by Vicki Delany
The spring rains had raised the level of the bog very high indeed. Paths that I’d walked down days ago were now virtually under water. I scooted around widening puddles in search of higher ground. Of which I could find precious little.
Sampson burst out of the bush, lifted a dripping muzzle to me and grinned from ear to ear before dashing back into the quagmire.A bath for you, my girl, when we get out of this. I smiled at the memory of the voice in my head. She hates the water, but up at our chalet, after a romp in the rain forest, Ray would throw her in the shower and clamber right in with her. Afterward, the bathroom would look like a tornado had swept through.
Getting into the tub with her was one thing I wouldn’t do for the silly dog. She would hate me for it, but I would make her stand under the shower all by herself, until she was once again shiny and reasonably pristine.
She disappeared into the swamp, and I kept walking, seeking some sort of path. No point in turning back now. She couldn’t get much muddier and neither could my boots. She would find me, soon enough. But instead of bursting out of the undergrowth in hot pursuit as soon as I faded from sight, the dog started barking.
Cornered a ferocious squirrel, I assumed and whistled for her to join me. Not that I can whistle, but I sort of push air through my lips and hum at the same time, and Sampson seems to understand.
But this time she didn’t respond. I called and whistled and called some more. And she alternately whined and barked but didn’t appear. With a curse I stepped off the high ground; my boots sunk immediately into the muck. I ploughed through, cursing every step of the way, the mud dragging down my steps like an affectionate bog-creature asking me to stay and play. For me, all this rain might be a curse, but for the forest it was the source of life. Spring flowers and grasses grew with wild abandon in the rich, muddy soil. A bullfrog croaked a throaty greeting (or was it a warning?) as I stepped over a rotting log covered with soft green moss.
“Sampson,” I bellowed. “Come here.”
She barked some more.
My anger faded to be replaced with a growing sense of worry. She didn’t sound in any sort of pain, thank goodness. But she might be stuck, and she is pretty darned heavy. Particularly when soaking wet and coated in mud.
I passed through the last line of trees clinging to solid ground. The swamp stretched out before me, stunted trees, thick mud, slimy water, long grasses. Thoroughly inhospitable. By this time next month it would be far worse—a paradise for breeding insects.
Sampson stood on a patch of slightly higher ground, surrounded by swamp. She saw me and barked once. She stood over a log, half of it submerged in the water, half resting on land.
I waded into the muddy water, hoping that Sampson had found nothing more than a struggling puppy, caught in the rising waters. I imagined myself drying it off in front of a roaring fire, pouring a small helping of dog food into a saucer and fresh water into a bowl, all the time receiving excited licks of gratitude from a soft, wet tongue. But the back of my mind warned me that this expedition wasn’t fated to have a happy ending.
I got closer and form took shape. A mud-encrusted foot stuck out from under the side of the log nearest to me. A pair of legs rested on the high ground, partially hidden by the log. One foot still wore its boot; the other was bare of boot and sock. The naked toes stuck up out of the mud at the round bottom of the rotten log, like little oyster mushrooms. The head and torso stretched down the slope and disappeared in the thick water, an arrangement for which I was profoundly grateful.
Sampson rubbed her big head against my hip. I sunk to my knees and hugged her tightly.
Chapter 32
The Diary of Janet McKenzie. December 14, 1953
My son dropped a glass of milk onto the bedroom floor today. It was a full glass, too full, and it rained glass and milk all over the floor, the liquid dripping under the big old dresser. I pulled the dresser away from the wall to get at the drops of milk and found the loose floorboard. I had actually forgotten about it. Too many bad memories, no doubt. I waited until the children and Mrs. M. were asleep, and Bob was in the front room listening to the news on the wireless, and then I pulled out my diary. I haven’t written in it for more than five years. It’s been a long five years. Aunt Betty is dead as well as Dad. So I really am alone in the world. I have thought a lot over the past years of what might have been. If Mum had stayed with us, if my brother John had lived. If Mary Jones hadn’t taken sick, so that I went to the dance with Jenny. If I hadn’t met Bob.
