The Retreat

by David Bergen

  “Careful, Lewis,” Mrs. Byrd called. “You’re going to kill your children.”

  Lewis came down towards his wife and laid out the sack on the rock and sat. He took her hand, and talked. Lizzy, from where she sat, couldn’t hear his words but she knew they were discussing the fate of the kittens. He talked and talked. Her mother sat up at one point and spoke, her long face turning towards Lizzy, and then away, quickly, as if what she had disagreed with should not be witnessed. Mrs. Byrd shook her head. Lewis took her hand and pressed it to his mouth. He kissed each finger. Then he stood and told his children to go up to the car. It was time.

  “Give the kittens over to your mother,” he said. “She’ll hold them.”

  William, at first, refused. He held the kittens to his cheeks and climbed towards the car. Lewis caught him and gently took Shadrach and Meshach. Patted him on the bum and sent him upwards. Lizzy descended towards her mother and handed her Bagger. Mrs. Byrd looked at her and said, “Your skirt is too short.”

  “What are you doing?” Lizzy asked.

  “Take up your brother,” Mrs. Byrd said.

  Lizzy went down to the lake and scooped up Fish, who placed a wet hand in the warm hollow of her neck. She talked to him as she climbed. She said that the lake had a monster and sometimes the monster came up to eat little boys and it was almost lunchtime and it wouldn’t be a good thing to offer Fish to the monster.

  “Does it eat fish really?” Fish asked.

  “Not little fish, just big ones, but if little fish are waiting at the shore, it sometimes eats them as a snack.” She had him on her back, and the way she was bent, facing the earth, stooped over, she imagined that she appeared as a figure both ancient and weighted down. William went up last, following Everett. Lizzy deposited Fish in the car and told Everett to watch him. She descended the hill and stood beside her mother. Her dad said, “Take the kittens, Lizzy. Your mother will go up to be with the children.”

  Lizzy held the kittens and watched her mother wind her way up the rocks towards the highway. Her father could ask anything of her and she would do it. “Please,” she said.

  Lewis stepped down towards the lake and bent to pick up a large rock. “Don’t make a fuss,” he said. “It won’t help.” He put the rock into the sack. “Here,” he said, and he held the sack open. She went to him and lowered the kittens into the gunnysack. The kittens clawed at her wrists and hands, and Bagger, believing this was a game, tried to climb up the inside of the sack. There was much mewling. Her father had a thin rope. He put the bag down and looped the rope around the top of the bag and tied it tight. He didn’t speak. Then he took the bag and threw it out over the lake and when it hit the surface it floated briefly, and then it filled with water, and it sank.

  Half an hour down the road, Everett cried out, “Where are they? Where are the fucking kittens?”

  “Your mouth,” Lewis said. Both of his hands were on the wheel. His eyes sought out the black strip of road.

  And then Fish’s voice joined in. “Where are they? Where went Bagger fucking?” This was his favourite, white with a single dot on the left ear. His speech was erratic. Sometimes he stuttered.

  “See,” Lewis said. “Your words become his words. Care is required.”

  “You murderer,” Everett said.

  “Bang, bang,” Fish said. “Murder.” And he began to whimper. “Bagger,” he said. “Bagger.”

  Lizzy watched a large truck approach. It passed in a swoop. Her father’s neck was brown from the sun. He needed a haircut. Her mother had long hair that covered parts of her thin shoulders. She was looking out the window and then she turned to Lewis and Lizzy saw the hollow of her left cheek and the sharpness of her collarbone and the darkness of her eyes. She didn’t speak.

  And in the tomb of the car, floating above the sobbing of Fish and then William, their father’s voice rose, calling out that everything in its time had to die and what would they rather have: three kittens starving and mistreated, or the certainty that Shadrach, Meshach, and Bagger were in a better place. He said that there was a time to be born, a time to die, a time to dance, and a time to mourn. He said, “I have maintained that which is under my control.” He said this as if it were something that he had just thought of, with a certain mellifluent surprise, as if to say, listen to these words I have found.

