‘Shit, la merde! You broke my arm!’ he exclaimed.
‘No I haven’t. It just hurts a little,’ Mrs Blewett replied.
‘Now in slow motion I’ll show you what I did.’
‘Are you going to hurt me again?’ he asked.
‘No. This is a slow motion demonstration.’
Once more Steve went behind her.
‘There’s something on your neck,’ he said, wiped it off then wrapped his arms around her throat once more.
‘Children, when a drowning victim puts you in a death vice this is what you do.’
In slow motion she grabbed one of Steve’s hands with one hand and the elbow of the same arm with her other, then pushed up on the elbow while pulling down on the hand. Steve theatrically released his grip and, with the grace of a trained ballerina, Mrs Blewett pirouetted around behind Steve and put his arm in an arm lock.
‘With your one hand keeping the victim in an arm lock, use the other to cup his chin while you tow him to safety,’ she explained to us.
After practising this on each other we were ready to practise in the lake.
During our lesson the weather had got bleaker. There were whitecaps on the water and Mrs Blewett told us that as the weather was now so bad she would demonstrate towing on the shore side of the landing dock, rather than the lake side where we usually had our swimming lessons. The water was just as cold there but much calmer. All she needed was a volunteer to be the rescuer and Steve suggested Rob who, showing how manly he was, immediately dived into the water. Mrs Blewett used the new aluminium ladder to gently descend into the lake, all the time explaining to us how to tow properly.
The class, around twenty of us, all boys except for Grace and Glory and Mr Yudin’s daughter, Sandy, and two girls I didn’t know, lined up on the edge of the dock while Mrs Blewett grabbed Rob from behind and he broke her vice-like death grip, swung her arm into an arm lock, cupped his hand under her chin and towed her slowly past all of us. Mrs Blewett’s blue bathing suit was coming undone, her chest looked like two white archery targets with big red bullseyes. None of us said a word, not even the girls.
‘I’ll tow you back once more,’ Rob suggested and making a tight U-turn he towed her back past us, her enormous and amazingly white breasts breaking the water with each scissors kick of his legs. Mrs Blewett realised her bathing suit had come loose only when she started to climb the ladder from the lake and quickly tied the strap behind her neck.
‘Mrs Blewett went skinny dipping the way you do,’ Grace told her mother as she drove us back to the point.
‘I don’t think so, children,’ her mother replied.
‘She did. Her knockers are enormous.’
‘Where did you hear such a word?’ Grace’s mother asked, and Glory told her how the strap on Mrs Blewett’s bathing suit had come undone.
‘How did that happen?’ she asked.
‘Steve told me it had partly come undone and I tried to tie it back when I towed her but that might have made it worse,’ Rob offered.
‘I think you boys are growing up too fast,’ Grace’s mother said as we arrived back at her cottage.
THE ROCKY SHOAL
Lake Chemong is long and narrow, with few islands and fewer shoals, although there are dangerous rocks just below the lake’s surface near Perry’s cottage on Cedar Bay, about a mile up the lake – beyond frog bog. The day after our artificial respiration lesson it was sunny once more, but not too hot and humid. Perry and Steve’s mother had invited my family and Grace’s family for lunch. That wasn’t unusual. Perry’s parents always came to the Saturday night parties the cottagers on Long Point had. Perry’s father hadn’t built their cottage. In fact no one else’s father had built their cottage except mine. They’d all been built by builders.
The families went to Perry’s by boat, the fastest way. Only children walked along the lake from Long Point to Cedar Bay. At the far end of Long Point was the dead forest and adults didn’t like walking through it. Up by the road was an abandoned barn and from there through the woods to the lake was private property. When you emerged from the woods the ground was wet and boggy and the air filled with mosquitoes, although at night the mosquitoes were joined by fireflies. After that there were three tarpaper shacks where poor people from Europe who didn’t speak English spent their summers. The shacks were no more than four walls and a roof with a round aluminium chimney vent up the outside wall of each one. The roofs were made of red asphalt tiles all covered in lichen. I don’t know who built them first but the people living in them repaired them each year, nailing overlapping rolls of new tarpaper on the outside to the simple shack frame, floor to roof. It was easy to see what was fresh and new and black. Old tarpaper went slate grey in a year. The tarpaper shack cottagers got their water from the lake and shared an outhouse you could sometimes smell even from frog bog. Fronko, the same age as me, lived in one of those shacks and every now and then went to our fort in the woods. Adults got to Cedar Bay by walking up the hill to the county road, then along that road to the narrow lane that led back to the lake. That took at least half an hour. The boat trip took only a few minutes.
My mother drove the boat with Angus in the bow. He liked to be lookout. As she neared Perry’s cottage she slowed it almost to an idle and asked us to look in the water for rocks. She didn’t want to shear another pin on them. I saw the rocks first and guided my mother away from them to our landing at Perry’s dock.
We had lunch together on the lawn and after lunch Perry and I went down to the lake and waded out to where the water was up to our waists. With our feet we felt the sand for clams. It wasn’t long before we had dozens of them. Our families didn’t eat them. We only ate fish with scales on them, but Dr Sweeting loved these clams almost as much as he loved the catfish we caught but were too frightened to take off hooks.
Uncle Reub watched us and, out of the blue, Perry asked him why there was that rocky shoal near here but nowhere else.
‘Well, that’s interesting,’ Uncle explained.
‘You see, long before the summer folk came to Lake Chemong, long before Farmer Everett’s ancestors cut down the forest and cleared the boulders from the land alongside the lake, for his corn and pigs and cows, long before the Bleuets became the Blewetts, an Indian hunter lived here. His name was Albert Gonquin although his good friends called him Al, Al Gonquin.
‘Al had a beautiful daughter, Minnemoosah, and all the young men in his tribe were in love with her and asked Al for her hand in marriage.’
The other children all knew that my uncle was a great storyteller. I thought that he enjoyed telling his tales as much as we enjoyed listening to them. Mum sometimes reads us stories, especially on rainy days when we were tired of playing cards, but my uncle told stories. We never knew whether they were for real or whether he made them up as he told them. One rainy day, when Mum had gone shopping in town with Grace’s mother, and Perry was visiting and my uncle had been left to look after us, he emerged from his bedroom with a tomahawk in his hands and a twinkling look of worry in his eyes. ‘Men and women,’ he said, ‘we’re under attack from Indians!’ But we knew he was making that up. He told his tale anyways and today, on the front lawn of Perry’s cottage, he continued.
‘Now Al couldn’t decide which brave should marry his daughter so he set a competition. Whoever threw the heaviest stone the farthest into Lake Chemong would marry her.’
Grace grinned and pushed me with her hands.
‘Boys, the day of that competition wasn’t a calm day like today. It was a rough day, a hellish rough day. The