Eye Lake

by Tristan Hughes

  ‘My dad says you’re not allergic to anything,’ Billy said. ‘He says your dad’s gone nuts.’

  George tried to hit him but Billy just laughed and pushed him onto the driftwood. I wanted to hit Billy as well then, except he was already walking away along the shore with his bag of eggs.

  ‘You two are a real pair of loons,’ he shouted back at us. ‘Looooooons,’ he shouted, trying to sound like one.

  George didn’t say anything until we were halfway back to town. Usually he’d be telling me stuff all the time or doing his National Geographic speeches or something, but now he was quiet, as though the snow was muffling him.

  ‘He’s not nuts,’ he said at last. ‘He’s not.’

  We were almost at the town sign before he spoke again. The snow was falling heavier and heavier. Under its whiteness Crooked River looked different – like a new place, like another town. It always did after the first snow. And then we’d get used to it and it’d look like the same old town again.

  ‘It’s just he knows stuff, stuff other people in town don’t know. He says he’s done all the research and he says at least we’ll be prepared, even if nobody else is. He says that’s why he made our fence so high – so he could prepare things without everybody else knowing.’

  ‘What stuff?’ I asked.

  ‘About what’s happening everywhere, about how it’s all going to turn out.’

  ‘How what’s going to turn out?’

  ‘The world,’ George said.

  And that’s when he told me about the end of the world.

  Of course his dad couldn’t say exactly what day it would happen. That would’ve been impossible, George said. But with the current situation it was definitely going to happen. It’s imminent, George said – which meant soon, he told me. Then he started talking about nuclear missiles and pre-emptive strikes and Ronald Reagan and the Russians. He said his dad had calculated which cities in North America would be hit and how far the destruction would spread and how long the fallout would last. Fallout was radioactive, which meant it was poisonous, and it would fall just the same as the snow was falling. George was telling me all this at a hundred miles an hour, as if he’d been storing it up the whole month, and I knew it wasn’t really him talking but Mr. McKenzie: it was the same as when he made his National Geographic speeches.

  None of it made much sense to me. I’d heard some of those things on TV but that was far away and this was Crooked River. The news didn’t happen in Crooked River. In the Crooked River Progress there was a section called ‘Police Watch,’ which was Virgil’s favourite section. He read it out whenever he got a new edition. His favourite one ever was about a dog. 12:58 p.m., it went. Dead dog spotted lying in the centre of Main Street. Plans made for its removal. 12:59 p.m. Dog moved on of own volition. I figured it was a good bet the end of the world wouldn’t happen here.

  As we passed the museum I asked George what his mom thought about the end of the world.

  ‘Mom doesn’t know the details,’ he said. ‘Dad says she doesn’t need to know them yet. She’d only get worried. He only told me because we found the underground place. The underground place is where we’re going to live when it happens.’

  I didn’t say nothing for a bit then and George started to twitch and look nervous. He took off his deerstalker hat and the snowflakes fell onto his hair, which was so white you could hardly see them there.

  ‘You can’t tell anybody,’ he blurted out. ‘I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody. Dad says when it happens the people who haven’t prepared will try taking all our things. That’s why nobody can know where the underground place is, even Mom.’

  We were almost back at number one O’Callaghan Street by then, and when we got to the gate into the garden we stopped and stood there for a while. Normally George would’ve come in with me for a cup of cocoa but he hung back now, shifting from foot to foot like he had something more to tell me.

  ‘Maybe he’ll let you stay with us, Eli. I could ask him.’

  I thought about that for a second.

  ‘What about Nana?’ I asked. ‘And Virgil and Dad?’

  He didn’t say nothing then. There was a tight feeling in my chest and a burning feeling at the back of my head. I was too mad to say anything so I turned around and left him and walked through the gate on my own.

