TWENTY-TWO
Spring did not last long. Summer came in late May and settled hot through the county. It almost never rained. Streams dried to tepid runnels and last year’s watermarks were written on the rock more than a foot above the small waves that passed in the bay. The crops came in too early and the young tree leaves went brown and curled like paper beside coalfire. There were ribbons of smoke rising from the west and then they were gone and later they would come back. At the end of one beach-headed concession road there stood a sign with a coloured semicircle and a wooden needle that the township moved to show the level of danger from forest fire and to show when a fire ban was on. Later in the month some kids from town got to the sign and a few passersby saw the sign itself on fire. That sign came down.
They left for the cabin at mid-morning, driving with the windows up until they got to paved road. There they wound the windows down and kept them so through gust and gale. Daniel drove and Sarah kept turning around to see if Madelyn was okay. The girl was still and quiet while her hair whipped around her head and showed her eyes and nose and ears in strobe. They drove north and skirted the town and went on. Single-lane highway with asphalt gone pale and fissured throughout. Concrete bridgework that took them high over marsh and swampmuck, weeded shallows, open waters lit by midday sun. Boats drifted by with their sails tucked, carried on by motor or current or just bobbing free in their windless channels.
Fifteen minutes later they came upon turn-offs to smaller towns and villages. Daniel took the truck to the far-right lane and they spiralled down to a roadway that coasted the water’s edge. A detour they’d half-planned that morning. Other roads branched off of the main lakeside pass and some were shrouded in heavy tree cover and some were barely roads at all.
“Why is granpa all the way out here?” Madelyn called out.
“It’s where he was born,” Daniel said.
He looked at the girl quick over his shoulder. She’d put a baseball cap on but her hair still blew. Old, tattered lid that he’d forgot that he’d given to her.
“Do you want to go, Madelyn?” he said. “We don’t have to go.”
“Yes, we do,” Sarah said.
She had her sunglasses on her head to hold her hair back and wore a tank top and shorts that showed a lot of leg. Her sandals were tucked under the seat and her bare feet rested one over the other, heels to the floor mat. Tiny beads of sweat at the nape of her neck.
“I want to go,” Madelyn said.
Daniel nodded.
“We won’t be in there long,” Daniel said, and faced the road. They rode fast with trees close on either side. Sarah’s window was open and its frame caught the tip of a long branch. A leaf fell to her lap in pieces. She bit at her nails.
The marker stood in the shadow of an oak tree. Thick-hewn stone, greying year after year in the rain and sun and frost. All that had been cut into the marker was his name and the years that he lived and a small Celtic cross at the centre apex where the rock had been rounded. The church had resisted his being buried there but Sarah wore them down until they allowed it. The man did not truck with religion much in his later years but he’d worn a silver cross alike to the one on the stone. He wore it because Daniel’s mother gave it to him before Daniel was born. She’d bought it in Wales and had it blessed there and later she hung it around his heavy neck while he lay slumped over, sleeping the sleep of the drunk in a deep-set armchair. Now Daniel wore the silver and he’d worn it to births and battle and it had only come off when he’d stepped into a ring or cage and his cornermen took it from him and held it in the shirt pocket atop their heart.
They were alone in the cemetery. The three of them stood at the stone and Madelyn went up and laid her hand on it and then she kneeled in the grass and laced her hands in her lap and started whispering to the stone. All the blood went out of Daniel’s face. Sarah started to go get her and Daniel took his wife’s shoulder and she turned. She came back. Soon enough Madelyn got up and said goodbye and she left the gravesite. She stood beside her father. He didn’t know what to make of the girl so leant down and kissed her on the head. Sarah started a prayer to the stone and it was short.
“Can I walk around?” Madelyn said.
They both said she could. She left them there.
