Surface Rights

by Melissa Hardy

  “Oh, man!” Verna moaned. “I can’t believe this is actually happening.”

  “What? You can’t believe you actually murdered your sister’s lover and now her children are disposing of the body?” asked Carmen.

  “We are so a team,” said Romy.

  They watched as the skiff sank lower and lower in the water before keeling a little to the leeside and disappearing from view with a slurp that could be heard all the way to the dock. Tai and Paisley sat for a moment, looking intently down at the water, before starting back to the boathouse.

  Winonah abandoned the end of the dock and came towards them, smoking a butt-legged cigarette and slapping at blackflies. “These bastards are really biting. I’m getting out of here before they eat me alive.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Carmen. “I could use some coffee. We all could use some coffee.”

  “I think there’s a Coleman stove in the pantry,” said Winonah. “And some propane in the shed.” The two women lumbered towards the house.

  The canoe pulled up beside the dock and for a moment the four of them — Verna, Romy, Paisley and Tai — sat there in silence. Paisley was ashen under her tan; Tai looked exhausted — for him, it had been a second night without sleep.

  It was Paisley who broke the silence. “What should we do with this?” She was referring to the canoe. “Is it all right to leave here or should we put it in the boathouse?”

  Verna roused herself. “Just tie it up here.” Paisley and Tai climbed out of the canoe and Paisley tethered it to the dock. “Thank you,” Verna managed, in a voice that crumbled into chunks half way through. It seemed so inadequate — “Thank you” — too little and much, much too late. And yet somehow here they were — Fern’s dirty, badly behaved, inconvenient children — their arms thrown around each other and her, too, gathering her close for a moment and holding on for dear life. Fern’s children, but her blood, too, and all there was left of her family. She whispered fiercely, “Paisley, you are so like your grandfather. And, you, Tai … in ways you are like Fern. And you, Romy … oh, God, Romy, you remind me of myself sometimes. It’s true.”

  But Jude had spotted something in the water. He barked excitedly, then flung himself off the dock and started swimming toward the centre of the lake. Twenty-five feet in, he veered leeward, plucked an object from the water and headed back to shore.

  “Here, Jude!” Tai called him. “Come here, boy!” He walked to the end of the dock and onto the beach. Jude emerged from the water, shook, and came toward him. Tai hunkered down. “Give,” he told the dog, holding his hand out.

  Obediently Jude relinquished J.R.’s soggy black Blue Jays baseball cap. Tai turned it over in his hands, then, spotting something on its inner band, peered more closely. He closed his eyes. His hand went to his forehead.

  “What?” asked Verna. She followed him onto the beach, trailed by Romy and Paisley.

  He handed the ball cap to her, pointing to an inscription written in Fern’s unmistakable childish scrawl on the inner band. TO J.R., ALL MY LOVE, ALWAYS, FERN.

  J.R. sank. Slowly at first, then, as the greater density of the water (eight times that of air) began to compress his fungi-pocked lungs, more quickly. Thanks to the rocks in his pockets, the only piece of Fern’s last lover to escape a watery grave was the baseball cap Jude retrieved; it disengaged itself from his head when the skiff keeled over and floated away.

  This realm of the cold-blooded was much darker than above the surface and more sombre in hue — with every ten feet of depth, a colour drops off the spectrum, so that, at ten feet, red appears black or dark gray; at twenty, orange ceases to exist; and at thirty, yellow disappears. This world through which J.R. descended — through schools of whitefish cruising for darters and insect larvae and solitary large northern pikes on the prowl for ciscoes and slimy eelponts — was coloured blue and green with an occasional, startling jolt of violet; it resonated with the purr, knock, and drum of gliding, darting fish and the clicking of invertebrates, and, for a time at least, the thick drag of a canoe paddle far above.

  Finally, after a descent of some sixty feet, J.R. came to rest on the lake’s silty bottom. There he would remain among the benthos — the midge and mayfly larvae and the common suckers — until the mishepishu swooped down and gobbled him up.

  Or not.

