Читать книгу Providence Island - Gregor Robinson - Страница 7

| Chapter 2 |

“Ray Carrier, you’re back!” said Mrs. Ault. And you still smoke.”

“Only at weddings and funerals,” I said.

“And between meals.”

I handed her my cash — strangely coloured Canadian bills. She took my money from the counter and handed me my cigarettes. My father used to say that Mrs. Ault was the Greek chorus of Merrick Bay.

Merrick Bay was the village at the bottom of the swampy inlet that serviced the resort community of Bellisle out on the point. Bellisle was attached to the mainland by a narrow causeway. There was a clubhouse, the golf course, an aging resort hotel, immense summer houses, and the green islands to the west. Those farthest out had expansive views down the lake. They had names like Greatview, Westwind, The Pines, Blackwood Island, Providence Island.

“Are you alone?” asked Mrs. Ault.

They knew of my failed first marriage and they appeared to know, in Merrick Bay, that I was with Katie.

“We were sorry to hear about your father,” said Mrs. Ault. “What could have come over him, walking out into the lake, a cold day like that?”

She pulled her fleece jacket tighter around her, even though outside the sun was shining. In less than two weeks, the May long weekend would mark the start of the summer season for the businesses of Merrick Bay. It was what they waited for all winter.

“I can’t imagine,” I said.

“That stupid boat,” said Mrs. Ault, answering her own question, “that’s what.” She paused to hear if I would say more, then asked, “You’ll be staying up at the house?”

The car I had picked up at the airport was ill-suited to the roads of Merrick Bay. Every winter they grew worse, cracked and buckled by the weather, and every spring the municipality repaired them as best they could. Now they were a patchwork of colours and textures. But with the rise in property values and new development, attention was being paid to what the government called “northern regional infrastructure.”

After J.D. Miller drowned and the Millers began their withdrawal from Bellisle, speculators and land developers started filling in the swamp at the mouth of Sucker Creek. Over the years, they moved farther along the creek until the Ministry of Natural Resources finally put a stop to the destruction of what they had started to call wetlands rather than swamp. Where Phil Havelock and I used to set minnow traps in the bulrushes there were now big yellow bulldozers parked on mud flats. Farther back from the creek, there were a couple of new streets of small, concrete-block houses with squat air-conditioning units beside the front doors. The people who lived in these houses commuted to Iron Falls where an auto parts company had built a plant.

When we first came to Merrick Bay, my father would take me to the Government Wharf or up to one of the outcrops behind the house, where granite broke through the thin soil, to look for the Northern Lights. In August the sky would be ablaze with shooting stars — invisible at home, in the city’s electric buzz. We would gaze over the line of the forests, the low hills rising in the distance. You could go north from here without meeting another soul, my father said. No lights, few roads, nothing but the dark forest and shambling beasts, the trickle of water into nameless lakes and muskeg, the sighing of the trees. Eventually the stunted pines, tundra, snow, and ice, the cold black water of Hudson Bay, and the Arctic Ocean.

“We are standing at the very edge of the North,” my father would say. “The last wilderness.”

A century earlier, when the Havelocks and the Applewoods and the other settlers who had received acreage under the Free Grant Lands Act — while they were clearing and trying to farm the hopeless land — rich families from the south were already buying the islands, distant green forests in the lake. Mr. Havelock would tell us how, as a boy, he would accompany his own father as he walked twenty miles with grain on his back to be ground to flour at Iron Mills. At the same time, a few miles away, steamers loaded with materials and equipment that had come by rail from the south were unloading along the shore and on the islands, for the building of elaborate summer cottages, designed by the likes of E.J. Lennox, or McKim, Mead, and White from New York City. People used to take the train to the foot of the lakes then a steamer up to their cottages. By 1910 the Millers had their own steam yacht, Hiawatha, at Providence Island. It had been built in Glasgow, disassembled, and shipped out in parts.