Daniel stared down at the marker for a long time. He said nothing. Often he would look for his daughter and find her afar in the rows and then he’d look back at the grave. Sarah put her hand on his neck and held him tight for a moment and then she let go. He rested his fists on his hips by the knuckles and hung his head. He wiped his brow with the back of his sleevecuff. He looked up.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Daniel stepped out of the row and didn’t wait for her to follow. He crossed the cemetery to where Madelyn had gone. Row upon row of markers that he passed. None too large. They were the graves of country folk and immigrants from England and Ireland and Scotland, Dutch and German, French names on the Métis markers and on the stones of the Quebecois who travelled the St. Lawrence River to live and die there. There were stones straight as carpenters’ nails hammered through planking. Others had been put askew by wild animals, time, treeroots that wandered subterranean. There were graves in that cemetery that were planted long before those great oaks and cedars were seed or sapling. Some older yet, by ages. And all of it penned in by dense and lightless forest that bowed under snow and wind and brokedown in part and fell to earth and grew again.
The girl had lately found a patch of grass with three markers planted flat in the ground. The names nearly wiped clear.
“They’re all in here,” she said. “This whole family.”
Daniel leant in enough to see the names. He nodded once.
“Where’s granma buried?” she said.
He kept reading the plaques.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The girl was waiting on him to tell her about it. He didn’t.
Eventually he stood and turned and saw Sarah in the distance. She was at his old man’s gravesite yet and seemed to be knelt or crouching there.
“You go on to the truck,” he said. “I’ll get her.”
He walked back to the grave and came up close. Sarah did not hear him. She’d gone to the actual stone and when Daniel came upon her she was kneeling in the grass as their daughter had. Her head was not an inch from the marker and she could be heard speaking to it in a whisper. She took very deep breaths. Daniel watched her for a long time and he didn’t say anything to her. She looked up but once. Out past the stonetop across the grounds, at the weather-worn rock and burnt shortgrass. He couldn’t see her face. She lowered her head and said a few more words and then she turned around all at once and when she did her eyes were red. She seemed surprised to see him there. She put her palm to the ground and got to one knee and then drew herself up, kissed the pads of two fingers and pressed them on the stonetop. She came out from the plot and took Daniel’s hand in hers and led him out of there.
TWENTY-THREE
The cabin sat in a clearing perhaps a hundred feet from the lake. It had been built of log and brick and mortar and looked down a gentle decline of rough soil and wildgrass. That land ran to rock just a few feet from the water. A granite overhang crept out past the bank. Four deck chairs were set on the stone in a wide semicircle and there was plenty of room to spare. Two lines of tall firs stood at either side of the lot and out in the waters there were no markers or boats or swimmers. Across the bay waves rolled up against the rock-lined bank of a narrow peninsula. That lonely building could only be guessed at from the road, smoke rising from the wood where its chimney might be.
In the cabin, Sarah unpacked her case. Madelyn had her bed in a near bunkhouse and she’d been putting her clothes away and evicting spiders with an old tin can left in the room. Daniel hadn’t been indoors yet. He stood on the stone overhang and looked up at the cabin, windows at
the side of the house facing the lake, drapes pinned back. The shapes of women moving about from room to room. Madelyn left the bunkhouse and went to the main cabin. Daniel surveyed the grounds aside the place. There was nothing else in the clearing but a woodshed and chopping block set back near the forest’s edge. Firepit some thirty feet from the front of the cabin, walled in by hand with loose brick. Daniel saw the opening in the wood where they had come out into the clearing and at the other end of the property he saw another break in the trees where another road took up and led to deeper country. He spat in the dirt and then looked at the lake again. Beside the ledge he could see clear to bedrock, to black mud where reeds grew and sashayed back and forth with the undercurrent.
In the morning none were awake but the girl. She’d been down to the water near sunrise and washed there, went into the house to do her necessaries. Ella stirred next and went into the kitchen. Sarah made funny noises and then sat up all at once like a folding cot sprung from its fasteners. She shoved Daniel but he wouldn’t shift. She pulled the covers off the bed and rambled overtop him, elbows sticking him in the stomach and chest. He smiled but didn’t move so she gave up and left him there in the bed with his shorts on. In the other room Murray had been left alone from the get-go and he lay snoring with his bare, kegbarrel chest rising and falling. Battered hands clasped over his breadbasket.
