But hardly any trains came through these days and right now I couldn’t sleep, even though I’d not slept the night before. Whenever I closed my eyes the shape of the castle would be there and their faces – George’s and Clarence’s and Dad’s – would be watching me from the windows and doors with big bubbles coming out their mouths, like the bubbles people speak through in cartoons, like they were full of talk that you’d only be able to hear when they got to the surface and popped. So I stopped trying to close my eyes and went through into the living room.
On one side of the room Virgil’s books still sit on the tall, wide shelf he’d built for them. They cover nearly the whole wall. I’m not so sure where he got all of them but a lot came through the post. Every month he’d come back from the post office with a package under one arm and a bottle of whiskey under the other, settle himself down on the cane chair in the kitchen, and announce to the room, ‘Speak to me now if you have to or forever hold your peace, ’cause for the next few hours I’m only listening to the muses.’ Then he’d open the package and start reading. Reading, fishing and hunting – that’s what Virgil did and that’s what he’d always done, ever since he was a kid. In the fall he’d do some hunt guiding for southerners and Americans, in the spring and summer he’d take them out fishing, and in the winter he ran a few trap lines on the north shore of Eye Lake. That’s how he made his money, which was never much but always enough.
On the other side of the room, beneath Nana’s Helsinki picture, there’s a box full of records that’ve been sitting there for as long as I can remember, and I sat down on the floor beside it and started picking through them.
Virgil used to tell me that the smartest thing you could do was not look behind you, not ever. ‘What’s gone, well that’s gone, Eli, and there’s nothing to be done about it, not a damn thing!’ Or sometimes, when he took me fishing, he’d say: ‘Worry about the ones you get in the boat, not the ones that get away.’ Virgil used fishing to explain a lot of things, like keepers and limits and getting your hook set, stuff like that. It was his way of thinking and I kind of believed it too. It was the same as a story we’d learnt in school, about Lot and his wife. In Virgil’s mind, to peek over your shoulder was a sure-fire way of turning everything to salt and leaving an awful bitterness on your tongue; that glimpse you felt you couldn’t help taking, the one when you’d just about made it – well, that’d be the one that spoilt everything.
Virgil’s theory seemed to cover just about everything – except music. He and my dad used to share the box of records, and leafing through them now I remembered that as far as I could tell every one of them was about losing things and looking back: women were always gone, homes were always lost, and every road the singers travelled was speeding away through the rear window. And sure enough, as if to prove his theory, the times he listened to these records were some of the few times I ever saw my uncle look truly unhappy; sometimes I’d even catch him with the tiniest of tears in his eye, as small as the weeping robin’s in his favourite song. But he was still a lot different to his brother – my dad – who always looked like he was listening to those records, even when he wasn’t. Dad was pretty much Virgil’s opposite: if there was any way he could crane his neck over his shoulder, then he’d do it. Take the Helsinki picture, for example.
It’s one of the only things Nana had brought with her from her old country. She had to travel light, she said. The ad told them their new husbands would provide for them. ‘Wives needed,’ it said. She was sixteen years old.
So she brought a picture of a cathedral in Helsinki. She’d bought it as she was waiting for her boat on the wharves of the city. She’d only been there once before – to visit an uncle when she was six – and, now, to leave. The cathedral was built of bright white bricks and had a huge, blue-green dome on top, dotted with painted golden stars. Above it the sky was an almost perfect blue, and so it looked as though one kind of sky was reaching up into another, changing from one of those northern summer nights, where it’s never quite dark, into the clearest of days. It was the last building she looked at before the boat pulled away, Nana said, so she was happy she had the picture. And glancing at it now I could see why that was. It looked so still and quiet and clear, so full of light, that it made you feel it’d be there forever. A sky with no clouds. Stars that would always shine.
But whatever Dad saw in it was plain dark. Whenever he looked at it he’d stop whatever he was doing and sit down and stare miserably in front of him as if it were some special place he missed most in the whole world, even though he’d only been there one time ever, on his honeymoon. My dad’s circle of tempers was all skewy and seemed to spin around in one direction mostly: down.
I wasn’t sure what a circle of tempers was back then, not exactly, but I’d heard Dr. Gashinski tell Nana that my dad suffered from something that sounded like cycle diarrhea, which only made me think of water and shit swirling around in a flushing toilet. She didn’t know what it was neither and so he told her it was a Latin word that translated as a circle of tempers, which meant a real up-and-downness in how you felt and that sometimes it’d be like night for my dad and sometimes it’d be like day, except that mostly it seemed like it was night. Virgil would have said that it was like fish and how you could divide them into evening biters and morning biters, except that a bunch of the time my dad wasn’t any kind of biter at all: he’d just lie in bed and leave the cups of coffee and plates of pancakes Nana sent me up the stairs with – to tempt him to get up – on the floor beside him.