My father’s house was over half a mile from the lake. It had been remote until the highway went through. The place had been one of the original settlers’ farmsteads, but aspen, hawthorn, sumac, and birch had long since reclaimed the fields; even the tops of some slender white pines had started to appear above the new green forest. People from the city were always surprised: why come to Merrick Bay and not have a house on the lake? But my father said that we could see the lake from the attic windows, and if you wanted to, you could always take the yellow canoe and paddle down the creek to the lake. Paddle your own canoe. A rule to live by. Although he was himself afraid of the water and took to a boat of any kind with trepidation. The real reason he had bought a house away from the lake: to him, it didn’t make much difference.

My father had acquired the house at Merrick Bay in an estate sale through one of his partners. We didn’t use it much at first, perhaps a week of holidays and a few weekends. My mother refused to stay there alone during the week; she had always been nervous, and she said that she didn’t know anyone there — that we were part of neither Merrick Bay nor the summer community. After she died, my father decided I should spend more time at the lake. He invited my mother’s elder sister, Aunt Beth, to spend the summers with us there. Someone had told him this would be good for me. He once went so far as to take an extra week of holidays himself, but he spent most of his time reading the papers on the porch, tending the garden, and fiddling with the radio, trying to get the opera.

When the house came into view, I saw my aunt standing on the front verandah. She and the house were both smaller than I remembered. She wore one of her generic flowered dresses and a faded blue cardigan. A few strands of white hair blew across her face in the breeze. She was waiting. No doubt Mrs. Ault had already phoned. I parked the car by the weathered posts that marked the edge of the vegetable garden, now overgrown, and carried my suitcase up the front steps. The smell of the poplar trees carried me back.

Aunt Beth gave me a peck on the cheek. “You’re in the front room upstairs.”

I said I’d be fine with my old bedroom at the back, on the ground floor. (I used to be able to sneak out the window onto the back porch.)

“We always put guests in the front rooms,” Aunt Beth said. She turned to open the door for me. She was in her mid-eighties, almost fifteen years older than my father, but she still moved quickly. She was short and getting shorter, and she walked with a slight stoop. “I’ve made some good thick soup. You go up and wash your hands.”

I recognized the creaking in the floorboards as I carried my suitcase up the stairs, and the smell of Aunt Beth’s bathroom soap — Yardley’s Lavender. In the guest room there was a pair of pictures in matching silver frames on the bureau: my mother and father, myself as a boy.

After my mother died, my father hired a housekeeper, Mrs. Ireland, who worked half days, two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. He also took me out of the public school I’d been attending and sent me to St. Jerome’s. He had the idea that they took their teaching more seriously in the Catholic schools — they did it because it was a vocation, he said, and not for the pensions and the long summer holidays — and he liked the discipline. But the main reason I was sent to St. Jerome’s was that the school days were longer there. They kept you busy after class: in the fall, soccer and football; in the winter, hockey and basketball; and in the spring, track, tennis, and baseball. With the exception of hockey — St. Jerome’s regularly lost players to Junior A — the priests didn’t take sports too seriously, which was just as well for me. I was weak at hockey and football, and took to tennis by default; I had a backhand, could run down any ball, and they let me play indoors year-round. There were other activities — drama, art, chess, the lit club — so that by the time I stepped through the front door at home it was often close to six o’clock, and dark.

Mrs. Ireland would make dinner before she left for the day; there were always casseroles and meats in the refrigerator. At seven, my father would come home. He would drink two whiskies, read the evening paper, and then call me downstairs for dinner.

We would sit in the panelled dining room, under the pale light of the chandelier, my father’s cutlery clattering against the china. He chewed his melba toast with noisy vigour. It was a relief to both of us when I excused myself to clear the dishes. After dinner my father read in the upstairs den. In the years following my mother’s death he read the whole of Dickens and Scott.

On Fridays or Saturdays he was often out for dinner, sometimes almost the whole weekend. He had woman friends about whom he was pathologically discreet. When I went away to college, he began a long-term relationship with an Englishwoman, a Mrs. Harris. My aunt had told me that whenever Mrs. Harris was in Toronto she would stay at our house. My aunt did not see this in a romantic light. She said that Mrs. Harris was a freeloader.

