Crow Lake

by Mary Lawson

  Matt was available, you see. He was there, though mainly out in the fields, every day, six days a week, all that summer. He was scraping together every penny he could, not for himself—he had so many scholarships even the cost of his books was covered—but to salve his conscience for leaving the rest of us.

  So he was available. And they’d been friends, of a sort, for a long time. And I think his grief over the loss of our parents had broken down some of the reserve between them the previous summer. He’d let her see that he was grieving. I think that may have formed a bond.

  She didn’t tell him everything, even then, but I’d be prepared to bet she wept on his shoulder. I’m guessing that’s how it started.

  He’d have put his arms around her. Of course he would; it’s a natural reaction when someone weeps on your shoulder, even for Presbyterians. He would have held her. Probably he would have patted her back, awkwardly, as if she were Bo. They’d have been around the back of the barn or behind the tractor shed—somewhere out of sight of Calvin.

  Definitely out of sight of Calvin. I’m sure they never even spoke to each other when Calvin was around.

  He’d have put his arms around her, out of pity and compassion, knowing from his own experience what it is to be wretched and unable to speak. I do not believe for a moment that he was in love with her. But he was eighteen, and when he put his arms around her he would have felt how soft she was. She was not pretty, in my opinion. Not at all. Too much flesh on her and not enough definition to her features. But she was undeniably feminine, and when he held her, her breasts would have pressed against him; his chin would have brushed her hair; he would have smelled the warm scent of her. He was eighteen, as I say. She was probably the first person he’d embraced, outside our family.

  It would have happened by accident, the first time. They’d have bumped into each other when she was in tears about something. He would have stood awkwardly for a moment and then put down whatever he was carrying, and they would have moved closer, probably not even aware that they were doing so. She would have leaned against him, because finally there was someone to lean against, and he would have put his arms around her. After a few minutes she would have stepped back, and wiped her face, and said, “I’m sorry,” in that pale, timid little voice of hers.

  And he would have said, “It’s all right, Marie. It’s all right.”

  chapter

  TWENTY-TWO

  Matt and I didn’t have much time together that summer. He left for the farm before I got up in the morning, and by the time he got home in the evening he was too tired to do anything but flop on his bed and read. I spent the days reluctantly doing chores for Luke or Mrs. Stanovich, or playing half-heartedly with the children of kindly neighbours who invited Bo and me over to help Luke out. I lived for Sundays, when Matt would be free. And at first he was, and took me back to the ponds as before, and told me how he was going to study about the creatures in them at university, and how there would be powerful microscopes so you could see just how things worked. He said that he would write to me, at least two letters a week, and tell me about what he was learning so that when it was my turn I would have a head start. He made me see that although we would be apart we would be carrying on pond watching, both of us, and telling each other about it. And there would be the summers. He promised that. No matter what the money situation was, he would come home for the summers.

  That was how it was the first few weeks after his exams were over—our usual routine, but full of plans and promises as well. But then things changed. Matt took to disappearing straight after lunch on Sundays. Sometimes he didn’t get back until almost suppertime, and the whole afternoon had been lost.

  I was deeply resentful, needless to say. I interrogated him about where he went, and he said for walks. I said couldn’t I come with him, and he said, vaguely but kindly, that sometimes he needed to be alone. I said why, and he said that he had things on his mind.

  I complained about him to Luke.

  “Matt’s never here any more.”

  “Yeah. He’s working.”

  “No, I mean when he isn’t working. On Sundays.”

  “Yeah?” said Luke. “Pass me that hammer, will you?” He was repairing the steps to the beach, which got mangled by the ice every winter. Bo was marching up and down at the water’s edge, bellowing hymns. “Jesus loves me dis I know, For la la la dells me so.” We didn’t know whether to blame Mrs. Stanovich or whether she’d picked them up at Sunday school.

  “But where’s he go?”

  “I dunno, Kate. I need that plank. No, the shorter one. Pass it here, okay?”

  “But he must go somewhere. And I want to go to the ponds!”

  Luke looked at me, the hammer balanced in his hand. “He’s taken you to those damned ponds ten million times. Leave him alone, okay? No kidding, you’d think you owned him.”

  He started hammering, loudly. If he minded Matt’s absence himself, wishing that he would stick around and help out on the one day of the week when both of them were free, he didn’t say so. He couldn’t, I suppose, granted how he’d gone on about being able to manage on his own. But also, he might have thought that Matt was worrying about leaving us all and was trying to sort things out in his mind, and needed time alone. Which was true, of course, but beside the point.

  I made no such allowances. All that was in my mind was the thought of how few hours I had left with Matt. And when I look back on it now I could weep, because in my resentment, I managed to spoil those few. He did take me back to the ponds now and then, and I was incapable of enjoying it. It seemed to me that he was distracted, not concentrating as he should. I accused him. I said, “Don’t you like the ponds any more?”

  And he said tiredly, “What are you talking about, Kate? Look, if you aren’t enjoying it, let’s go home.”

  I was forbidden to go back to the ponds alone. They were deep, and a child had been drowned there once. Perhaps that was why I went—as an act of rebellion.

