‘Edgar calls his god the Mighty Spirit. Doesn’t that sound wonderful, the Mighty Spirit? He says the Mighty Spirit ensures that everything has a soul but to my mind it’s those pebbles acting as ballast that protects the boat.’
Uncle Reub paused once more, then looking beyond Grace to me in the front of the boat he continued, ‘Bruce, you’re ballast for your mother.’
My mother was always telling me how she felt, especially about other people. I knew what Uncle Reub meant.
When we arrived at the dock and after we tied the rowboat to it and got out, Grace turned to my uncle and said, ‘Can we go back tomorrow?’
SHOPPING IN BRIDGENORTH
There was a rhythm to summer life. Patterns. The Silverwood’s Dairy truck delivered milk to the cottages on Long Point early each weekday morning. The milkman wore white pants, a white shirt and a white peaked cap. The Browns’ Bread deliveryman arrived an hour later, the driver in a muddy brown uniform the colour of a chocolate bar wearing a peaked cap the colour of a muskrat’s head. Angus would announce their arrival. Dr Sweeting’s son, James, delivered the Peterborough Examiner just before supper. James was old enough to drive, but late each afternoon he bicycled the two miles into Bridgenorth to pick up the newspapers then bicycled back to deliver one to each of the cottages on Long Point. When it rained hard, Mrs Sweeting collected the papers for him. Sometimes she drove James down the point on his delivery round. Mrs Nichols brought us fresh eggs each Monday. We had swimming lessons from Mrs Blewett at her family’s lumber mill in Bridgenorth every Tuesday afternoon. Mr Everett, the grumpy farmer who owned all the land around the Nichols’ farm, collected garbage from the cottagers every other Thursday. He didn’t like children. Best of all, the fathers arrived Friday night while children slept. Fathers meant more cars and cars meant we went places we didn’t go during the week. That’s what fathers were for. Mothers were for everything else.
My dad had brought fresh meat from the butchers in Toronto until Mum discovered how tasty meat was from the General Store in Bridgenorth. ‘Imagine. This chicken lived within squawking distance of Bridgenorth,’ she’d say as she prepared it for the oven. ‘My mother killed her own chickens. Isn’t that dreadful? We had chicken each Friday. She went to the market and chose the chicken she wanted, took it home and wrung its neck. I had to watch. Then she cut its head off and held it upside down. Imagine. Then she said a prayer and swung it around in the air. There was blood and feathers everywhere. It was terrible. Such superstitions.’
‘Why did she say a prayer?’ I once asked.
‘It certainly wasn’t for the poor chicken,’ my mother replied.
‘She was thanking God that we had food on our table for the Sabbath.’
‘Do you thank God for food?’ I asked and my mother smiled at me, came over and pressed me hard to her chest.
‘I thank God for you,’ she answered.
On Saturdays Dad sometimes drove us to Peterborough, for supper at Fosters Restaurant on George Street. Some of our Peterborough neighbours on the lake had stores on George Street. Mr Silver had a shoe store, Mr Collis a men’s clothing store, Mr Cherney a furniture store, Mr Yudin the theatre. Their children were either a few years younger or older than I was. I saw them when we went swimming out to our raft and at swimming lessons each week but we didn’t search each other out to play with. Not until we were a lot older and understood the sustaining worth of shared, warm memories.
At our end of the point, early on Monday mornings the fathers all left to return to Toronto, leaving the mothers with us. Our family had only one car so when my mother wanted to go to Bridgenorth during the week, to shop or pick up mail, we went in our red-bottomed fourteen-foot cedar boat with its fourteen-horsepower Evinrude motor.
The milkman and the bread man had both come and gone. Rob was at Glory’s cottage and I was searching through the stony gravel by the shoreline, looking for the roundest and flattest stones to skip across the lake’s still water. Angus, lying in the grass, was watching me. I hoped that making stones skip as many times as I could might make them flatter but I was interrupted by my mother who asked if I wanted to go to Bridgenorth with her.
‘I’ll have a cigarette then we’ll go,’ she called from the cottage porch.
The lake lay listless, shrouded in a heat haze. The water by the shoreline was warm, almost hot. I walked through it and with each of my steps, grey clouds of lake bottom swirled up to the surface where it just lingered. A school of jet-black, baby catfish darted away in all directions then, as if drawn by an invisible magnet, found comfort in each other once more and moved on.
Across the lake a mile away, a single cotton candy cloud cast its shadow on the hills, then onto the lake itself. When the wind was blowing, I sometimes watched a cloud’s shadow cross the lake and would run down the point and up to the highway, just to see if I was faster than the sky itself. Today, I shuffled around on the shore playing with seaweed. Others thought seaweed was smelly and dirty but I was intrigued by it. A single strand of lake weed was as soft and as fragile as a strand of cooked spaghetti but when it was torn by storms from the bed of the lake and twisted and tied by the lake’s waves it became stronger than my father.
Outside, on the cottage terrace, my mother lit her Black Cat cigarette and looked out over the lake. I knew that I shouldn’t speak to her until her cigarette had burned to its cork tip. This was her quiet time.
My mother always checked up and down the lake before taking the boat out. If there was a wind developing, even if it wasn’t strong, even if there weren’t any whitecaps, the shopping trip was cancelled. Today the lake was calm. She took from the wall her pencilled list she had tacked there, put it in the pocket in her shorts and walked with me to the boat.
‘Reub, put this cardigan on if you get cold,’ she said to her brother as she stopped by the lawn chair where he was sitting, a heavy book resting on his lap, unread.
In the boat she lifted the gas tank and gave it a shake: she never blithely trusted the arrow on the fuel gauge. If it was low we would stop at the marine gas station at the Blewetts’ lumber mill.
Mum and I put on our Kapok-filled life preservers. Hers was like a vest with ties in front. Mine slipped around the back of my head, down my chest and tied at my waist. In her short shorts and tight blouse and wearing her padded life vest, I was aware of how my mother’s arrival in the village always attracted the attention of the local men in Bridgenorth. At the age of ten I didn’t understand how exotic, how alien and how sexy she appeared to them. I don’t know whether the other young ‘city’ mothers had the same effect on the local men. They probably did.
On a calm day like today it took no more than fifteen minutes to reach the bridge, then only five minutes more to get to where the boat could be beached. Mum talked to me most of the way but what with the engine noise I didn’t hear much. There was no dock to tie up to, so Mum always approached the beach at a good speed then cut the motor and lifted the propeller out of the water, allowing the boat’s momentum to drive us far enough onto the beach for her to hop over the bow onto the sand without her getting her feet wet, then tie the boat’s bowline to a tree while we walked up the steep dusty road to the general store at the top of the hill.
Bridgenorth had all the necessities of cottage life and no more. A general store, a post office, Mr Bell’s gas station, a bait shop that also sold grilled sandwiches, an ice house, a barber’s shop with a pool room the children were not allowed in, and a machine shop. My mother had a Bridgenorth shopping ritual. We never visited the ice house. Collecting sawdust-covered lake ice for our kitchen icebox, where my mother kept her meat, fish and dairy and my father kept his fishing worms, was left to my father to do on weekends. Her first visit was to the post office, to collect that week’s mail and read whichever letters couldn’t wait until she returned to the cottage. ‘Now she’s going to ask the postmistress about her children,’ I thought