‘The good Lord made you then he took you away. Ahem,’ I said.
‘Ahem,’ Grace said, then added, ‘I want to go for a swim.’
We rowed back to my cottage. Young children like us couldn’t go swimming unless there were older children or an adult swimming or watching. Uncle Reub couldn’t swim but he was sitting on a deck chair looking out at the lake and my mum said that it was only important that he was an adult. She said if we got in trouble he could yell for help louder than we could. The water was still cold and I didn’t want to get my shoulders wet. I floated on my inner tube and my back felt as warm as an oven.
OPENING UP THE COTTAGE
There were no locks on the cottage doors. When my father built our summer home, he made three small bedrooms, an indoor toilet and bath, and everything else big – the kitchen, the combined living and dining room. Picture windows overlooked the lake, twenty feet away. It hadn’t entered his mind he’d ever need locks. This was in 1949, when I was five years old, and it wasn’t Toronto, it was the Kawartha Lakes a hundred miles northeast of the city, where the last strip of cultivatable farmland collided with unending primordial forest. The few farmers who tried to work this boulder-strewn land went to church on Sundays, grew their own food and, from the way the wife of the nearest farmer Mrs Nichols dressed, made their own clothing. You don’t need locks when these are your neighbours.
Each year, when school finished in June, the summer people – my parents, their friends and their children – invaded Long Point on Lake Chemong. Just as abruptly they left the lake, and the locals, at the end of August and returned to where they lived the rest of the year. Some to Toronto, others to Peterborough, the local market town seven miles away.
My father, a man with a natural majesty and a deficiency of words, made his first serious spring visit to the cottage in early April, to see what damage winter had brought. In April 1954, when my mother was in Montreal with my brother, Robert, and there was no one to look after me, Dad took me and Uncle Reub with him. Angus too. Angus was a small black dog. He had bad breath but I didn’t mind that. Dogs are totally honest with you and you can be completely honest with them. More than you can with people. Bad breath didn’t matter.
Except along the shoreline where we collected water for cooking, ice still covered the lake. It was too early to risk refilling the drained plumbing, there might be another frost, so we carried our drinking water in thermos bottles and used a plot amongst the trees for our toilet. Angus drank from the lake and peed where he wanted. At night it was so cold the only way I could get out of bed in the morning was by wrapping a comforter around me.
That first morning, in the living room, I found Uncle Reub by the south-facing window, already up and dressed. I watched unnoticed as my small uncle gently lifted a fly, stunned into a stupor by the night-time freeze, and moved it into the warm rays of the morning sun bursting through the window. I joined him and we both watched in silence as the warm heat revived its soul and brought it to life again.
The cottage was properly opened when we moved to the lake at the end of June. That year Uncle Reub came with us. Angus and I ran from the car straight to the front of the cottage. Angus wanted to see if there were dead fish to roll on. I wanted to see what the lake was doing and to count how many different birds I could see on the land and on the water. There was always at least one dark, long-necked cormorant by the shore and sometimes further out on the lake a compact flock of green-winged teals. Robins busied themselves in the grass searching for earthworms, or in the trees calling to me to cheerily cheerily cheer-up cheer-up. Robins were city birds. I was more interested in the eye-catching country birds, bright orange and black Baltimore orioles, egg-yolk yellow goldfinches that I called wild canaries, belted kingfishers on willow branches overhanging the lake, red-headed woodpeckers battering their beaks in the white pines and especially my favourite but most elusive bird, the fiery red cardinal. All of those birds might live in Toronto but I never saw them there. I knew I’d see them at the cottage. Everything at the lake – the bugs, the birds, the animals, the smells, the weather, the waves, even the people – was more exciting. Angus disappeared. He’d come back when he was hungry or wanted me to rub his belly. I knew that, as old as he was, he was off hunting. He loved the lake.
Rob and I used the wheelbarrow to clear the shoreline. Dad told us to. He never said much to either of us, to anyone for that matter, but on that first day at the cottage when so much had to be done he gave us short, simple instructions. Although Dad wasn’t much of a talker, Mum’s extrovert nature made up for his lack of gregariousness. Dad was a doer and my older brother and I, as young as we were, both knew that physically he could do anything.
Fifty years later, at my father’s funeral, after his casket had been lowered into the rich, dark soil below the hard frost line and we’d all taken turns, using his own cottage spade, shovelling frozen clods of earth onto it, Steve, my brother’s best friend at the lake, asked us what it was like to have had a father who didn’t say much.
‘When we lived at the lake I wished my father looked like yours,’ Steve said. ‘Whatever he was doing, sawing wood, repairing the raft, just fishing, he was always so dignified, so handsome, so strong. I thought he was Clark Gable. But I never knew who he was. I never managed to get more than a few syllables out of him. Did he ever talk to you two?’
‘No,’ my brother and I answered in unison.
‘He wasn’t someone to talk about your feelings with,’ I added. ‘I had my mother or my Uncle Reub for that. Talking with my dad wasn’t important. What was important was I knew that if he had to, he could kick the living shit out of anybody else’s dad.’
‘That’s right,’ my brother nodded.
On the shoreline there was driftwood, whitening in the sun, a tangled mess of early seaweed, and even though the fishing season didn’t open until the first of July there was a painted, wooden fishing lure nestled in the weeds, its rusty hooks the same colour as decomposing vegetation. We watched shoals of minnows dart this way and that in the shallows then it was our job to remove the oiled tarpaulin from the canoe, raised off the ground over winter on two sawhorses, and clean the spiders’ webs, leaves, larvae and pupae from inside it. I saved the pupae to unwrap and inspect later. I was good at saving the best for the last. To my ten-year-old mind the pupae were miniature Egyptian mummies, prepared by hosts of never-seen slave insects.
Rob and I did the same with the rowboat and while we were allowed to carry the canoe into the lake, our father had Mum help him turn the heavier rowboat over and put it in the water. Rob and I both stared. Kids did things in the lake together. Not grown-ups. Uncle Reub sat on a lawn chair, a heavy book on his lap, looking out at the lake. He was one of many uncles my brother and I had, sixteen of them, almost all in Toronto. The others frequently visited but it was my mother’s big brother who stayed, sometimes just for a few days, sometimes for months. It was only with us, not with his other brothers or sisters. Back then I didn’t think much about why. I knew he’d been married. Twice. My father never seemed to mind, he treated his brother-in-law like a shadow. My mother would sometimes be quite stern with her older brother. She used the same tone of voice she used when she reprimanded Rob and me.
After the rowboat was in the lake, water leaked into it – at least an inch of water.
‘You should caulk and paint that rowboat,’ Mum said. She was always giving instructions, not just to my father. To everyone. She did so with an affable look and an alluring smile, and everyone seemed content to do as they were told to do.
‘Everyone thinks your mother is sexy,’ I’d heard Steve telling Rob. At that time I didn’t know exactly what that meant.
‘The wood will expand,’ Dad replied and it did. It took only days for the leaking to stop. In mid-July my mother repainted the rowboat herself. All summer