Mosquitoes of Summer

by Julianna Kozma

  “It’s definitely the Crazy Squirrel. Same scar and same stumpy tail. And he is NOT pleased. But go see for yourself. By the way, what were you doing up on the roof?”

  “I had to patch the chimney area with tar where the rain was coming in,” explained Dad. “We need to get this house as dry as possible so that those black water beetles don’t come in anymore. They love the dark and the damp. But they freak your mother out, and she hates to hear them flying around at night.”

  Shuddering at the thought, Emily heartily agreed with Mom for a change. Quite simply put, they were disgusting. And at night they flew in her hair and climbed into her clothes that were lying on the floor. Yuck! Now she had to put her clothes in the laundry hamper. Talk about slave labour. “Go get him Dad!” Although out loud she voiced total confidence in her dad, in truth she was not sure who would actually win, squirrel or man.

  Wiping his black and sticky hands on his pants, Dad warily made his way to the open camper door. He slowly peeked inside. Suddenly he pulled back and slammed the door!

  “Unbelievable! He’s staring right at me.”

  The Crazy Squirrel set up such a racket, squeaking and chirping, making a loud clicking noise. As soon as it saw Dad it pounced on the screen window of Hannah’s bed, and scrambled outside through a newly chewed hole on the other side of the tent. Sure enough, Emily was right. As the neurotic rodent glanced back for a last look, Dad saw the scar. Then the stumpy tail disappeared through the hole.

  “I can’t believe he came back,” said Dad, shaking his head in disbelief. “It’s just not possible. I dumped him far away.”

  “The cat came back, the very next day,” chanted Hannah under her breath. She thought the whole thing hilarious. As Dad opened the door again, Crazy Squirrel came bouncing over the roof of the camper, hopping closer and closer towards his sworn enemy. More squeaks and trills could be heard in the nearby branches of the spruce as other squirrels joined in on the excitement.

  Battle stations! Human attack plans were drawn up. Squirrel territories were invaded. Chases ensued. It was pure and utter chaos.

  “This is war,” bellowed Dad as he shook his fist at the brown fur balls frantically running around him. He marched quickly back into the house. A minute later he emerged with the red cooler, cork and string in hand. A bag of peanuts bulged from his pants pocket.

  Throughout the morning, squirrels were trapped and forcibly removed to greener pastures many more kilometers away than the Darnley Golf Course. In the end, Dad managed to entice six squirrels into his homemade trap, including the Crazy Squirrel. They were transported, one at a time, to Sea View, located about 8 kilometers away. All this activity used up half a tank of gas. Was it worth it? You bet!

  “That should do it,” he nodded with satisfaction. “Got the Crazy Squirrel, and five more to boot. They were insurance, just in case any of them decided to follow in Crazy’s footsteps. Unlike the Acadian deportation of the 1700s, the tree rats got what they deserved.”

  Hannah thought it was more about revenge than anything else. No squirrel was going to beat her dad.

  The remainder of the day passed quietly. It was a hazy lazy kind of afternoon. The gusting wind turned into a gentle breeze. Across the road from the Blue Lobster, tall yellow rye grass swayed slowly, flirting with the butterflies that hovered above. Hannah watched as small bees gathered pollen from the wild rose bushes that bordered the front porch. Emily bugged Mr. Bean, trying to entice him to wake up from the afternoon nap he was taking in his cage. He was strategically positioned under a red beach umbrella, enjoying the warm weather, head tucked back under his wing, stubbornly ignoring all poking and prodding.

  “Hi! My name’s Jack, but my friends call me Jack Jack.”

  Surprised at the sudden intrusion, Hannah jumped off the stairs where she had been sitting, quietly reading her Hardy Boys book. She came face to face with a blond-haired blue-eyed boy about her age. Emily came dashing up from the side of the house to critically inspect the strange boy.

  “You’ve got freckles,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Yup, and they get worse in the summer,” agreed Jack. “I read somewhere that you can get rid of them by rubbing lemon juice over the spots. So I gave it a shot. Made no difference that I could see, but my ma said I smelled as good as her clean laundry. That’s me, fresh lemony scent Jack Jack.”