  This is how it came to pass that J.R. Eubanks became a secret kept fast by the lake. Another secret. One among many.

  Like tall, slender dancers clad in frilly white bark, the birches gathered around the mossy pocket of open forest floor that was the glen. Of those who had come to Verna’s aid the previous evening — Winonah and Granny, Carmen, her nieces and nephew — only Carmen had declined Verna’s invitation to join them for a joint scattering of Fern, Donald, and Lionel’s cremains in the glen. “There’s not a canoe big enough.”

  “I can’t begin to thank you,” Verna had told her.

  But Carmen had just squeezed her arm. “You can thank me by not selling the cottage. I need another commission like I need a hole in the head, and, besides, it wouldn’t be right. I’m thinking that you belong here. That here is where you need to be for all kinds of reasons.”

  Winonah, Granny, Jude, and Verna, along with the LCBO bag containing the three cartons of cremains, journeyed to the lake’s farther end by canoe. (Since Romy refused to venture out onto the water, Fern’s three children were compelled to retrace their previous buggy slough through the bush to the alvar.) Midway across the lake, Granny asked Winonah to stop for a moment while she crumbled tobacco between her fingers and sprinkled it onto the surface of the water, muttering in Algonquin. When Verna asked what she was doing, she told her, “Mishepishu might want a smoke, eh? After his big breakfast.”

  After they had pulled up the various wooden posts that J.R. had driven into the ground in and around the glen, the old woman took charge of the formalities, announcing, “N’gah auttissookae! I’m calling the Grandfathers. The Grandmothers, too. Gonna ask them to help our loved ones on their journey to the Sky World.” Reaching into the LCBO bag, she retrieved the three cartons of cremains. To Winonah she gave Lionel’s cremains; to Verna, Donald’s; and to Paisley, Fern’s. “You’re the oldest,” she explained. Then she turned towards the east and held up her hands. Winonah, taking her cue from her, also turned in that direction.

  “This way!” hissed Winonah over her shoulder — uncertain as to what the proper protocol might be under such circumstances, the others found themselves at a loss as to how to proceed. “Face this way!”

  It was as though she had poked them with a cattle prod. Everyone quickly shuffled into place.

  “Grandmother East,” Granny chanted in a kind of sing-song, “from you comes the sun, which brings life to us all; please make the sun shine on our friends here and bring a new life to them — but one without all the pain and sadness of the world, eh? Could you do that for them?”

  She turned towards the south; again she held up her hands. Everyone followed suit. “Grandfather South, you bring the Thunderbirds from down below and the rains that make things grow and live. Be gentle when you fall on our friends. Let the rain wash away their pain and their sadness. How about it?”

  To the west, “Grandmother West, it’s you who takes the sun from us and cradles it in your arms. You bring darkness so that every creature can get some rest. We only ask this, that when you bring the darkness to our friends here, do you think you could leave the nightmares outside the door? Could you let your stars and moon shine on our friends nice and gentle?”

  She turned to face north. “Grandfather North, you are the warrior, ride alongside our friends and help them to be at peace with everything that was and is. You are the doorway to wisdom, the place of elders.”

  Casting her eyes upwards, she intoned, “Grandfather Sky: May your songs of the winds and clouds sweep the pain and sadness out of our friends’ hearts; as they hear those songs, let them know the spirits who are with those songs are at peace.”


  Finally, with Winonah’s assistance, the old woman knelt and directed her words down toward the earth, “Grandmother Earth, all spirits come from your womb,” she said. “I have asked all those other Grandfathers and Grandmothers to help our friends rid themselves of the troubles that weigh so heavy on their hearts. This way, the weight they carry will be less; and they will walk more softly on you.” She gestured to Winonah, who helped her to her feet.

  “And now we have come full circle,” she said. “To the eastern doorway, I say meegwetch. To the southern doorway, I say meegwetch. To the western doorway, meegwetch, and to the northern doorway, meegwetch. May the Great Spirit watch over you and may you be at peace.”

  Romy tugged on Winonah’s sleeve. “Meg who?” she hissed. “What’s she talking about.”