Don’t look back. I do sort of believe that. If it’s going to set your circle of tempers spinning any which way, spinning you right down into the dark or the night or the toilet bowl, then don’t do it. But stuff comes back when you least expect it. Like Clarence’s castle. You never know what you’re going to catch when you cast. And if I didn’t look back, just a bit, just now and again, then I wouldn’t be able to see Virgil, or Dad, or Nana, or Curious George, or any of them. And sometimes I’ve got no choice but to look that way, just the same as Lot’s wife and those country singers. I can’t help it – even if sometimes it leaves a sad, scary taste in my mouth. Backwards is where the lost things are. And where else are you going to find them?
Where the Lost Things Are
It was late in May the day George McKenzie went missing and I knew from the start they were looking in the wrong places.
I was sleeping on the porch because it was one of the first warm days of the year and I was woken up by the sound of knocking at our front door.
‘Hello there, Gracie,’ Virgil croaked.
Gracie didn’t say anything.
‘Christ, it’s barely morning.’
Gracie started sobbing. The skin on her face scrunched up like it’d got old already, even though she was still young then.
‘He’s gone, Virgil,’ she sobbed. ‘He didn’t come home.’
‘Who’s gone? Joseph?’
‘No, not Joseph. Don’t I wish. Not Joseph.’
‘Who, Gracie?’
‘It’s George.’
I was good and awake then and listened as Virgil started phoning around. Soon I could hear all sorts of people in our kitchen. Jake Ottertale the trapper and Jim Clement and all sorts of other people.
‘You take the tracks,’ Virgil said to Dad. ‘You and Larry. Check as far as the narrows, at least. Me, Jim and Jake’ll take the bush as far as Eye Lake. I’ll knock at Buddy’s and see if he’s got a plane free.’
Then it was quiet again and when I walked into the kitchen there was just Nana and Gracie there. Gracie was sitting at the table staring at a napkin and Nana was trying to give her a bowl of porridge with raisins in it, which was what she did when bad things happened.
‘Why don’t you go outside, Eli,’ Nana said. ‘We’ll get your breakfast later.’
Outside in the garden I found Billy leaning over the fence lo
oking excited and kind of pleased with himself.
‘Have you heard?’ he said. ‘The wolves got George.’
‘No they didn’t,’ I said. ‘They just started looking for him.’
‘I bet you the wolves got him. They can eat someone in a couple of minutes. Guts and everything.’
‘Wolves don’t eat people,’ I said. ‘Except when they’re dead.’
‘What do you know?’ Billy sneered. ‘Maybe he is dead.’
Billy’s two days older than me and always tried to act like it was years instead, like he knew a hundred times more stuff than me. But he didn’t know where George was. Nobody did – except me. But that was eighteen years ago and we were only eleven.
Everyone in our house called George ‘Curious George.’ We hadn’t always called him that and we didn’t call him it to his face. We started it when his dad, Joseph McKenzie, lost his job and decided George was allergic to everything and shouldn’t go out too much, even to play, which was bad news for me because George was my best friend and when he wasn’t around there was usually only me and Billy. Billy lived next door and George lived right across the street, in the only house that was across our street. Beyond us there was just the river and the train tracks and the woods.
You would’ve thought Mr. McKenzie would have noticed George being allergic to everything before and how he was no different than he’d always been – so white and pale he was almost see-through, with eyes that were nearly pink and went red and runny when the sun got too strong. Billy found out a word for it once: ‘albino.’ He was pretty pleased with himself to start with but lost interest after saying it about a hundred times. But Mr. McKenzie decided it was all on account of allergies. It was like the moment he stopped working was the first moment he’d stopped to think about it.
And you could have thought he would have come up with a better explanation. He was a teacher, after all, and educated. Maybe that was why he took losing his job in such a bad way, even though everyone else was losing their jobs too.
Because even back then everything was always closing in Crooked River. People were always talking about how there used to be the railroad and there used to be the lumber mill and there used to be the mine – until it seemed like a town where everything used to be. You’d hear them on the street saying things like ‘This town is finished’ and ‘That’s it for here – this place is kaput.’ Then they’d suddenly begin saying, ‘But I tell you, I’m not leaving. I’m from here and I’m not going anywhere!’ But some of them must have gone somewhere. Every time George and me went to the corner store to buy comics, Mr. Krishka, the owner, used to look at us a little sadly and say, ‘When I opened this place it used to be 6,750.’ And I’d feel kind of guilty then, for being 5,671. And that was why Mr. McKenzie lost his job: because there were less children, just like there was less good lumber and less iron ore and less trains.
When things went kaput for Mr. McKenzie he did two things: he decided George was allergic to everything and he started building a higher fence around his house. He started building it the fall before George went missing. I remember that because it was the same fall I thought George and me wouldn’t be able to be in the same class anymore, on account of the cord that was wrapped around my neck when I was born. And maybe on account of the cold too, though nobody was so sure about that.
I was born in the kitchen of number one O’Callaghan Street – right in the next room – where my mom could be nearest the wood stove. She would have been in the hospital except the tires had frozen on my dad’s truck. It was forty degrees below zero outside. According to my nana I came out completely purple as if I were freezing to death already, but really it was because I had my cord wrapped around my neck and couldn’t breathe, not for ages, not until Dr. Gashinski cut it with a pair of scissors. ‘I would’ve thrown him back, a sickly minnow like that,’ Virgil used to joke; and sometimes I did imagine myself that day, all purple and gasping for breath like a fish on the bottom of a boat. Later, when I’d hear Nana tell the story of my birth, she’d sometimes give a little shiver, as if it were still forty below outside.