  He had a big smile plastered across his face as he continued to gaze at the girls, and then the Bean. He did a double-take. Where was the bird’s head?!

  “Where are you from?” asked Emily. Hannah hung back, a bit shy. She usually let her sister break the ice first, and then made friends when she was sure they didn’t bite. Sometimes Emily had her uses, thought Hannah. Guess everyone needed to have a use in life, even the Bozo.

  “I’m visiting my grandparents. They live just down the field in the back of your house,” said Jack, pointing behind Hannah to George and Helen’s small white house. “I usually come down from Summerside to stay here during the hot weather. Grandpa told me he cuts the grass at your place and said I should introduce myself. So here I am. Want to go visit a cemetery?”

  “What?” choked Hannah, unexpectedly uttering her first word since Jack came on the scene. “What are you talking about?” She stared at Jack, unsure if he was the type of person who would turn into a werewolf on a full moon. A cemetery, of all things! Although … he certainly had a mischievous glint in his eyes.

  “There’s a really cool cemetery in French River that not many tourists know about,” said Jack, bending towards Hannah in his eagerness to convince the unwilling. “Grandpa’s going to visit my uncle Fred after supper. He lives down near the harbour and he can take us with him. The cemetery is not far from there. It might be a bit dark by the time we get there, but I can borrow a big flashlight. Grandpa’s got one of those that he claims gives off a million candle lights worth of brightness.”

  “My dad bought one that has two million candles,” boasted Emily. “He’s a flashlight junkie. The bigger, the better. He has a whole bunch of them. And going to this cemetery, especially in the dark, is just plain crazy. Only stupid people would even think of doing that.”

  “What’s so special about this place?” interrupted Hannah, still wondering what Jack was all about. She also noticed his sudden odd behaviour. Jack kept looking around as if a ghost or something was eavesdropping on his conversation. He also looked a bit nervous, constantly licking his lips. It was a change from his jovial introduction. Emily, in the meantime, took three steps back and away from Jack, eying him with much skepticism.

  “You know how ships used to sink in the sea in the old days because of the wild storms?” he whispered conspiratorially. “Well, there are a whole lot of shipwrecks scattered around there. Where do you think the bodies disappeared to? I’ll tell you! They got washed up on our beaches. The locals who found them didn’t want to go far to bury the bodies so they planted them nearby. My cemetery is one of the burial grounds people used for the sailors who died during the Yankee Gale. Guess what it’s called?”

  Silence.

  “Yankee Hill Pioneer Cemetery. Original, huh?”

  Jack paused for effect, expecting screams. Better yet, maybe Hannah would fall into his arms and ask for his protection. That would be great. She was really pretty, with her long dark hair. What a smile. And she had freckles too. Dark skin and freckles. Imagine that.

  Silence.

  Jack laughed. Girls! They were afraid of their own shadow. No one of the female persuasion had ever taken him up on his offer. Not that he was disappointed much. Graveyards were not exactly his thing either. He much preferred playing a good game of Mission Impossible on his Nintendo. But he also liked showing off, and most of the girls thought he was really brave for even suggesting such a thing. And he definitely wanted to impress his new neighbour.

  “Okay, we’ll go,” said Hannah finally. There was absolutely no hesitation. “But I’m going to ask our friend Lucy to come with us. We u
sually go to the Cavendish Cemetery and do grave rubbings. I like to hang the rubbings in my room. They’re really interesting. I found one last year of 10-year-old girl called Leila Rose. She died in 1888. There was a lamb carved on her white tombstone. I thought it was pretty cool.”

  Jack Jack’s mouth hung wide open.

  “What’s wrong, Jack? Your chin’s touching your shoes!” Emily smiled, all innocent-like. “Did you actually think we would say no?”

  Hannah also smiled to herself. People were always shocked when she mentioned her grave rubbings. She loved doing them. Tombstones, especially in the older graveyards, had so many stories to tell. Her mom found a really interesting one last year in Cavendish. A woman died at the age of 43, sometime in the late 1800s. Her entire family was buried all around her grave. There were two markers for her babies who died a few years apart at the age of one and two years old. Then her son died at the age of 18. And finally her 23-year-old daughter died two years after the mother. A tragic story, thought Hannah. This woman must have had a lot of sadness in her life.