  That night I slept in my Spider-Man suit. I hoped it’d protect me from the bad thoughts that kept creeping into my head. Whenever I closed my eyes I could see the Earl’s face, covered in egg, staring out at me from the triangle. And then the watchers. They could see me past the edges of the ice and their heads were swaying back and forth unhappily on the lake’s bed. The snow was falling, except instead of settling it was melting everything. The Earl’s face was going bit by bit, until there was only his glasses left hanging in the air where his face should have been. And then I realized that the watchers were Virgil and Nana and Dad and Clarence, and the snow was falling clean through the water and landing on their faces too and bit by bit they were melting until there was nothing there but the empty bed of the lake. And then I must have fallen into sleep, because the next thing I remember is hearing the sound of Virgil’s truck clunking and clattering through the icy potholes of O’Callaghan Street. I was so relieved I jumped straight out of bed and ran down into the kitchen in my Spider-Man suit. Nana was leaning over the sink but I was past her and through the door before she had the chance to tell me to put my coat on. Outside the sky was clear and the sun glistened over the surface of the new white snow.

  Prairie Flowers

  ‘Are you going to the birthday party?’ Bobby asked. I was sitting out front of the Tamarack dorm, sorting through my tackle box. They’ve got a curious way of getting all tangled up, do tackle boxes, however careful you are putting stuff back into them. But I’ve always enjoyed sorting through them. It’s real soothing somehow – finding the right place for everything and discovering old hooks and lures you don’t even remember having. I’d already found one of Virgil’s old ones in the bottom of my box: a homemade jig, with black eyes and bright red and yellow feathers, like some kind of South Seas idol.

  ‘Whose party?’

  Bobby looked at me as if maybe I was joking him. But I wasn’t.

  ‘Crooked River’s!’ he said. ‘You must know about that birthday. We’ve been doing stuff in school for it all week and there’s posters and everything all over town.’

  ‘I knew about the birthday. I guess I must’ve forgotten about the party.’ And I had clean forgot. The day before, as I was walking back from the mine site, a car had pulled up beside me and it was Officer Red, who was called that because his hair was that colour, almost the same colour as the dust on the road.

  ‘Hey there, Eli,’ he’d called out from the window of his car. ‘This is some coincidence – I was just meaning to call on you out at the Poplars.’

  I figure it was a coincidence. He did a lot of driving, Officer Red. Because there were less and less people in Crooked River there was less crime too and so he just drove around a lot hoping someone might break a law or two.

  ‘Where you been?’ he asked.

  ‘Out at the mine site,’ I said. ‘I was on the beach, where they used to have the picnics.’

  ‘Beaches and picnics, eh? I don’t recall ever seeing either of those on the mine site. You weren’t shooting up those buildings?’ he asked. ‘Because I’ve sure noticed a bunch of holes in them.’

  ‘I wasn’t shooting nothing,’ I said.

  He smiled then and said, ‘I was only kidding, Eli. Now, why don’t you hop in the car and we can go down to the station?’

  In the station house everyone had seemed pretty excited. Sergeant Hughie was pointing this way and that and Miss Kadychuk the secretary was scurrying around trying to follow his pointing. There was a man I hadn’t seen before, standing by the desk, a
nd I think all the fussing and pointing was to find him a room to use. I guess I’d come in sooner than they’d expected. As I watched them I remembered Virgil reading out the Police Watch. 12.58. Dog in road. 12.59. Dog departed of its own volition. Sergeant Hughie waved to me and Officer Red told me to take a seat.

  ‘Don’t you worry yourself, Eli. This is all just routine,’ he told me, looking kind of proud and important as if this much was always happening in the station.

  It was the same as what Gracie had said. They wanted to get a sample from me, of my DNA stuff. I didn’t know what they needed for a sample.

  After they’d sorted out the room for the man, Officer Red led me over to the door and we went in together.

  ‘This is Officer Mathieu,’ Officer Red said. ‘He’s from forensics in Thunder Bay and he’ll take your sample.’

  ‘It’s very simple, Mr. O’Callaghan,’ said Officer Mathieu. ‘All we require is a single swab with some of your saliva on it.’

  A swab. I looked at him and then at Officer Red.