  Winonah glared at her. “Meegwetch. It means ‘thank you.’”

  Granny was satisfied with the proceedings. “Okay. It’s time.”

  “Let’s do this!” agreed Romy.

  “Wait a minute,” said Paisley. “Tai? Romy?” Opening the carton, she untwisted the tie from the plastic bag that held Fern’s cremains and held the box out to her brother and sister. “We should all do this. Not just me. Here. Take some.” Tai gulped, then reaching into the carton, he wiggled his hand through the bag’s opening and grabbed a handful of cremains — they looked like grey sand.

  “That doesn’t look like ashes,” Romy objected.

  “It’s not,” said Tai. “It’s dried bone fragments that have been pulverized in a cremulator.”

  “What? You’re kidding!”

  “A cremulator?” asked Verna.

  Tai nodded grimly. “I had a friend who had a summer job at a crematorium.”

  Romy winced, closed her eyes and thrust her hand into the bag. “Ooh!” She sounded surprised. “Gritty.”

  Verna and Winonah opened their cartons, hauled out the bags, untwisted the ties.

  “One, two, three!” said Granny and for a moment unfurling ribbons of sand-like powder glittered in the hazy cylinder of pale golden sunlight that bored through the canopy before settling. Out of the corner of Verna’s eye she thought she glimpsed the spirit of Lionel slipping away between the birches, another wavering verticality, then gone.

  “Lionel?”

  She must have spoken aloud, for Granny shushed her urgently, seizing her by the wrist and pressing her bony index finger to her lips. “Don’t say his name, Verna! When you say his name, you call him back. You got to let him go. You got to let them all go.”

  Paisley and Tai left early on the holiday Monday. Paisley needed to get back to her business and Tai was on call at the hospital. Before they left, Paisley asked if her and Jill’s wedding could take place at the cottage the following spring. She was certain that Jill would accept her proposal of marriage now that she had dealt with her baggage.

  “That’s one way to describe what happened here this weekend,” said Tai.

  “You’ve got to promise me that nobody tells anybody about this,” Verna insisted. “Not Jill. Not your dad, Tai. Not yours, Romy. Nobody.”

  “Of course not,” Paisley assured her. “It’s our very own skeleton in the closet. We get it, Auntie Verna.” She turned to Tai. “I’m hoping you’ll agree to be my best man?”

  “I would be honored,” said Tai.

  “What about me?” Romy cried. “Can I be a bridesmaid?”

  “Only if you go back to the Birches,” Paisley told her sternly. “Jill’s not going to want a bridesmaid who looks like Jack Skellington.”

  Verna, Paisley, and Tai had decided between them that Romy must go back into rehab. Verna was to call Paul Doucette that night and the Birches the following day — there could be no hope of raising anybody at the centre on the first long weekend of the summer.

  “Unfortunately, by signing herself out the way she did, she’s almost certainly forfeited her bed,” said Tai. “There are waiting lists for these places. She’ll probably have to queue up again and wait her turn. It could be months. I just hope she can make it until then.”

  “Auntie Verna,” Romy began. Tai and Paisley had just driven off and they were having coffee on the porch. “About those OxyContins …”

  “About those. I didn’t think that bottle was empty.”

  Romy smiled at her. The cat who ate the canary.

  Verna held out her hand. “Let me have them.”

  Romy shook her head. “No way, José! Uh-uh!”

  “Let me have those pills!” Verna insisted. “I mean it, young lady!”

  “Hey! Like you can be trusted with them?” retorted Romy. “The murder weapon!”

  Verna realized Romy had a point. “Oh,” she said. “Right. Sorry.”

  “There were two left,” Romy told her. “We could each take one right now and that would be the end of them.”

  Verna thought for a moment. “Oh, sure. Why not? It’s not like I can set you any worse an example.”

  “You’re not so bad.” Delving about in her voluminous folds, she surfaced with the two pills and handed one to Verna. “Remember to chew.”