  “Well … okay,” stammered Jack. “I guess I’ll see you after supper then. We’ll pick you up at seven o’clock.” In a daze, Jack headed back to his house. Shaking his head, he muttered “They actually said yes! I just don’t get them…. Girls!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  GHOSTS AHOY !

  Four shadows quickly flitted past the rows of fishing boats tied up in the harbour at French River. The slowly setting sun cast a warm glow on everything, bathing the still water with a golden light. There was Wayne Simpson’s Lost Horizon. Wayne looked up from the stern of his boat as the children passed silently by.

  “Them kids look like they’re up to something,” he mumbled, staring off after them. Then, without a second thought, he went back to his repairs. A couple of nails peeked through his pursed lips as he hammered in a loose plank. Seeing Lucy reminded him of the upcoming supper at the Smiths. He just loved Alice’s home cooking, even though he would die a thousand deaths before he admitted it to her. Although his cod cakes were second to none, at least according to his old girlfriend Nancy, Alice’s were even better. He hoped that she’d make some more of that tomorrow night.

  Meanwhile, Jack led the three girls farther up along the path. A few minutes after leaving the relative peace of the harbour, the sandy road turned sharply to the right and the group made their way towards a small copse of woods. Beech, elms and maples gently rustled their leaves and cast long shadows in the darkening evening. Every once in a while, a branch creaked in the wind, stirring up birds settled down for the night.

  Suddenly Jack stopped and three bodies bumped into him, thump, thump, thump, sending him sprawling in the red dirt.

  “Why did you do that for?” he demanded, sitting up and brushing the dirt off his bright yellow sweater that sported thick black stripes.

  “Next time don’t stop like that without warning us, Bumblebee,” said Lucy.

  “If you weren’t following so closely I would still be standing,” he shot back. “Now listen up. The graveyard is in those woods. Once the sun sets it gets pretty dark. I don’t want you girls getting scared, so if you want to turn back, now’s the time.”

  “Nope, we’re fine, thanks,” Lucy assured him. She was all for joining the girls and their new friend on this mission of discovery. Although not interested in making her own grave rubbings, she enjoyed exploring this long lost cemetery. She and her parents had found this cemetery a few years ago while chasing Meg. It was perhaps half a kilometer away from the open sea and Arrowhead Beach. Many of the grave markers were overgrown with brambles and grass gone wild. Most of the lost souls buried here lay under unmarked graves, but every so often Lucy managed to uncover a tombstone that had a name and date etched faintly into the greying and mouldy rocks.

  Shrugging his shoulders, Jack resumed walking. Glancing back he said “Just don’t come crying to me if you get scared.”

  Hannah snorted. She wasn’t scared. Now, where was her flashlight again? Ah yes, the top front pocket of her coat. Lucy told them to dress in pants and a jacket. The nights get cool on the island, but it was the mosquitoes that were worse. They were voracious pests and swarmed the unwary victim, sucking up all of her blood. Vampires with wings. Shaking her head, Hannah forced herself to think happy thoughts. She was too good at scaring herself.

  Finally, after an uneasy 10 minute walk, they reached the edge of the woods and paused to ready flashlights.

  “Here we go,” said Emily softly, not at all convinced that she should be here. She gripped her flashlight tightly in one hand, and grabbed hold of Hannah’s coat with the other, reluctantly following her sister into the darkening woods.

  As soon as they stepped into the old forest, the sunlight disappeared and the air turned cool and damp. The trees were tall, and grew close together, obliterating the sky with their leaves. Very little light penetrated this thick canopy. The dark giants stood watch, swaying in the wind, their creaking trunks the only noise in the eerie silence that filled this corner of the island.

  “I don’t think I like this very much,” complained Emily. “This is spooky.”

  Unfortunately, none of her compatriots seemed to have heard her, or cared about her plight for that matter.

  “Ahhhhh!”

  Jack went down again, tripping over a large rock half-buried in the mossy grass.

  “You might be better off on your hands and knees instead of walking upright,” laughed Lucy, relieved that the scream was not ghost-related. “It seems you have too much trouble staying up.”