My father would likely have married Mrs. Harris had she not insisted on living in the country, though nowhere near Merrick Bay; she had in mind something more genteel: horse country. They saw each other several times a year but, by that time, in an ironic turn of events, my father was living in the country with another elderly woman.

On the bureaus of the guest room, I noticed a photograph of my father and J.D. Miller on the front steps of the Bellisle Golf and Yacht Club, J.D. wearing tweed plus fours, his arm around my father. My father was not one for hugging. None of the Carriers are. To the left is the fender of J.D.’s antique Packard limousine. And to the right, standing behind J.D., Mrs. Applewood in her nurse’s skirt, a dark raincoat over top, her hands crossed in front.

When I was a boy, my father used to tell me — admonish me, really — that I was overly impressed by money. “Always have been,” he would say. But it wasn’t just money; it was the ease and possibilities that money provided, the prospect of a glittering history, and a world that I imagined as lush and green. On Providence Island there were always guests and activities — tennis, golf, sailing, elaborate preparations for a party or for a dance at the Bellisle Club across the channel. At our house there were only old books and greasy playing cards and board games — Scrabble, Monopoly, Clue — jigsaw puzzles with pieces missing, musty old copies of Country Life, and Dorothy L. Sayers paperbacks with blotchy yellowing pages.

Over lunch, my aunt and I spoke about the arrangements for the funeral.

“Saint Andrew’s United,” she said. “You should go out there and talk to the minister.”

As far as I knew, my father hadn’t been to church in years, not since my mother died.

“But I am a member of the church,” said Aunt Beth. “And your father used to come with me. From time to time, at any rate.”

“He wouldn’t have wanted a church service,” I said.

“We always have funerals at churches,” said Aunt Beth. “It doesn’t matter what you believe — funerals are part of a person’s spiritual life, the departure of the soul. Birth, marriage, death — all part of the life of the community. The hotel kindly offered to host the reception. They also offered to open some of the rooms early, for visitors from out of town.”

“How many are you expecting? Surely there won’t be many?”

She frowned. “We’ll try to put up as many of the guests as possible at peoples’ houses. I think it’s so much nicer to stay in someone’s home rather than in a hotel, don’t you? Especially the Merrick Bay Hotel?”

“Wasn’t it a boy from the hotel who helped him back from the lake?”

“It was,” said Aunt Beth. “Who knows how long your father would have stood there in the water otherwise? A mystery to me what he was doing. He’d not been behaving oddly lately, nothing like that. Perhaps a little vague sometimes — I put that down to deafness. Eyes like a hawk but couldn’t hear a thing. Deafness runs on his mother’s side. I suppose you didn’t know about that —” she looked at me pointedly “— about your father going deaf, I mean, living — where is it — Idaho? I don’t see why a person would want to live in Idaho. Anyway, he was fine earlier that morning. Just fine.”

“Could he have been trying to drown himself?”

“In Merrick Bay? At eleven o’clock in the morning? In a foot of water? Anyway, your father wasn’t the type.”

The truth was that we were both a little afraid that my father might have thought of suicide. No one was the type until they did it. Looking back, I would describe him as melancholic.

“What about the boat?” I asked. “Was it really that old green rowboat from the island?”

“So they say. The boy from the hotel said that your father wanted to set the thing on fire. Why don’t you go have a look? They’ve taken it up to the marina. Philip Havelock wanted to burn the thing, too, but somebody said no. It belongs to the Millers, after all. Besides, the police might want to look at it.”

“The police?” It was the boat from which old Mr. Miller fell and drowned more than twenty years before.

“That awful summer,” said Aunt Beth. “You remember, the Applewoods … that girl, Marjorie …” She paused, looking at me as though considering whether to say more, then turned and gazed out the window, a plate in each hand. The skin on her arms was like parchment.

“Did Marjorie ever get away to university?” I asked. This brought her out of her trance.

“Does anyone from around here?” said Aunt Beth.

“The brother went to the art college,” I said.

But he was a famous exception. In places like Merrick Bay and Iron Falls, the larger town fifteen miles down the highway, school was generally seen in those days as an impediment to the world of work and adulthood, rather than as a means of entry into it. Even the girls, who were brainier, and who were expected to continue in school because there was nothing else for them to do except get into trouble at places like the Rexall Soda Fountain and the Shalomar Tavern, even they were discouraged from any path that might take them too far from the community. The people of Merrick Bay hated airs — people being too big for their britches.