  ‘It’s that,’ Officer Red told me, pointing at Officer Mathieu’s hand. He was holding one of them things you clean your ears with. He put it in my mouth for a second and that was that. Apparently even a tiny drop of my spit had a fingerprint of Clarence in it. Even my spit was full of bits of lost people.

  Afterwards Officer Red told me it wouldn’t take them long to get the results, and as he was leading me to the door out he started asking if I was going to the street party they were having to celebrate the township’s birthday. ‘But of course you will be,’ he’d said, answering his own question. ‘You being related to the founding father and all that.’ And then he’d looked over at some plastic bags with tags on them that were sitting on a desk in the corner and stopped speaking, as if it weren’t proper to bring Clarence up when it might be his remains right there in those bags. But I wasn’t thinking about those remains. I was thinking that if I spat on the ground there’d be bits of them all in it somehow.

  ‘So,’ Bobby asked, ‘are you going?’

  ‘I’m not too sure,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel much like celebrating, Bobby.’

  ‘But there’s going to be a parade and floats and everything. My teacher said there’s even going to be a float with someone dressed up as your grandfather on it.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ I said.

  ‘Please,’ Bobby said. ‘My mom doesn’t want to go – because of the bruises on her face. But she might go if you go, and if she doesn’t then I could go with you.’

  I said yes then, even though I didn’t want to go. It seemed like I always ended up going places I didn’t want to go.

  The three of us walked together down the dirt road towards town. The sun was out and it was warm and the smell of the pine sap was soft and sweet. It was already hard to even imagine there’d been a winter. It was like this every year – the seasons slipped from one to the other so fast it was like you’d just blinked and didn’t quite believe what’d been in front of your eyes the second before. Bobby was scouting through the roadsides for frogs and toads. I would’ve liked to have joined him. When he was around it made me want to do all the stuff I used to do when I was a kid.

  Sarah was wearing a dress with pictures of flowers on it. She looked really pretty, even with her black eyes. She was wearing sandals too but after a bit she slipped them off and started walking in her bare feet.

  ‘I love being able to walk barefoot,’ she said. ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it? It seems like yesterday it was winter and now you’d never even believe it. Thank you so much for coming with us, Eli. I haven’t felt much like going anywhere recently.’

  I was happy then, thinking how we’d been thinking the same thing. And then I wanted to ask her where all the frogs and toads went in the winter, because I’d been thinking that as well when I was watching Bobby.

  When we came to the crossing I looked down the rail tracks and there were flowers growing everywhere at the sides, beyond the cinders. There were pink ones and delicate blue ones and yellow ones. I’d never known their names and they only ever grew by the sides of the tracks. Virgil told me they were prairie flowers and grew from seeds that fell off the grain trucks when the wheat trains passed through. I remembered watching them passing – the trucks coloured half yellow and half rusty brown, with a big picture of a head of wheat on each one – and how many there seemed to be. They’d go on and on until it seemed like the train was a hundred miles long, so long you could imagine how big and wide the prairies were just from watching them go past. And looking at the flowers now I wondered if Sarah recognized them and knew their names from when she lived out west, and if she’d seen the fields of wheat that’d filled all those trucks. I was going to ask her that, but before I could she’d taken hold of my hand and was holding it in hers. Her skin felt as soft and smooth as pine sap.

  Outside the museum doors Mr. Haney was standing on a platform made of boards, dressed as a voyageur. He had a buckskin coat on, with tassels on the front, and a red scarf and hat.

  ‘Ça va,’ he called out to us as we walked by. He was smiling and happy. There were a bunch of people outside the museum, as many as the town could muster.

  Beside Clarence’s canoe there was a table where they were giving out hot dogs, and a barrel full of corncobs, and another table where a big cake sat with a hundred candles on it. Mrs. Hamalainen and Mrs. McKay were handing out the food and Mrs. Arnold was standing nearby talking to Gracie. She didn’t teach anymore – she’d retired. Her hair was grey all over these days.