  And into that claim, into the buoyancy of his timbred voice, soft and silky, there fell a silence, the stillness of the children, who seemed to hold their breath, as if the words themselves would become proof of a bigger place that only their father could provide. Words and words and words. He must know. But Lizzy knew that he might not know. In fact, she knew it with utter certainty. But she didn’t confess her knowledge, because that would make Fish cry. And Everett was silent now, a wall falling down and separating him from the world. Lizzy, in the sticky morning heat, beneath the drone of her father’s voice, took Everett’s hand, held it, and he let her.

  The Retreat was located several miles outside the town of Kenora, on two acres of wooded land. Up the highway and then a left turn and down a winding gravel road, past a collection of houses, and on further towards a small lake and then left again down a narrow road that was really two tracks of mud and a strip of grass and, finally, out of the bush and into a clearing. The main cabin was an old house that had been gutted and opened out with pine beams. This was the dining area and it was also the meeting place and it was called the Hall. Across from the Hall, at the opposite side of the clearing, stood seven cabins in various stages of disrepair, cabins that housed the occupants.

  There were sixteen people living there: three families and several younger men and women who found, in the Doctor’s vision, their own parallel dreams. The Doctor’s goal for the Retreat was both spiritual and practical. A chiropractor by training, he had lived all his life in Duluth, Minnesota, married there, and come to Canada when his wife left him and after the divorce eventually came through. He settled in Thunder Bay where he opened a small chiropractic office and fell in love with his receptionist, Margaret. She became pregnant, they married, and during their first spring together he bought the land for The Retreat. In the following years, each April, they travelled around, giving talks in small school gymnasiums and recreation halls, encouraging people to visit The Retreat, with the notion that a refuge from the hurly-burly of the world for several months of every year would augment peace; not world peace but individual reckoning. If the Doctor wanted this place to be considered a spiritual oasis, it was also sometimes referred to as an artists’ colony, though there was very little art happening, except perhaps at the hands of Emma Poole, who was playing with watercolours. Harris, her husband, had money in his pockets that had been made in an earlier stage of his life. Lewis felt that this was the only reason Emma Poole stayed by his side. “That’s the problem with money,” he announced. “When you have it, you don’t know who your true friends are.”

  Of the families in the group, the Byrds took up two cabins, the children in one, Lewis and Norma Byrd in the other. Doctor Amos lived with his red-headed wife Margaret and their son Billy, who was overweight and breathed noisily through his mouth; the children had taken to calling him Big Billy. Harris and Emma Poole were from the United States. They had arrived with a younger man in tow, a German named Franz, a man fascinated by anything to do with the original people of Canada. These were his words. He was a photographer and a collector. He lived in the smallest cabin, the one with the bowed roof. He spoke with a heavy accent and spent more time with Emma than with Harris. Harris was a novelist who had once been very successful. According to Emma, his achievements had been brilliant but brief; he had not written anything for a long time. She had dropped this into several conversations and in doing so her voice became thinner and her words came out of her mouth more quickly, as if she were talking about a farm animal that had failed to do its job.

  Harris had carried part of his library with him and he had opened it up to the rest of the people there. He was
in a wheelchair and rumour had it he had come to the camp to be healed by the Doctor, though that hadn’t occurred yet. His wife was an entomologist and a painter. She was often seen wandering around in the bush, wearing her wide-brimmed hat, carrying a butterfly net, being trailed by Franz. Emma had a large collection of butterflies pinned up in the Hall and Everett would study it lovingly, conscious of how the Latin names lent a seriousness to the dead insects. Lewis said one day that Emma Poole was like a butterfly herself, frail with gossamer arms. He said that even her clothes were diaphanous, and then he said to Everett, “She’s bossy, and she thinks the world owes her something, but she’s beautiful. In her way.”

