Eye Lake

by Tristan Hughes

  When I saw it, it was like I knew it’d be there. The tower of the castle, jutting out of the surface. The water seemed to be dropping almost as fast as the sun.

  Everything comes back in the end.

  Through the woods I could hear shouting and I ran towards it until I got to the Pine dorm. Billy’s truck was parked out front and Bobby was standing in the garden, wrapped up in his sheets. There were so many bugs you could hardly breathe, and the sound of them was everywhere, as if they’d flown into my ear and were buzzing around inside my head. Billy’s voice sounded like them too, starting slow and faint and then reaching up and up until it became a loud whining. I couldn’t tell what he was saying. It all sounded like mosquito to me.

  ‘Mom doesn’t want Billy to visit anymore,’ Bobby whispered.

  I didn’t say nothing.

  ‘I kept my minnow in a bucket,’ Bobby said. ‘And I put a rock in there too, for cover. Like you said they liked.’

  ‘I don’t want you just turning up, Billy,’ I heard Sarah shouting from inside. ‘I’m not your fucking fallback when your whores are out of town. Nine years, Billy! Nine fucking years! We’re either your family or we’re not!’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said to Bobby. ‘They like rocks.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ Billy whined. ‘This is my family’s frigging property, if you’ve not noticed. And that’s my kid.’

  ‘Where you keeping it?’ I asked Bobby.

  ‘Down by the lake.’

  And I was going to get him to show me it when the door flew open and Billy strode out in a big huff. We looked at each other in what light was still left.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here, Eli?’

  I didn’t say nothing. I was thinking how I wished Billy had been number four thousand or something, so I wouldn’t have to have grown up with him.

  ‘I mean, what the fuck?’

  ‘Eli came to see the minnow I caught,’ Bobby said. ‘We went fishing.’

  ‘Now this takes the frigging cookie,’ Billy shouted at no one in particular. He was standing in the same way he’d always stood, ever since he was a kid, with his legs bandied out wide like he’d just got off a horse, like he was a cowboy having a tantrum. His new moustache was twitching up and down as if it were an inchworm walking over a leaf. ‘Eli-fucking-O’Callaghan. Is that what this is? You’ve got so frigging desperate you’ve started banging Eli?’

  ‘You’re such a spoilt goddamn prick,’ Sarah said. She was standing in the doorway behind him. Her voice had gone still and calm now. ‘As if that’d be any of your business, Billy. Nine years on and off, waiting for you to grow up. As if it’d be your business anymore who I banged.’

  ‘Damn fucking right it’s my business,’ Billy said. ‘It’s my kid, Sarah. I don’t want some frigging retard playing daddy to my kid.’

  Sarah’s face turned as hard and white as quartz.

  ‘He’s not,’ she said.

  ‘Not what? Retarded? I’ve known him my whole fucking life, remember!’

  ‘He’s not your kid, Billy.’

  Billy turned around and punched her in the face.

  ‘You better go now, Billy,’ I said.

  Billy said nothing, he just climbed into his truck.

  Afterwards I got Bobby to show me his minnow, while Sarah was cleaning up her face. It was too dark to see it in the bottom of the bucket but I pretended I could anyway.

  ‘It’s a shiner,’ I told him.

  ‘Who were you shouting at?’ Bobby asked. ‘When we were fishing.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t nobody.’

  Crooked River: Population 1

  Idon’t have a phone but there’s one in the office building. When Sarah knocked on my door and said I had a call I wasn’t really sure what she was talking about at first – I never get calls; I can’t remember ever getting one. I walked with her a bit, towards the office, and there were bruises under both her eyes and a cut across the top of her nose. I didn’t know what to say at all.

  ‘Your face looks pretty bad,’ I said.

  ‘You know what, Eli,’ she said. ‘In a strange way I’m glad it does.’

  She put her hand up to her cheek and said: ‘This is a full stop. This is absolutely a full stop. This ends the whole miserable page.’

