The man said he had a wrench, but he couldn’t get the trunk open. So he yanked the back door and told the boy to get in and pull the rear seat forward. The seat wouldn’t move. The man started yelling at the boy. “Bust it! Go on! Keep pulling, boy! Bust the goddamn thing!” Finally the seat back gave way with a rip and the boy tumbled out of the car onto the ground. He was about my age. His neck was so dirty it was crosshatched with deep black lines like an old shoe.

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