I liked that answer so I gently placed the flashlight into the water and watched as it twinkled into the deep. For a moment I had an impulse to follow it, to see what lived at the bottom of the lake.
I didn’t tell Grace why the flashlight wasn’t there, I just said, ‘It’s not here,’ and quietly walked over to where she was.
‘I can’t see anything,’ I said.
‘Stupid! It’s your fault it’s gone.’
‘It’s not my fault. Anything would run away just looking at you!’ I hissed.
Sometimes Grace was like Angus. She didn’t think first. She just said things or did things. That made me angry and I said things I didn’t really mean. We both decided not to talk to each other ever again and to go back home.
Rowing back to the cottage – with Grace rowing because she said so – the army of angry crayfish marched this way and that on the bottom of the boat, all their claws raised in anger. Grace rowed squatting with her feet beside her. I sat backwards with my feet over the transom. That boat filled with crayfish was just too thrilling and it didn’t take long for Grace to speak.
‘Mr Muskratt says that crayfish are tasty and we should eat them.’
‘When did he say that?’ I asked. Mr Muskratt lived up the lake, on the Indian Reserve. He was thickset and strong. His leathery face was the colour of the woods. Even his dark brown eyes blended into the landscape. He never said much, almost nothing at all. ‘Yep.’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Eh?’ when he wanted you to say something again.
On Friday, when he came in his canoe selling fish, he saw the crayfish my dad had for fishing and told him that instead of wasting his time fishing with them, my dad should just buy Mr Muskratt’s fish and eat the crayfish instead. He said that Mrs Muskratt sometimes boiled them and sometimes roasted them for Mr Muskratt and their children.
AN EARLY SUMMER DAY
Sometimes, even when you’re little, you know when life is perfect. You just know. The sun woke me up early and it dazzled off the white clapboard siding on the back of the cottage. It was so clear and it was so bright it almost hurt just to keep my eyes open. Warm rain overnight had left the grass heavy with wet and the black soil in the vegetable patch near the gravelled road steamed.
It was my second week at the lake and so far it only rained at night. I walked round to the front of the cottage. The lake looked like an enormous puddle of mercury and it gave such a pure reflection of the cloudless morning sky and the forested shore on the far side I couldn’t tell up from down. When the water looked like that I knew that nothing would happen. Fish wouldn’t bite. Ducks wouldn’t fly. Only dragonflies enjoyed that nothingness. I wasn’t surprised my uncle was there, motionless in a lawn chair only yards from the shoreline facing the lake. He was always looking out at the lake. Sometimes he’d sit there in his pyjamas all day until my mother would tell him to get dressed. This time I wondered whether my uncle had died during the night and I was the only one to know.
I didn’t move. For a long time I just stared, watching to see if he was breathing but somehow he knew I was there.
‘I’ve been looking down towards the bridge. It’s too far to see now but when cars had their lights on earlier, they looked like tiny fireflies slowly gliding across the water.’
He paused and again we were both silent. That wasn’t unusual. Sometimes Uncle Reub let his silences stretch out and I didn’t mind that.
‘What do you think of this morning?’ Uncle eventually asked but I didn’t answer. I knew what I thought. I knew a lot but I didn’t always talk about it.
‘I’m going to frog bog,’ I finally said, not as an answer but as a fact.
‘With Robert?’
I never did anything with my big brother. If we played together we ended up fighting. We had the same parents and lived in the same house but that was the extent of our shared togetherness.
‘Just me.’
We both looked down the lake, me straining to see a car crossing the bridge, then to my surprise my uncle said, ‘May I come along?’
Uncle Reub didn’t do much at the cottage. He didn’t swim, or even put his feet in the lake. He certainly didn’t take walks on his own like my mother did. He didn’t seem to care much about his clothes. During the first week at the cottage he wore city trousers held up by braces, over a white shirt. Now that it was hotter and more sultry during the day he wore a white undershirt. This morning he was in trousers but still wearing his pyjama top. He always wore black leather city shoes, usually with white socks. To me, my uncle seemed separate from other adults. He listened to me and I was pleased with that attention. I said, ‘Yes.’
Frog bog was part of the dead forest, the part that lay in the lake. I thought there once must have been a great battle with an evil spirit that lurked in the depths of the lake and that the trees gave up their lives and drowned themselves to save their friends in the living forest. Maybe it was just a shooting star that had fallen on them. Most of the trees were cedars but there were willow trees too. I knew that because, out of all that death, some of the fallen trunks had green shoots emerging from them and on those shoots were magical new willow leaves. Each year the muddle of fallen branches and trunks seemed to get more complicated. They sank deeper into the bog, nestling in each other’s arms. This is where I came to catch tadpoles and frogs, painted turtles and water snakes.
Uncle Reub sometimes told me stories when we were alone together but today we walked in a mutual solitude, across the dew-damp lawn, up to the gravelled road that ran behind the cottages. My bare feet were already tough. I never wore shoes when we lived at the cottage, except when my family took me to a restaurant or to a movie in town. Shoes were for city boys. Even on the hottest days, when tar melted on the road to Bridgenorth, I only ever experienced a satisfying warmth in my bare feet that made me feel I was connected to the land, that I understood it, that it was part of me.
We walked up the point, past silent cottages where not a single curtain was yet drawn. In the fluorescent yellow light of early morning, all the cottages looked and smelled as if they were freshly painted. They probably were. I was only a boy but I understood how proud the cottagers were of their summer homes. Each garden was perfection, lush green lawns, pink granite stone and concrete pathways from the gravel road to the cottage door, petunias and begonias in a constellation of marshalled perfection. It was as if the cottagers challenged the wild around them, that they vied with each other to be the best at taming the surrounding forest.
Passing Dr Sweeting’s clapboard grey cottage, a dog barked and a wiry brown mink darted from the stand of white pines the cottage nestled in and across our path. I was glad Angus wasn’t with us. He would have killed that mink. We walked on in a complicated silence until the road and the cottages ended and the woods began.
‘Is this your secret place?’ Uncle Reub asked.
I thought that was a childish question but I didn’t say so. It wasn’t a secret. Everyone knew where the living woods and the dead forest were.
‘It’s the woods,’ I answered.
We followed a track that all the children on Long Point and Cedar Bay had made, through the maple and birch trees, down to the lake. ‘That’s frog bog,’ I told my uncle, pointing to the shambles of tree trunks, branches, weeds and reeds that lined that deep and hidden bay on Lake Chemong.
Uncle walked to the edge of a bank of sweetgrass and looked out over the stillness. I sometimes did that too. In its quiet and calm that scene, that view of