  The office had a big boulder right in front of it with a sign that said: This represents the obstacles we can overcome. There’s a bunch of other stuff like that in the grounds of the Poplars – for the business people who never overcame the bugs and snow I guess. There’s even a statue of Buddy Bryce that he paid an artist to make. He wasn’t that happy when it arrived, though. It didn’t look like him at all: it was a mushroom-shaped piece of iron, with a kind of stalk growing out the top. It had a sign explaining it too: This represents the Northern Spirit. The upward thrust of the sculpture, akin to a new branch growing from a tree, encapsulates the vision, entrepreneurship and endeavour of pioneers like Buddy Bryce.

  I remember when they first showed it. Buddy had invited a bunch of people from town to the Poplars and it was covered in a white sheet. Then the artist – a funny-looking guy with long black hair and glasses – said a few words and pulled off the sheet. Everybody clapped, except for Buddy. He looked like someone had just filled his boots with moose piss.

  Afterwards I heard Buddy and the artist talking. ‘It doesn’t look nothing like me,’ Buddy said. ‘Jesus! It doesn’t look like anything.’

  ‘It’s figurative,’ the artist said. ‘It symbolizes your achievements.’

  ‘Figurative,’ Buddy hissed. ‘Well, maybe that thousand bucks I’m supposed to be shelling out for it is figurative too. It symbolizes you trying to rip me off with this piece of junk.’

  When I got to the phone I’d started thinking things through and reckoned it was probably going to be Buddy, phoning to sack me. It was going to be a full stop for me too.

  It wasn’t Buddy though.

  At first it sounded like a bad connection, low and raspy and crackling, but it turned out to be Gracie McKenzie and that’s just how she sounds.

  ‘Eli,’ she said. ‘I think you better come to the museum. They found something … Are you there, Eli?’

  I’d kind of forgotten to say anything, because I wasn’t used to getting calls. ‘I’m here,’ I blurted, and realized I didn’t need to talk so loud. ‘What they find?’

  ‘Remains,’ she said. There was another long pause when I forgot to speak again.

  ‘Look, Eli, I’ll tell you everything when you get here. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  On the walk into town I found a baby owl sitting under a jack pine. It was covered in white fluff and stared at me with its black eyes, snapping its beak and opening and closing its talons. Up above in the branches I could hear another, louder, snapping noise, and when I looked I found its mother there, staring angrily down at me with the same fierce, black eyes. I thought I could maybe find the nest and put the baby owl back, but the way its mother was staring at me you could tell that wasn’t such a good idea.

  When I arrived at the museum Mr. Haney was standing out side again, with his hands on his hips, shaking his head. The big poster above the door had come off at the corner and was peeling down. ENNIAL, it said. 001.

  Inside, Gracie was sitting in her glass office. She must have been smoking a lot because you could hardly see her in there, the smoke was so thick; some of it drifted out the window of the office into the museum, making everything look grainy and misty. Clarence peered from the wall as if he was trying to spot me through a fog.

  When Gracie saw me she waved her hand and I went in and sat on a chair opposite her desk. There were piles of old newspapers strewn over it: copies of the Crooked River Progress from years and years back. Here and there you could see a face smiling out f
rom them, some Miss Teen Crooked River or Bass Classic winner from ages ago. Gracie’s skin looked like their newspaper skin – thin and yellowy and brittle, from another time.

  ‘I tell you, Eli,’ she rasped, ‘it’ll be another hundred years before I finish cataloguing this junk. Now look, I’m sorry for dragging you all the way here but I thought I’d best tell you about what they found.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Some fishermen or canoeists or something. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter who.’

  ‘What they find?’ I asked. My head was beginning to hurt around the temples as though I were wearing a cap that was too small for me. I was hoping she was going to say Clarence’s castle and then I’d say it was me who found it and that’s why I’d come yesterday – to tell Mr. Haney and her. But the pinched, hurting part of my head was thinking something else.

  ‘Remains,’ Gracie said. ‘Human remains.’