  It was an extremely hot day, heavy and still. I walked tightrope along the rails, the heat of the steel burning through the soles of my shoes, and then slid down the path to “our” pond. It felt very strange to be there on my own. For a while I lay on my stomach and stared into the water, but everything that could move was in hiding from the sun. Even if you poked about, you only got a brief flurry of activity and then stillness again. I stood up, dizzy from the heat. If Matt had been there, he would have sought the shade on the other side of the bank between our pond and the next. At the foot of the bank I hesitated, thinking I heard voices, though I knew I couldn’t have. No one ever came here but us. I scrambled up the side of the bank, using the tufts of grass as handholds, and hauled myself onto the flat grassy top. There were voices. Definitely there were. I stood up and peered over the side.

  They were lying in the shade of the overhanging bank, about twenty feet below and to the left of where I stood. Matt had taken off his shirt and spread it on the ground, and they were both on that. Marie was lying down and Matt was kneeling beside her.

  Marie was curled on her side, her knees drawn up. She was crying. From where I stood I could not see her face, but I could hear her. Matt was saying something to her, the same thing over and over again. I remember how urgent his voice was, almost frightened, utterly unlike him. He kept saying, “Oh God, I’m sorry. Oh God, Marie, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  I couldn’t figure out what he’d done. Maybe he’d hit her—hit her ferociously and knocked her down. Though I could hardly believe it; it took such a lot to make Matt angry enough to hit anyone that Luke was the only one who ever managed it. Then I noticed his shirt again and realized that he would not have spread it out in order to knock her down on it, so it couldn’t be that.

  After a bit he helped her up and tried to put his arms around her. She turned away. She was wearing a thin cotton print dress. It was creased and rumpled and had come completely undone down the front. She began doing it up, sniffling and fumbling. Matt
watched her, his hands clenched at his sides.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I didn’t mean it to happen, Marie. I just couldn’t … But it’ll be okay. Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.”

  She shook her head, not looking at him. I remember that in spite of my confusion, I hated her for that. You could see how upset he was, but she wouldn’t accept it. She finished doing herself up, then straightened and smoothed back her hair.

  It was then that she saw me. She gave a cry of absolute terror, and Matt jerked back and then saw me himself. For a minute all three of us were frozen. Then Marie started crying hysterically. Her fear was so great that it communicated itself to me and I turned and ran, slithered down the other side of the bank, around the edge of our pond, running as I had never run in all my life, my heart pounding with fear. I was halfway up the path to the railroad tracks when Matt caught me.

  “Kate! Kate, stop!” He caught me around the waist and held me. I was kicking and struggling, trying to kick his legs. “Kate, stop! What are you afraid of? There’s nothing to be afraid of! Kate, stop!”

  “I want to go home!”

  “We will. In just a minute. We’ll go home together. But we have to go back to Marie first.”

  “I’m not going back to her! She’s horrible! Screaming like that—she’s disgusting!”

  “She’s just upset. You startled her. Come on now.”

  She was standing where he had left her, arms wrapped around herself, shivering in the blazing heat. Matt brought me up to her, but he didn’t know what to say. It was Marie who spoke.

  “She’ll tell.” She was white as chalk. White as a fish’s belly, trembling, weeping, snivelling.

  “No, she won’t. You won’t tell, will you Kate?”

  I had recovered from my fright and was starting to feel outraged. Was this where he had been? Could this possibly be where he had been? On our precious Sundays?

  I said, “Tell what?”

  “Oh, Matt! She will! She’ll tell!” More weeping.

  Matt turned first to her, then to me. “Kate, you have to promise. Promise me that you won’t tell that you saw us here.”

  I wouldn’t look at him. I watched Marie. Marie Pye, whom Matt preferred to me, though she had no interest in the ponds whatever—you knew that just by looking at her.

  “Kate? Promise me.”

  “I promise I won’t tell on you,” I said at last, turning to him. But he was too smart for that.

  “Or on Marie. You must promise not to tell that you saw her with anyone. Word of honour.”

  The silence grew.

  Matt said quietly, “Word of honour, Kate. Promise me on all the times I’ve brought you to these ponds. Promise on the life of every creature in these ponds.”

  I had no choice then. Sullenly, mumbling, I gave my word. Marie looked a little less fearful. Matt put an arm around her and led her a few yards away. I watched them, jealousy making my lower lip quiver. He talked to her very quietly, for a long time. Finally she nodded, and walked off across the sand toward the path that led up to her father’s farm.

  Matt and I walked home together. I remember I kept looking up at him, hoping that he would smile and everything would be as it had always been, but he seemed unaware of my presence. In the coolness of the woods I drew up the courage to ask if he was mad at me.

  “No. No, I’m not mad at you,” he said. He gave me a smile of such misery that I was shamed out of my own self-pity.

  “Are you all right?” I said, loving him, almost forgiving him. “Is everything going to be all right?”

  He was different after that. He continued working on the farm, but in the evenings and on Sundays he shut himself in his room. I did not know what was wrong with him. In fact I hardly thought in those terms. I was too bewildered by that closed door to think of anyone but myself. But I can imagine now what he must have gone through, as one week followed another, waiting and hoping, and no doubt praying too, for we had been brought up to believe in a merciful God.