But what’s done is done. And no use crying over spilt milk as Aunt Betty always said.
It’s time to start writing in the diary again. I did like keeping it. But I’ll never show it to my daughter now, as had been my intention, so long ago.
As bad as things are, I do have my children. And if things had been different, then I wouldn’t have them. So maybe it is all worthwhile after all. Shirley is so smart, like I knew she was when she was a baby. She does so well in school. Jim is a little terror, but Mrs. M. says that all boys are like that, so I’m glad. That he’s normal, I mean. I learned early that there was no point in calling him Arthur. Can’t have the poor boy growing up confused about his name, Mrs. M. said one day. The only bit of sense I have ever heard come out of her mouth.
Sometimes they call him Little Jim and then they call Mr. M. Big Jim. That I’ll never say.
Bob built a bit of an addition onto the house. So we could finally move Shirley and her brother into their own room. Not that there is likely to be anything going on in our bedroom that the children shouldn’t overhear, let me tell you! That part of our marriage is long over. Bob reached for me one night a few weeks after the baby was born, and I actually jumped out of bed and ran to the bathroom to be sick. I won’t allow him to touch me in that way again.
So he continues to drink.
A second room went onto the main house as well. “Shirley will want a room of her own once the next baby arrives.” Mrs. M. smiled at me. Stupid woman. But it’s hard to hate her. She’s like a particularly innocent child herself, so timid and frightened, scurrying about, trying to guess what her husband wants before he bellows for it.
Him, of course, it isn’t hard to hate at all. At least he pretty well stays out of my way.Since the time Bob took his mother shopping and the children were napping and he caught me in the kitchen. I pulled a knife out of the drawer and told him I’d use it if I had to. I would have too, and he believed me. I wish sometimes he hadn’t. Then I could have used it. I don’t think I’d even mind going to prison, if it meant that my children would be free of him. He has no more time for Shirley than he ever did, thank God. But it worries me sometimes, the time he spends with Jim. Trying already to ‘make a man out of the boy’.
There will be no ‘next baby’, so I turned the new room into a sewing room. No one ever goes in there. I will move my diaries and bury them in a drawer under a pile of fabric.
After Jim’s birth and then the news about Dad, I thought I might die of sorrow and loneliness. But shortly after that a new minister arrived in town and his wife turned out to be nothing at all like the old one. She is terribly nice, not at all like the stuck up old prune face who would scarcely give Mrs. M. and me the time of day. As if it was our fault that we live in a shack with a bastard of an old man and his son who drinks himself into oblivion. But the new minister’s wife, she is nice. She invited me to the quilting circle she started at the church. I didn’t really want to go. Sit around in that freezing old church basement with that herd of stuck-up cows sewing a bunch of rags? No thanks. But Mrs. Burwell talked me into it (she doesn’t take no for an answer, that woman). There is no one left now in the quilting circle but Mrs. Burwell and I. And the quilts she taught me to make are certainly not bunches of rags.
So now I have a lovely sewing room of my own. I don’t get much in the way of housekeeping money but I’ve managed to save a bit of what Bob gives me for the children’s and my clothes by making them myself. I am making a quilt for
Shirley’s bed. In my own sewing room.
Chapter 33
Not until long after, when the shock started to fade and it was me, not a rescued puppy, sitting in the warm kitchen, wrapped in a blanket, food and drink pressed upon me, did it occur to me that perhaps I should have checked the body for signs of life. I have never seen a dead body before, not counting those dressed in their best, neatly made up and laid in a casket, but I found that a person knows. This one was well and truly dead.
I’d grabbed Sampson’s collar, keeping my eyes averted from the half-submerged object. The dog followed me, reluctantly, and we waded back through the swamp to the path. Once again, I stripped off my coat and hung it on a branch before sprinting through the woods for home, Sampson loping ahead of me. She didn’t even pause to chase a squirrel that crossed her path.