  She was looking right at me. Her eyes were glistening and dark like the owl’s. They were younger than her face, even though her face was older than she was. I kept my own eyes on the faces of the newspaper people.

  ‘I didn’t want to explain all this on the phone, Eli – the details are still a bit loosey-goosey. But they found them east of Eye Lake, near the bank of the Crooked River. One adult male, they said. Not recent.’

  One adult male. I’d heard it when she said it, in her voice: a little flinch or flicker of something – of relief, I guess. I felt it too.

  ‘The thing is, I always promised your uncle Virgil if I heard anything about them finding human stuff, anything that might be about Clarence, then I’d tell him first. I promised him, Eli, and you’re the closest thing left now so I’m telling you.’

  In my mind I could see footprints and the river flowing, around and around. It was soothing in a way. It was the picture I’d always had.

  ‘Of course, this could be nothing to do with your grandfather, nothing at all. The police are nosing through the bones as we speak. They might be in touch with you.’

  My head began to hurt again. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What do they want with me?’

  ‘For identification, Eli. To get a DNA sample and what not.’

  I didn’t really get what all that meant but Gracie said it was just the same as in those TV shows where bits of people are like fingerprints and people from the same family have the same ones. By taking a sample of me they could check if the remains were Clarence’s.

  ‘I haven’t got a TV at the Poplars,’ I said. ‘I sure wish I did.’

  Then I heard Mr. Haney making coughing noises outside the office.

  ‘What do you want, Tom?’ Gracie said.

  ‘It’s just in case of visitors, Grace. There’s an awful lot of smoke … ’

  ‘Jesus, Tom. When the hell was the last time we had visitors?’

  Outside the museum there’s an old steam train and an old mining drill and an old canoe standing on two poles. I went to sit on the bench beside it. It used to be made of birch bark but that rotted away so they replaced it with plastic. Underneath, a placard says: This is to commemorate the arrival of Clarence O’Callaghan on the site of what subsequently became the Township of Crooked River. Before it came to the museum, the canoe used to sit in a shed in our garden and George used to sneak in there sometimes to take a peek at it. Sometimes I’d catch him at the shed door peering at it, tilting his head slowly this way and that, like a curious bird.

  The arrival of Clarence was George’s favourite story in school. We had normal history lessons, about the voyageurs and confederation and all that, but then we had Crooked River history lessons too. As far as I remember Crooked River history was just two stories and then a lot of stuff about railroads and mines and logging. Clarence arriving in his canoe and building his hotel was the first story, and Buddy Bryce finding the iron ore and them diverting the Crooked River and draining Red Rock Lake to get at it was the second one. George liked the first one best, probably for the same reasons he started getting National Geographic and going on expeditions and thinking of himself as a real explorer.

  This is the story we heard in school.

  On May 6, 1901, Clarence O’Callaghan paddled east up the Crooked River. Nobody was certain exactly where he started from. It might have been Fort Francis. It might have been anywhere. All they knew was that he must have paddled a long way – there were no roads here back then, not for hundreds and hundreds of miles. You travelled by water if you travelled at all, the same as the trappers and prospectors and loggers – who were the only white men who passed through these parts back then. Nobody saw much point in having roads in a place where it was all forest and water and swamp and bedrock. Nobody much planned on staying for long.

  But they were planning to pass through it. That’s what Clarence knew, that’s what he was counting on. They were building a railroad to take wheat from out west to the port at Thunder Bay and then east down the St. Lawrence into the Atlantic Ocean. And Clarence reckoned that the places where the trains would have to stop to refuel and re-water and whatever else those old trains had to do, well, there’d be men who had to stay put there. And they’d need somewhere to stay put. Clarence had an eye for an opportunity, our teacher told us. He took out a map, scratched his head, looked at where the railroad was being put through, flipped a coin or two, picked a spot, and started out in his canoe. He was sixteen years old. And he was right, too – about the spot. Right on the button. Two weeks after he set off the Canadian Northern Railway announced they were putting in a division point – which was what they called the stopping places for trains – almost exactly where Clarence was headed. Except he didn’t know that yet. There was nobody about to tell him as he made his lonesome way up the river.