  I can imagine how in his mind he kept trying to turn the clock back to that one final moment when he could have stopped, but did not. In later years, when I thought about the similarity between what happened to him and what might have happened to Luke and Sally McLean, it seemed to me that you could define my brothers’ lives by one moment, and it was the same moment for both of them. With Luke, it was the moment he pushed himself away. With Matt, it was the moment he did not.

  God was not merciful. One night in September, a few weeks before he was due to leave for Toronto, Marie Pye came to the door, hair wild, eyes wild, asking for him.

  He was in his bedroom but he must have heard her, or sensed her presence, because he was at the door before Luke or I had time to fetch him, and he pushed past us and took her outside, and we heard him say, “Wait, wait. Let’s go down to the beach.” But she couldn’t wait, her terror was too great to hold, she was doubled over with it, almost crouching on the ground. She said—and we heard her plainly because fear forced the words out far too loudly and we hadn’t even had time to close the door—“Matt, he’ll kill me! He’ll kill me! Matt, he’ll kill me! You don’t believe me but he will! He killed Laurie, and he’ll kill me too!”

  part

  SIX

  chapter

  TWENTY-THREE

  That last stretch of the journey from Toronto to Crow Lake always takes me by the throat. Partly it’s the familiarity; I know every tree, every rock, every boggy bit of marshland so well, that even though I almost always arrive after dark I can feel them around me, lying there in the darkness as if they were my own bones. Partly too, it is the sensation of going back in time, moving from “now” to “then,” and the recognition that wherever you are now and wherever you may be in the future, nothing alters the point you started from.

  Normally, the feeling is as much pleasure as pain. It fills me with a sort of all-pervading regret, but it also anchors me and helps me to know who I am. That Friday night, though, with Daniel in the passenger seat, still peering out of the window as if by penetrating the darkness he might learn whatever there was to know about me, the memories were too close. They weighed too much. I could not see how I was going to get through the coming celebrations—the joking, the merrymaking, the being-sociable, not to mention bringing Daniel into it all. It seemed to me that they must think that I was flaunting him. Bringing him home deliberately in order to show off my success. Here am I, with my wonderful career, and here is my boyfriend with his wonderful career, and look at all of you. I felt I would die rather than have them think that of me.

  “How far?” Daniel asked suddenly, out of the darkness.

  “Five minutes.”

  “Oh! Great! Didn’t know we were so close.” He shifted his position, trying to ease the stiffness. He’d said almost nothing for the past half-hour, for which I was grateful.

  I had to remind myself to turn right at the Northern Side Road rather than continue on to the lake. Normally when I come I stay with Luke and Bo, but the farm is about half a mile along the side road, on the left. You could see it as soon as we turned off the Lake Road. All the lights were on in the farmhouse and they’d switched on the lights over the barn and the silo as well, by way of welcome. The silo is new since Calvin Pye’s day. And the barn is not the original one. Matt burned down Calvin’s barn.

  Matt and Marie were down by the driveway when we pulled in—they would have seen our lights as soon as we saw theirs, and guessed it was us. Marie hung back a bit while Matt and I hugged each other, holding each other hard. As children we never embraced—it’s something we’ve started to do quite recently. Like coming home itself, it is both pleasure and pain. The feel of him is wonderful, but hugging seems such a symbolic gesture, in our case—a physical attempt to close an emotional distance, to bridge a gap which should not be there.

  “Good trip?” he said, wrapping his arms right round me.

  “Fine.”

  We released each other, and he smiled at Da
niel. “You made it then.”

  “Wouldn’t have missed it,” Daniel said.

  “He’s not impressed by the bugs, though,” I said, trying for a lightness of tone and achieving it, more or less. “Hi, Marie.”

  Marie and I do not embrace. We smile the polite smile of acquaintances.

  “Hi,” she said, still hanging back a bit. “You made good time.”

  “Bugs?” Matt said. “Do we have bugs?”

  “I should introduce you,” I said. “Daniel, meet Matt and Marie.”

  It was said. Daniel, meet Matt … After all these weeks of dreading it, visualizing it, living it in advance a thousand times, it was said. And my voice was fine. You wouldn’t have known, if you were listening in, the huge and nameless weight behind those words. They were said, and I had survived it. The world was still turning on its axis. I should have felt relief.

  “You must be hungry,” Marie said. “We’ve held supper for you.”

  Simon materialized out of the dark, tall and lanky like his father. Terribly like his father.

  “Hi, Auntie,” he said. “Do I get a kiss?”

  He calls me Auntie to tease. There is less than nine years between us. I kissed him, and he kissed me back, and shook hands with Daniel and said that it was nice of him to come.

  Daniel said, “You’re the one it’s all in honour of?” and Simon said, “Yup.” Then he added, “Well actually, it’s just an excuse to get Aunt Kate to come home because we hardly ever see her. But you won’t be sorry you came. Huge amounts of food. Mum and Bo and everybody’s been cooking like maniacs.”

  “Speaking of which,” Matt said, “let’s eat. Marie’s made all of us wait for you.” He started ushering us toward the house.