  ‘Hi there, Eli. Good to see you here,’ she said. I tried to remember something she’d taught us in school, so I could show her I’d remembered it, but I couldn’t think of nothing.

  ‘Hello, Mrs. Arnold,’ I said.

  ‘Please, Eli. I think you can call me Frances now. And who is this?’ she asked, smiling down at Bobby.

  ‘This is Bobby,’ I said. ‘And this is … ’

  ‘Hello, Sarah,’ Mrs. Arnold said. ‘I’m so glad you could make it.’

  Everyone has always met everyone else in Crooked River. I forget that sometimes.

  Mrs. Hamalainen and Mrs. McKay were busy shoving hot dogs and corn and pieces of cake into Bobby’s hands. They were cooing over him and mussing his hair and he looked a bit nervous. It was like all the grown-ups were searching out kids to give stuff to – like there weren’t enough to go round.

  ‘If I were you I’d get some hot dogs down you quick and get going before Tom there starts off with his speeches,’ Gracie whispered to me. ‘I swear he spent three hours practising them yesterday – maybe more. I was asleep after ten minutes.’

  But it was already too late for that. Buddy Bryce, the Reeve and a few other old-timers had sat down on chairs on the platform, and Mr. Haney had rounded up some kids to stand in front of it and sing ‘O Canada.’ A couple of them were dressed as voyageurs as well, but most of them weren’t. As soon as they’d finished he stepped onto the platform himself and started fussing with a microphone.

  ‘Jesus,’ Gracie rasped. ‘He doesn’t need that damn microphone. We’re hardly the five thousand here, are we?’

  ‘Testing. Testing, one, two, three,’ Mr. Haney said into the microphone, but you could only hear his normal voice.

  ‘Everyone can hear you just fine as it is, Tom,’ someone shouted.

  ‘Get on with it,’ Gracie called up at him.

  ‘It’s a great pleasure,’ he began, ‘to see so much of our community gathered here today to celebrate a hundred years of Crooked River. What an achievement it’s been. For a community like ours to grow and flourish in the wilderness has been no mean feat. Of course over those hundred years there have been ups and downs and obstacles to overcome, but each time, pulling together as a community, we’ve managed to overcome them. I’d say Crooked River truly is “The Little Town Who C
ould”.’

  Mr. Haney went on for quite a while after that, talking about Clarence and the railroad and the mine and just about everything that’d happened in Crooked River over the last hundred years – at almost the same speed it’d happened too, it felt like. One of the old-timers fell asleep on his chair. Then Buddy made a loud coughing noise and Mr. Haney said: ‘But to conclude, I’d like to make a special presentation to one of our citizens for their exceptional contribution to the life and history of our community. The story of Red Rock Mine belongs not only to our town’s history, but goes down as one of the most audacious and remarkable feats of industry and engineering in the history of our entire nation. That story began with one man and his vision. While others before him had suspected that somewhere beneath our wilderness lay a potential wealth of iron ore, it had eluded all of them; until one day a young man arrived in this town with nothing more than a hunch, a bagful of determination, and an unshakeable ambition to succeed. Where others had confined themselves to the probable – to the shore, if I might put it that way – he let his vision range further, across the water. Where they saw a lake, an insurmountable obstacle, he saw a possibility. And so it was, almost sixty years ago now, that he walked out onto the ice of Red Rock Lake, drilled down through it, and discovered the ore lodes beneath its bed. And of course that was only the beginning. I’m sure all of us here know the subsequent history: how, as the president of Red Rock Mines, this man assembled the finest, most imaginative engineers and undertook nothing less than the diversion of a whole river and the draining of a whole lake; how he brought out the first loads of ore; how – sixty years ago – he turned a small railroad division point into a thriving and prosperous town. As a token of the township of Crooked River’s gratitude for all his many achievements, I would now like to present a special “Outstanding Living Citizen” award to Buddy Bryce. I’m sure he’ll be the first to appreciate the material out of which it’s been constructed.’