  Everett was surprised and a little embarrassed by his father’s enthusiasm. He didn’t find Emma that good-looking, certainly not like his mother, or his sister Lizzy, who spent her afternoons sunbathing down by the pond. Often, Everett joined Lizzy there and she asked him to spread baby oil on her back. Everett did this willingly, aware of the sharp shoulder blades and the small freckles upon her light skin, and how when her long hair was pulled up into a swirl, her slender neck revealed soft patches of hair moistened by her sweat. She smelled warm. She was wise. One time, several days after their arrival, they were down by the pond, watching over Fish and William who were stabbing frogs with sharp sticks at the edge of the water. Lizzy was on her stomach, her chin in her hands. One leg was raised and her bare foot waved at the sky. “It’s so nowhere, the Treat, but I kinda like it,” she said. This is what Fish called the Retreat, and the other children had picked up the term, though their mother thought they were being disrespectful. She worried about the Doctor’s feelings.

  Everett looked out across the pond to the other side where there was a forest that extended into more forest, and beyond that, more forest. “It’s sort of bleak,” he said.

  Lizzy rolled onto her back and held a hand up to shade her eyes. She grinned. “Sweet little Ev, always wishing for something else.” Everett looked at Lizzy’s flat white stomach, her navel, and the sharp edge of her ribs.

  “Take off your shirt,” she said. “Come.” She sat up and pulled at the base of his T-shirt and as he raised his arms she lifted the shirt up over his head. “Lie down,” she said, and when he obeyed, she spread oil on his back. “Oooh,” she said, “blackheads,” and she spent the next while squeezing the blackheads and mounting them on her thumb for Everett to see.

  “Mum lied,” he said. “There are cats.”

  “She didn’t lie. She said there was no room for more animals.”

  “There’s lots of room. Look around. Someone was lying.”

  “Maybe it was Doctor Amos. He talks a lot and sometimes too much talk leads to bullshit. Maybe he wanted some sort of sacrifice.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know. Forget it. He talked to you yet?”

  “Uh-uh. You?”

  “Hmm … yesterday.”

  She said that he had called her over to the Den for nine a.m. and when she showed up he had a fire going and it was hot but she had had no intention in taking off her sweater. “He probably wanted to look at my bare arms or something.” She said that the Doctor had brought his chair really close and leaned forward, playing up the closeness, as if they were best friends. He had talked about hope and despair and then he’d asked what she believed in and she told him that she didn’t believe in anything, or at least not much. The Doctor had been surprised and said that that was dangerous and she didn’t want to fall into solipsism. She didn’t know the word, so he stood and went over to a dictionary and pulled it out and had her look it up, like he’d suddenly become a teacher. Then he’d asked if she read at all, and she said some and he said what, and she’d named some really crappy books and he’d raised his eyebrows. He asked if she did drugs, and she said that she was a real addict. Everything: coke, heroin, acid, hashish. And he’d looked surprised and asked if she was joking.

  Lizzy stopped talking. Touched her bare feet, rubbed a bit of sand from her toes. She smiled. “I asked him if he did drugs and he didn’t answer.” She said that he’d called her insolent, but he said it so lightly that she thought it might be a compliment. Then he asked about their mother. He wondered if she was aware of how beautiful their mother was. “That was weird, talking about Mum that way,” she said. “With him. It felt like I was betraying Dad, only the Doctor made it seem very normal. But it wasn’t.” She admitted that, strangely, she did find herself liking the Doctor. His voice was soft and what he said was pretty interesting. “He’s got the most gorgeous hands,” she said. She had moved away from Everett slightly and he was alert to her voice and its elasticity and how she seemed to project her soft certainty onto others. Everett could hear her breathing. Back at the camp someone started up a saw. Fish looked up from the water’s edge and called out, “Ainsaw.”

  Everett said, “Dad isn’t very happy here.”

  “Mum is. She thinks that her life is real now. Everything before was superfluous. I think that’s what she said, though I bet she was quoting the Doctor or something. I’ve never heard her use that word before.”

  She called out to Fish who was waving a dead frog on a stick. William was up to his waist in the water, looking down as if seeking out a lost object.