We stumbled through the back door, a stream of mud marking our progress. I grabbed the phone and dialed 911. My father sat at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee frozen on the way to his mouth, the Saturday newspaper spread out before him. Upside down, I recognized the face of the Prime Minister, who was shaking hands with some foreign dignitary.
The conversation was brief. I declined to stay on the line and, after offing the pertinent info, hung up before collapsing into a hard kitchen chair. Sampson gulped back stomachfuls of water. My father looked at me, open-mouthed, his eyes reflecting the confusion and despair in my own. Without a word he pushed his chair back and left the room, to return moments later with two thick, fluffy towels. He pressed one into my shaking hands and lowered himself on arthritic knees to kneel on the floor beside my dog. He murmured softly to her, all the while rubbing her coat vigorously with the towel. I followed suit, rubbing at my own face and hair. Sampson attended to, Dad poured the remnants of the morning’s pot of coffee into a chipped mug, took the towel out of my hands, and replaced it with the mug.
It was awful, the dregs of the pot, and lukewarm to boot. I drank deeply, wanting only to soak up the warmth. Then Dad knelt again, his face wincing with the pain in his knees, and loosened the laces of my shoes. I held my feet out, one after the other, and allowed him to peel off the dripping socks and rub my feet with the towel. I closed my eyes and luxuriated in the feeling of being truly cared for: the one thing that money can’t buy. You can purchase a day at the spa or hire a masseuse, but when your time is up or your money runs out, you’re shown the door, ready or not.
Sound of a car on our road, tires crunching the gravel driveway. Doors opening and slamming shut.
Too soon.
Groaning, Dad pulled himself to his feet and went to open the door, Sampson following at his heels. I shook my head and tried to pull myself back to reality.
Two OPP officers marched into the kitchen, holding their wide-brimmed hats in their hands. One female, one male. I didn’t recognize either of them. He was young, fresh faced but prematurely balding; she had long black hair gathered back into a perfect French braid. In my younger, much younger days, when I had long hair, I tried so hard to do it like that. Weeks of trying and buckets of tears of frustration passed before I gave up.
“I was expecting Bob Reynolds. He came the last time I called. You’ve heard about the scarf I found?”
“Sergeant Reynolds is in court in North Bay today, ma’am,” the female officer said in a voice as high-pitched as a child. Internally I cringed. That voice will kill her professional future in what is still a man’s world as surely as a round of tears at a crime scene.
“If there is anything to report, we’ll let him know,” the young man offered.
“Well let me assure you, you’ll have more than enough to report. It’s out that way.” I waved my arm in the vague direction of the woods behind our property and through them to the swamp. “I left my coat as a marker. Can you bring it back please? It’s rather a good one.”
“If you could show us what you saw, ma’am? That would be more convenient.” They looked at me.
“One minute,” Dad waved his hands in the air and hustled out of the kitchen. He returned with a handcrafted cable-knit sweater, two pairs of thick woolen socks and high rubber boots.
“Thanks, Dad.” He was smaller than I, but his feet were bigger. With both pairs of socks my feet fitted into the ugly boots, although leaving a bit too much wiggle room for the toes. They would do.
Sampson made no effort to follow us. I almost wished she would: this was starting to become a habit. I led the police through the woods and into the swamp. There hung my lovely shearling coat, hanging on the branch of a naked tree.
Past the coat and down the incline to the moving boundary of the rising swamp, I stopped at the water’s edge and pointed.
“There, there it is. That log. Do you see it?”
“I see lots of logs,” the male officer said, taking a few tentative steps into the water. The squelch of mud as he pulled his boot free with each step was clearly audible.
On the patch of high ground there was a flash of movement at the sound of our voices as something, some animal, scurried away from no-need-to-contemplate-what.
His partner followed, the edges of her mouth turning down and her nose crinkling in disgust, as she put one foot into the water. “We see it, Ms. McKenzie. You don’t have to come any further. If you could stay at your home for a while? Someone will be around to take your statement.” She looked over her shoulder at me. The other officer waded through the muck. Frogs and birds and early insect life set up a cacophony of protest at the human invasion of their muddy paradise. Part of the evidence was visible from where I stood, particularly that one foot held down by the log. But regardless of my revulsion, I felt a twinge of regret for the creatures that called this swamp home. The invasion had only just begun.