  And there was still nobody about when he arrived, not a soul. ‘Picture this,’ our teacher would say, ‘picture Clarence pulling his canoe up on the bank – near the very spot where the two old white pines grow – and looking around him. What would he have seen? Would he have seen the bank or Mike’s Mart or the Red Rock Inn? Would he have seen the school we’re sitting in? No. He would have seen those two white pines and behind them a whole bunch more white pines. There was nothing here back then, not a single building. So Clarence got out of his canoe, walked up the bank a couple of hundred yards, picked a piece of flat ground, and started building one.’

  When the railroad men arrived a few months later Clarence already had the foundations finished. ‘What are you doing?’ they asked.

  ‘I’m building a hotel.’

  ‘For who?’

  ‘For you guys.’

  ‘How’d you know we were putting a division point here?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Jesus H. Christ!’ said the railroad men. ‘I guess you’re one lucky crazy son-of-a-bitch.’

  Who knows why Clarence started building his hotel. Who knows why anybody does anything. That’s what my nana used to say when crazy things happened, things you couldn’t work out the reasons for. It sounded funny when she said it, in her accent. She must’ve heard it when she first came over and she spoke it like it was something special she’d found on her travels, like she’d kept all the new words and sayings she’d picked up in her new life as souvenirs. Who knows?

  Our teacher, Mrs. Arnold, was pretty sure she knew. She said it was because Clarence was a pioneering spirit. I don’t think none of us kids knew exactly what that meant, only that pioneering spirits were restless and ambitious and had built Canada, the same as Mrs. Arnold told us. But I couldn’t quite get my head around that. I used to try imagining it, as if Clarence woke up one day and thought, ‘I’m feeling restless and ambitious today so I’m off to build Canada. First I’m going to have some breakfast, but right after that I’m off to build Canada.’ What Virgil and Dad told me was that Clarence was the last of nine kids on a tobacco farm in Sarnia and he got sick of
being the ninth and getting all the shitty jobs. They said one day, after cutting tobacco till the sun went down, he got into a fight with the eighth kid and got beaten. ‘You’re nothing,’ said the eighth. ‘You won’t come to nothing. So you better keep cutting that tobacco and keep your trap shut while you’re doing it.’ The next day Clarence was gone. One year later he was building his hotel. I couldn’t work out why taking a beating would make someone start thinking about building Canada. Or a hotel. Or anything.

  George didn’t worry about all that stuff. He wasn’t interested in the building part and everything that came after. The part he liked was the arriving bit, the one where Clarence was standing by himself in a place where nobody but Indians went, where each step took him onto ground he’d never seen before, onto ground hardly anyone had seen before. You could see George’s face go funny even thinking about it. You could tell he was picturing himself there, standing wide-eyed in a world that was one big collection of exhibits, just waiting for him to find them.

  Big Rock Candy Mountain

  The week after we found the underground place, George came over in the morning and told me he was going back there. I said I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea, what with the chance there was a shacker living in it and everything, but George got in a huff and said he’d go anyway, with or without me, and I knew he’d not get far with just him paddling. Okay, I said, and told him I’d go this one time and then we should leave it be. I don’t like it there, I told him. He nodded his head and the brim of his hat slipped over his eyes.

  ‘Why don’t you wear a baseball cap like everyone else?’ I asked.

  ‘Why don’t you shut up?’ he said.

  When we got to the riverbank we couldn’t find the canoe anywhere. I had a look through the bulrushes and George tramped up and down through the bog mat, poking around with this old walking stick thing he’d brought along. ‘Well, that’s that then,’ I said. ‘No can do.’ ‘Maybe if you’d look properly we’d find it,’ George said. But it wasn’t there and no amount of looking was going to change that.