  “Shakespeare, come out of there,” Lizzy yelled, and she got up and walked down to the shore and pulled William in. Everett saw her knees and her long calves and thought about what the Doctor had said about his mother. He wondered if his father wanted to take the chainsaw and cut off the Doctor’s hands.

  In the mornings, Lizzy took to wheeling Harris down to the edge of the water where he sat and read, or he peered from beneath the bill of his cap and watched the children play. Usually, by mid-morning he fell asleep, his chin dropping to his chest, his hand lying like a small stranded animal on his lap. Emma had approached Lizzy and asked for her help. Her husband needed fresh air and he disliked the adult chatter in the Hall, and when she and Franz went out into the bush, Harris couldn’t keep up, obviously. She was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and Lizzy could not see her eyes properly, but Emma hesitated as she said Franz’s name. Then her voice rose again and she said that her husband was fond of water and children. Would Lizzy take care of him in the mornings? She would be well paid. Emma raised her head and then stared at Lizzy and Lizzy understood that Emma was betraying her husband for Franz. One day, early into their stay, Emma had called Lizzy up into her cabin to help move a dresser and during that brief visit Lizzy had noted two narrow beds with a bamboo divider between the beds. There had been, in the way Emma talked about her husband, something cold and efficient and intolerant in her tone, as if she were speaking of a difficult child.

  Harris was little trouble for Lizzy, and when he did ask for something – a drink of water, or for his chair to be turned away from the sun, or for his book to be taken out from the rear carrier – he was almost apologetic, as if he were imposing. He had none of the impatience of the other adults. He sat, a solitary sentry, looking out over the goings-on at the pond. Fish became quite attached to him and treated him as one more receptive container into which he could drop his many questions.

  When Harris chose to speak, he addressed Lizzy, who was usually lying on a beach towel off to the side, sunning herself. He spoke offhandedly, as if he were addressing an equal, or as if he had been out walking and stumbled upon something banal yet extraordinary and had to share it with Lizzy. He was not interested in gossip or idle talk. And for Lizzy, this changed the atmosphere at the pond. She found herself looking forward to the mornings with Harris. She had never heard someone talk in this way before. Certainly not her mother, who was more concerned with what the mirror offered her, or her father, a man who had turned inward and appeared lost. Harris had revealed to her that a conversation could be full of surprises.

  One morning, he placed the book he had been reading on his lap and he said, “Ahh, I don’t believe it.”

  Lizzy opened her eyes and saw Harris�
�s shoes beside her chair, which she had removed for him earlier when they arrived at the pond. She looked at him, but she said nothing.

  He continued, “This author assumes that I will trust what he tells me, but I don’t.”

  “Is it true?” Lizzy asked.

  “Not if he can’t make me believe it.”

  “It still might be.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Even a lie has to be convincing.”

  Lizzy said that she didn’t like true stories. Her favourite stories began with “once upon a time” because that meant that the story was made up and made-up stories were always more convincing.

  “That so.” Harris grunted. He said, “Once upon a time there was a man called the Doctor who claimed he could make lame men walk.”

  Harris sat looking out across the water. He didn’t smile or make any motion to indicate that he had said anything remarkable. Then he said that of all the stories that could be told by him, one in particular came out of Africa, and maybe he would offer it to her. He said the word offer slowly, as if it were the most important word in the sentence.

  Lizzy was not sure what to make of this, but she nodded. Fish and Big Billy began to fight over a stick at the water’s edge. Lizzy called out to Fish, and when he didn’t listen, she rose and walked down to him and picked up the stick and gave it to Big Billy, then carried Fish over to the towel and sat him down. “Here,” she said, and handed him a cracker. He took it and ate and then looked at Harris, pointed and said, “Your foot.”

  Harris’s left foot turned inward, a small club attached to his ankle.

  “Fish,” Lizzy said, her voice lifting in a reprimand.

  Big Billy dropped the stick and came over and reached for a cracker. He ate quickly and then took another and pushed it into his mouth. Crumbs gathered on his wet lips.

  Harris lifted his leg so that Fish could inspect the foot. “It has a mind of its own,” he said.