“I’m not going anywhere.” I stumbled back through the woods, cursing the police for leaving me to find this… thing… after they’d supposedly spent the weekend scouring the swamp, and trying to keep from throwing up until I was out of sight of the two officers, although I had no reason to care about their opinion of me. My heaving stomach held out until I reached the tree holding my coat, and there I vomited into the soft mud around the roots. A lifetime passed, but my stomach did eventually settle, and my panicked breathing returned to a semblance of normal. With one hand holding the small of my back I straightened up.
I kicked mud over the puddle of vomit until it was completely covered. A nice meal for the insects burrowing around the tree roots. The thought brought on moments of dry heaving. But nothing remained in my stomach to come back up.
I gathered my coat and stumbled up the path to my family home.
I never again wore the lovely chocolate shearling coat with the beige cuffs.
***
Naps make me bad tempered and grumpy. Give me six to nine hours in the dead of night, and I’m a happy woman.
But on this day, I walked through the house in my father’s mud-encrusted boots without saying a word. His worried eyes followed me. I slammed the bedroom door in my dog’s face and collapsed fully dressed onto the bed, remembering only to pull off the boots before I hit the sheets.
I slept badly, disturbed by the sounds of the house. Dad turning on the TV. Sampson scratching at the door. Her toenails clicking dejectedly down the hall. The phone ringing. A heavy knock at the back door. Dad grunting as he pulled himself out of his best chair. Murmured voices. The sound of a car engine starting up and the crunch of gravel as it pulled away. Then gentle tapping at the bedroom door and my father’s soft voice.
Thinking about it made me realize that his voice is soft. Soft and gentle like the man himself. “Girly man” my grandfather called him once, in my own hearing. My father had flushed and looked at me, embarrassed. Not at the insult but at his daughter overhearing it. Of course I didn’t know what a “girly man” might possibly be. A man who liked to play with girls, perhaps? Nothing wrong with that. Men were fun to play with—not Grandpa of course, never Grandpa—they would swing me around and around by the arms until I s
creamed with delight. Or push me on the swing that my brother Jimmy, in a rare moment of kindness, had made and hung under the biggest tree that could be found for miles around. Push me so high I both feared and hoped that the swing would break and I would fly over the lake and into the setting sun. Men played in a way that women never did.
The door squeaked open on a hinge in need of oil and Dad smiled in. “Time to wake up, sweetheart. I’ve brought you a bit of toast and some tea.”
I struggled to consciousness and tried to sit up. “Come in, Dad. What time is it?” Sampson landed on the bed with enough force to knock the breath out of me. I scratched behind her ears.
“The police wanted to talk to you earlier, but I sent them away. They said they’d be back at five and it’s almost that now. Some tea and toast will help you get yourself up.”
I settled a mound of pillows behind my head, and Dad put the tray onto my lap. The toast had burnt and he’d tried to scrape most of the black bits away. An open jar of cheap, mass-produced marmalade sat to one side, the knife stabbed into the sticky, aromatic depths. A tea bag floated in the cup. If Mom could have seen it she would have passed out. My throat closed.
Girly man.
It should have been offered as a compliment.
Praise of the highest order.
“Thanks, Dad.”
He grinned shyly and his cheeks burned. “Better hurry up and eat that, my girl. The police said five o’clock and you can be sure they’ll be here right on the dot.”
I nibbled at my toast. “Anything happening at the swamp?”
“Too much. Too much. Cars coming and going; people and dogs tromping through the woods. Everyone and their dog phoning me to ask what’s going on. I wish your mother was here, Becky. She’d know what to do.”
I doubted it. My mother could handle almost anything, but a dead body would be out of even her league. I smiled anyway. “That she would, Dad. That she would.”