  “Ha ha! Funny,” said Jack. “It’s all these rocks. You never know where they’ll pop up next. And I bet I scared you all.”

  “They’re not rocks,” said Lucy, ignoring his teasing. “They’re tombstones. Or at least grave markers. Some of the dead were buried without anyone knowing their names. So the locals marked the burial spots with rocks. If you look closely, you can see a cross or an anchor scratched into the stone. Some of the bigger ones even have dates of when the bodies were found.”

  Thick brush grew throughout the forest floor. Bright green ferns and thorny brambles wrapped themselves around tree trunks and caught tight to the kids’ jeans as they slowly made their way through the dense undergrowth. Hannah walked over to another bump in the grass and started digging around the edges. Sure enough she uncovered a large rock the size of a basketball. After brushing off the damp earth she could just barely make out the faint outline of a ship. No date though. Oh well.

  “You’ll find bigger stones farther in where the trees have grown in more thickly,” instructed Lucy. Hannah, Emily and Jack followed her advice and broke apart, moving in different directions towards the ghostly white shapes.

  Somewhere close by, an owl screeched a warning cry. Four white faces peered uneasily up into the trees, wondering if he was hooting at them.

  “Wow, here’s a gorgeous one,” exclaimed Emily, excitedly jumping up and down. Hannah quickly joined her sister, helping to clear away some of the bigger branches of a wild chokecherry bush. “The trees and bushes have really gone wild here. No one’s come to clear any of this away, and it’s probably been over a hundred years that this place has been left alone.”

  Shining the flashlight on the leaning tombstone, Hannah squinted, trying to focus on the inscription. “Here lies Ebenezer Scottsdale. May his sails catch the winds and carry him up to Heaven. Departed from this life in 1851, aged 27.”

  Standing directly behind them, Jack spoke up suddenly and startled the two sisters. “You’ll find a few graves from the 1851 sea disaster when a whole fleet of American fishing boats went down in this huge storm. And if you notice, many of the tombstones are facing out towards the sea. I think that’s very creepy, as if the ghosts of the dead could actually look out to sea. Who would want to look out for all eternity at the place where they actually died? Sometimes adults make absolutely no sense!”

  The sisters turned in the direction of Jack’s p
ointed finger and saw more tombstones. Although the setting sun was barely visible through the trees, the girls could still see that yes indeed, the graves faced west. The sun was setting, slowly sinking below the horizon, beyond the sea. Hannah approached the nearest grave marker, whipped out pencil and paper, and started rubbing the impression from the stone.

  In the meantime Lucy was unsteadily weaving her way through what looked like a bramble of fallen twigs and wild rose bushes. Trailing vines wrapped greedy suckers over the branches of a nearby yellow birch, slowly choking the young tree. It seemed like everything wild and thorny was triumphantly taking over the burial ground, reclaiming the dead. The tombstones, monuments to past lives, were now being swallowed up by creeping green vegetation, ultimately suffocating in this woody embrace.

  “Ouch!” yelled Lucy. “This darned rose bush has a lot of thorns. Guys, come help me clear it away. It seems that someone has already started removing some of the branches, and I want to see what they thought was so interesting.”

  The job went quickly as all four kids helped lift, pull and break off the abundant growth surrounding Lucy’s find. Thistle spears poked out of their sweaters and the kids’ faces and hands were covered with dirt. Finally the work was done and four pairs of eyes studied the grey stone in front of them.

  “What’s so special about this one?” asked Emily, disappointed. “It looks like all the rest, except that it’s grey. It’s also facing the other way, not like the tombstones we were looking at before. See, it’s crooked. Do you think there is a reason for that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jack, frowning in concentration. “This grave is also from the 1850s. I can’t make out the last number of the year though. It’s got an anchor carved on the top, so that usually means he was a sailor or was from a shipwreck. He was 48 when he died. Can any of you make out the name? There’s a lot of moss stuck in the grooves of the letters, so it’s really hard to read.”

  “I have an idea.” Hannah took out another blank sheet of paper from her backpack. “We’ll rub it. Sometimes the impressions are clearer because only the letters are coming out on the paper, and not the moss and other gunk growing on the stone. Let’s see if this will work. Shine the flashlight over here.”