I’d heard Nana telling our teacher, Mrs. Arnold, the story that August. I was meant to be in the garden but I was on the porch instead, looking through a crack in the door. Mrs. Arnold was sitting in front of a teacup, pushing a piece of her hair back behind her ear and nodding.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I understand.’
Nana was explaining about the cord.
Then she said she’d go fetch me and I ran out into the garden.
Seeing as I’d had so much fun that year in school, Mrs. Arnold told me, they were going to let me do it again. ‘Aren’t you lucky, Eli,’ Nana said. But I didn’t feel lucky. I felt mad and out of breath as if the cord were wrapped around my neck again. On the stove I could see a pot of porridge bubbling. The next week I heard Billy telling George that his mom said I couldn’t be in the same grade as them because I was so dumb. But it turned out that even if I had been in the same grade as George we still wouldn’t have been in the same class, the same school even, because George never went back to school at all.
The fall came on slow that year. The leaves took a long time to change and drop. There were a few yellow ones on the poplars by the river on our first day back and I noticed a few on the maples outside the museum that were turning red and dying and hanging off like scabs. Billy and me walked past them every day on the way to school and every day there were a few more. But George wasn’t with us then. Apparently he was suddenly so allergic he couldn’t go to school.
After three weeks of George not coming to school, Mrs. Arnold came to visit his house. The leaves on the poplars by the river were almost all yellow by then and the wind made them rustle with that dry, flickering sound they have and some of them were falling into the water. I was sitting on the bank, watching them fall and float away on the current. It was always so peaceful down by the river, watching the water and wondering if there were fish swimming underneath between the weeds. Except it wasn’t quite as peaceful that day because Mr. McKenzie was sawing planks in his garden to build his fence higher with. He’d been doing it all week – muttering about people interfering and spying, and drinking cans of Molson and sawing up planks and building his fence so high you couldn’t see over it. He’d been growing a beard, which was red and full of sawdust, and it reminded me of Noah in the Bible, building his ark, which we’d been told about in school before they decided I was stupid on account of the cord. When I saw Mrs. Arnold I wanted to run over and tell her how I’d remembered about Noah – just to show her I wasn’t completely stupid. I waved and started running but she didn’t see me and carried on walking up to the gate of Mr. McKenzie’s fence, with the wind blowing and a piece of grey hair sticking out from under her hat. Instead I crept into our garden and from behind the crabapple tree I could hear bits and pieces of what they were saying.
‘Let’s be reasonable here, Joseph,’ Mrs. Arnold said. ‘The school will take any precautions necessary … it’s best...’
‘Do you know what I think’s best … I’ll tell you...’
‘There’s no need to speak to me like that, Joseph...’
‘And I’ll tell you this, Frances … if you think the board can throw me aside like an … it’s all going to shit, to fucking shit, and now I’ve got to explain myself to you … and how long have you even been here, eh, Frances, you fucking out-of-towners thinking you know … ’
Mostly the conversation seemed to be Mr. McKenzie telling Mrs. Arnold this and then telling her it again and again – with bits of sawdust flying off his beard like flecks of spit – about how everything had gone to shit and how she’d only moved to Crooked River ten years before and so didn’t know shit, as if you needed to live in Crooked River for at least twenty years like him to know shit. And Mrs. Arnold just being quiet and patient and looking at Mr. McKenzie like maybe he needed hold
ing back a grade or two.
This went on for a while. Nana’s face was in the window; Virgil was out hunting; Dad was still in bed. Then suddenly Mr. McKenzie turned around and walked back into the house and because Mrs. Arnold stayed where she was I thought he was going to get George, to prove how allergic he was to everything, but instead he came out with his deer rifle. He didn’t point it, he just held it.
‘I think this conversation is over, Frances,’ he said. He was talking quietly now.
‘I guess it is, Joseph,’ Mrs. Arnold said.
That’s when George started having what they called ‘home-schooling.’ Billy and me were a bit envious at first, thinking now he didn’t have to go to school he’d be able to do whatever he wanted during the week. But it didn’t work out like that. He wasn’t allowed out at all during the week, even after school hours; he was only allowed out on the weekends. The McKenzies’ fence was nearly six feet high by then and sometimes we’d see him looking out through gaps in its planks, desperate to see what was going on, all white-faced and wide-eyed like a lemur in a zoo. And that’s when we started calling him ‘Curious George,’ after a toy monkey I’d had who was called that.
‘Nothing,’ my dad shrugged when Virgil got back. Virgil hadn’t even asked anything, he’d just looked at him when he came in the door. ‘What about you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Did Buddy send out a plane?’
‘He sent one. But there’s only so much you can spot from up there. It’s like looking for a needle in the proverbial.’
‘How far you get?’
Eye Lake Page 3