“I remember,” Aunt Beth said, “one time at the store hearing Charmaine Ault tell her mother she thought she might like to go away to school, like Marjorie Applewood was planning to. You remember Marjorie wanted to become a high school English teacher, perhaps even a doctor. ‘Fine for Marjorie Applewood, but you better learn typing first,’ Mrs. Ault said to Charmaine. ‘A girl who knows how to type will never be without a job. Bookkeeping, too. We could use some bookkeeping around here.’”

She paused for a moment. “Actually, I think Marjorie did go to teachers’ college, somewhere down east.”

“You said in your letter the Millers were selling the island,” I said. She had also told me that some of the Millers were supposed to be coming up later, after the funeral, I reminded her.

“I suppose that means you’ll be staying on, does it?” she asked sharply.

I was not a son of Merrick Bay. The Carriers were outsiders. And although neither were we one of the old families that made up the community at Bellisle, I always liked to see myself as one of the summer people. Aspired, perhaps. I didn’t have Aunt Beth’s contempt for them.

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.

When we were on our way again, I asked my parents why those people were dressed like that, about the way they smelled, and what was wrong with them.

“They’re just poor,” my father said.

I was to meet the minister at two o’clock. My father had been dead five days, the funeral was in three days, the out-of-town people were starting to arrive, and yet arrangements were still being made. In Merrick Bay, as in many small towns, funerals were not even held in the winter; the bodies were stored in a vault at the undertaker’s until the ground thawed and the graves could be dug.

We had no family plot, but my aunt was hoping we could put my father out there near the church, anyway. This proved impossible.

“You’ll have to get a place at Iron Falls,” said the minister. His name was Reverend Hamm. We stood outside because the church would be cold inside — they only fired up the stove on Sundays. And the weather was warm for May, almost like summer, but without the white light or the settled dust everywhere. The fields were the luminous summer yellow-green of my dreams.

“The graveyard here has been closed for sixty years,” the minister said, pointing. “Filled with pioneers. Have a look if you like. Not the actual graves of course, everything’s been moved around.”

The tombstones, about fifty of them altogether, had been assembled into ragged rows inside a rusty fence. I saw the names: Reed, Merrick, Havelock, Alpenvord, Dixon, Macdonald, Mackenzie, MacNab. Some of the oldest stones were the graves of children.

“Do you remember some story — something they found in the swamp?” I asked.

“The swamp? When?”

“Twenty, twenty-five years ago maybe.” For some reason, I pretended to be vague.

“Before my time, I’m afraid. Only came up here up ten years ago. I’m from the east, you see,” said Reverend Hamm. “Nova Scotia.”

We went over the order of service, the readings, some possible hymns, and then he was off; he was responsible for three of these country churches now, he said — the congregations were all in decline, people dying and moving away, what could you expect — and there was a lot of road to cover, terrible roads at that.

Before leaving, I walked around the church. The mortar between the bricks was pocked with holes, and from the open windows you could smell mildew and dampness, the odour of rotting wood.

Before my mother died, my father used to suggest we attend church once or twice a summer. “For tribal reasons,” he would say. “Before Union, (he meant the union of the Methodist and Presbyterian Churches) this building was Presbyterian.”

It would seem strange to be sitting in church, warm air wafting across the pews from the open windows, and, outside, the buzz of the cicadas. The minister liked to speak to us of something that he called the power of alternative imagining. Four miles away people with gin and tonics would be lounging on the docks by their boathouses. I loved the smell of suntan lotion.

On the way back from the church to my aunt’s house, I passed the Applewoods’ farm. The built-up banks of Sucker Creek had collapsed and shallow water covered the fields. The roof of the barn had collapsed, too; the house was grey and sagging and the windows were boarded up. It was from one of those windows that I had first set eyes on Quentin Miller.

The stone pump house still stood, as solid as a gravestone, in a grove of weeping willows by the creek.