BAREFOOT
at the
LAKE
A Boyhood Summer in Cottage Country
BRUCE FOGLE
Vancouver/Berkeley
Copyright © 2015 by Bruce Fogle
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Greystone Books Ltd.
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-77164-155-5 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-77164-156-2 (epub)
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West
The lyrics for “Lover, Come Back to Me” on page 198: Words by Oscar Hammerstein II. Music by Sigmund Romberg Copyright © 1927 by Harms, Inc. Copyright renewed. The Oscar Hammerstein II interest assigned to Bambalina Music Publishing Co. (administered by Williamson Music) for the extended renewal copyright term in the USA. International Copyright secured. All rights reserved.
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
THE HERON
One day when Grace and I were crayfish hunting on the shore of the lake, we found a dead heron under a mighty elm tree.
‘How do you think it died?' I asked.
‘Of a broken heart,’ Grace replied.
‘That’s not true. Shall we bury it?’
Grace had short hair that looked like it had been cut any old how, not cut like her sister Glory’s. Glory’s hair always looked like the coloured pictures in my mother’s Chatelaine magazine. More girly. Grace had shiny brown hair and legs as straight as poplars. Her knees were chapped like a boy’s. Grace’s nose was neat and her face flat, and although she wasn’t exquisitely beautiful like I thought her mother was, I thought she was quite pretty. Everyone has his or her own smell and Grace had hers. Like summer by the lake, she smelled of grass and gasoline.
*
‘I want some feathers,’ Grace answered.
She straightened out the dead bird’s wings and they were wider than her father was tall. She grabbed several long grey wing feathers and pulled on them. They came away easily, all attached to bits of skin and flesh.
‘Wash them off in the water,’ I said.
‘Stupid!’ she replied and with her fingers she separated the feathers and left them in a row on a rock, each one with sinew and skin hanging from it.
‘How should we bury her?’ she asked.
‘How do you know it’s a girl?’ I replied.
‘You’re so dumb! Boy birds can’t be that beautiful. She’s a girl.’
We walked back through the shallows to my cottage to get a trowel and spade to dig a grave for the bird, and returned the easier way, by rowboat. Now that we were both ten years old, if we wore our life jackets Grace and I were allowed to go out alone in it. Canoes tip easy but it’s hard to tip a flat-bottomed rowboat. The first week at the lake we went out together almost every day.
You never keep anything in boats but there were always two life jackets, a flashlight and a bailing can in the rowboat. I untied it from the dock. Other girls at the lake always held onto both gunwales when they got in. Grace just stepped right into it. Grace was strong and rowed like a boy, not a girl. One pull of her arms and the rowboat glided fast over the lake, the bow making a little splash each time she took another pull on the oars. Whenever I was in the rowboat with Grace, she always rowed. She just did, without asking. When I was in the rowboat with my uncle, he always asked me to row.
Sometimes when we were out together Grace would stop rowing. We liked to see how and where the wind took us. Once she said, ‘Let’s lie down so no one can see us.’ We did, with our feet touching each other under the rowing seat.
‘Do you think they’ll think we’ve fallen overboard and drowned?’ I asked.
‘It doesn’t matter what they think,’ Grace answered.
Grace continued rowing, then stopped.
‘I need to see where I’m going,’ Grace said, talking to herself, not to me, and pulling on one oar and pushing on the other. The rowboat smoothly spun around. Now pushing on the oars instead of pulling on them, we continued along the shoreline, stern first, Grace looking for where we had left the dead heron. I didn’t mind. It was languid and peaceful rowing that way. I turned around too and we both watched as some cattle grazing in the long steep pasture leading down to the water’s edge found their way through the maze of cedar trees that lined the shore and drank the clear water.
When we returned to the dead bird, I tied the rowboat’s bowline around the trunk of a cedar. By the time I had finished Grace had already picked up the heron, as heavy as one of Mrs Nichols’ big old egg-laying hens, and carried its body onto the meadow grass.
‘You dig and I’ll prepare her body,’ she instructed me.
I usually did what Grace told me to do. I couldn’t dig in my bare feet with the spade, so with the trowel I’d got from the tool house I cut into the grass making a square, then I used the spade to lift the grass all the way around the square. I’d seen my father do that with a spade when he was making the vegetable patch on the cottage lawn up by the gravel road.
Grace prepared the heron. After taking some more feathers, she squeezed the wings against the bird’s body and rolled it in the grass to make a neat bundle. She tried to bend the legs but she couldn’t.
‘Dig deeper,’ she told me, after she inspected the grave and silently, without complaining, I did. Digging was easy. The black earth was as soft as cashmere. It was easier than digging through sand on the beach to find clay.
When the grave was deep enough to satisfy Grace, she placed the dead heron in it, but no matter how she tried she couldn’t get its feet in. I tried to bend them but I couldn’t either.
‘We’ll have to break them,’ Grace said.
‘No!’ I answered. ‘If you break them she won’t be able to fly in heaven.’
‘That doesn’t matter. She won’t be good at flying anyways ’cause I’ve taken her feathers,’ Grace replied.
‘You shouldn’t have,’ I answered. ‘You give them back. They’re not yours. They’re the bird’s.’
‘No. I’m going to make an Indian headdress from them, to wear in my hair. How do you think the Indians get the feathers they wear at the powwow?’
‘That’s different. Give it back its feathers!’ I thundered.
Grace was surprised by my sternness, so she did, laying the feathers she had just plucked, and all the other feathers that were lying on a rock on the shore, on top of the heron’s body in its grave.
‘Good,’ I said and with the trowel I cut the grass in a long thin line around the heron’s extended legs, lifted the grass and set it aside then dug out the earth below