  “Oh, I remember!” Verna assured her. She stared out at the lake as she ground the OxyContin between her teeth, reflecting that, on any given day, it could appear to be midnight blue, azure, cerulean, or ultramarine, but always, always blue. Most of the lakes in this region were the colour of tea. That was because the forest was largely coniferous and needles are slow to degrade. Not Lake Marguerite. Its colour was a reflection of the sky above. It was the sky’s mirror. From the bulrushes and cattails on the lake’s western shore, a loon wailed, a long note followed by a second higher note and then a third. Plaintive. Haunting.

  She said, “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Do what?”

  “Live like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Drink like this.”

  Romy considered this. “Well, you could, but it wouldn’t be so hot.”

  “I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Well, yeah, but you don’t get falling-down drunk,” Romy pointed out. “Not like my dad.”

  “Was Paul a drunk?” Verna asked. “Of course, I scarcely knew him. I scarcely knew any of them — Fern’s men. I scarcely knew her.”

  “That makes two of us. What?” Romy turned to look at her. “Are you going to cry again?”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.” Verna swiped at her eyes and dripping nose with a piece of soggy Kleenex.

  “Come on!” Romy protested. “You’re supposed to be the strong one!”

  “Who said I was the strong one? I’m a basket case. I’m not strong!”

  “You’re stronger than me! At least you’d better be. Now, snap out of it!” Taking Verna by her shoulders, she shook her.

  “Okay! Okay!” Verna conceded. “I’ve got a hangover! Ouch!”

  Romy released her and went back to staring fixedly at the lake.

  Some time later it dawned on Verna that the OxyContin was kicking in. Suddenly she felt vague, warm, comfortable. That was an unusual feeling — comfort. “Why are you staring that way?” she asked Romy. “It looks like your eyes might pop out of their sockets.”

  “I’m watching,” replied Romy.

  “For what?”

  “That manatee.”

  “The mishepishu.”

  “Whatever.”

  “What? Do you think it might suddenly appear? Like the Loch Ness monster?”

  “I don’t know,” said Romy. “But if it does, I’ll see it.”

  Time slipped away. At some point in the course of this slippage, Verna realized that her memory of Fern was not of how she was, but how she was when she was. In other words, Fern had ceased at long, long last to be a presence and become, instead, an absence. This struck her as an important insight. “Hey, Romy.” She tugged on the girl’s sleeve. Romy tore her gaze away from the lake. “My sister no longer exists in time. I mean Fern, your mother. She exists somewhere other than time. Time is reality. It is the de
finition of reality. Transcendence, on the other hand, is outside time!”

  Romy stared at her for a moment. Then she said, “I’m glad you cleared that up.”

  They returned to looking at the lake.

  “So, Auntie Verna, what are you going to do now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you going to sell the place?”

  Verna thought about it. Then she slowly shook her head. “I don’t think I can.”

  “Why?”

  “Because everyone is here.”

  “Everyone?”

  “My grandfather is here and my mother … and now my father and my sister. Everyone. I … I can’t leave.”

  “I like it here,” Romy said. “It’s nice. It’s really nice. Auntie Verna, can I stay with you? Until a bed comes free at the Birches? I don’t want to go live with my father and his new wife.”

  “Here?” Verna was as surprised as one can be on prescription drugs. “With me?”

  “You’re as close to being my mother as anyone else could ever be. And we’ve already been through a lot together.”

  “But I’m not good with children.”

  “I’m not a child.”

  Verna thought about this. “Okay,” she said cautiously. “All right. But there are conditions.”

  Romy clapped her hands. “Goody! What?”

  “You have to eat enough to stay alive. I can’t have you dying on me.”

  “I promise!”

  “And that’s not all. You have to learn to swim.”

  Romy’s face fell? “What?”

  “You have to learn to swim,” Verna repeated.

  “Why?”

  “Because you can’t live on a lake and not swim,” Verna replied. “Because swimming is intrinsically a very good thing to be able to do.” Because there are mermaids in the lake who might help you, she thought, who might even make you well. That’s what Lionel had said and it was worth a shot. “I’ll teach you,” she promised. “I’m a good swimmer. I’m not good at very much else, but I am a good swimmer.”