At breakfast Madelyn stared the old man down from across the table. He’d come out of the bedroom wearing yesterday’s jeans and his wrinkled and slept-in undershirt. He yawned and started in on his coffee. She was trying not to laugh at the state of him before the food made it to the table. Daniel and Sarah brought the toast and butter and set the plates in their places. They sat down and Ella laid down platters of bacon and eggs for them all. She fussed about the stove and the kitchen counter. The old man leaned back in his chair and stared back at the girl. She kept looking at him as if he were a bug in a jar.
“There’s somethin’ wrong with that kid,” he said, pointing at her with his fork.
They hiked upcountry on a grown-out path, the two men and the girl. Murray led them on with the fishing rods over his shoulder, the handles to his palm. Daniel followed. Madelyn towed a metal cart with studded tires and their provisions inside. Cooler filled with beer and sandwiches at one end. Another for their catch. Bait and tackle aside it. Soon they came upon a wildgrass clearing and a width of river that ran quick to forest cover and to the lake beyond. They stopped near the riverbank and Madelyn pulled the cart into a thicket of tallgrass where it wouldn’t roll. Sound of continuous thunder near to the clearing. Two-storey waterfall just upriver from them, rock steps that stuck out and split the cascade. The current broke on the rock and shot spray that caught sun and coloured the air. At the base of the falls whitewater roiled and ran south over polished stone.
“Come on,” Murray called back. “The spot’s just a’ways over.”
Madelyn parked the cart on an earthen overhang maybe four feet above the surface of the river. Firs on the opposing bank caught most of the late afternoon sun and the grass brushed coolly against their ankles and shins as they set up. Murray took Madelyn’s rod and cut the line and tied on a new hook and weights. He showed her how to cast the line sideways and it took only two or three tries for her to fling the hook far out into the river current. Daniel put a hand to her shoulder and she gave him a funny look and then reeled the line in crazily and cast again.
When the rod bent the first time, the girl jumped but she held fast. By the second dip she pulled the rod hard and started trying to reel the line in. Daniel put his hand on hers to stop her turning the handle. Then he got hold of the rod higher up and felt the pull on it.
“We gotta let the line run a bit,” Daniel said. “Otherwise it’ll snap.”
Madelyn stared at the taut line and dug her heels. Daniel told her to flip the guide open and line shot off the reel by the foot. Madelyn watched it go.
“Now get hold of that handle again and, when I tell you to start turnin’ it, start turnin’ it.”
He’d started reaching out to grab the rod from her if she lost it. She swatted his hand quick and got her own back to the rod.
“I can do it,” she said.
“Alright.”
Daniel turned. Murray was sat on the cooler and he was laughing. Can of beer in his hand. The girl had her tongue stuck out a little, bit between her teeth. The line ran awhile longer.
“Now,” Daniel said. “Crank it.”
Madelyn wound the handle and the guide came back and the line rose out of the water and went straight. The rod bowed and near doubled over but she held.
“Keep hold of that thing but let the fish pull it back the other way. Just don’t let it run like before. Make it hard on him.”
So she did. She held the handle-knob in her fist and let it windmill back toward her and come up the other side. Daniel had shuffled back some so that she had the space to work.
“You feel him startin’ to quit?”
“I don’t know,” the girl said.
The line cut through the riverwater. Slacked some when the fish rose or came closer to the near bank and snapped tight again when the fish bolted. Madelyn held on and on and the torque on the rod lessened by the minute. The girl whiteknuckled the reel-handle now. She kept turning it slow. Sure-handed as could be.
The fish came up into the shallows like a phantom formed there. It thrashed in the last few feet of river and little waves carried out from the spot. Ripples on the surface that soon thinned and vanished. Madelyn kept winding and hollered when the fish came clear, twisting wild in the air, sunshine caught in its scalecoat. The fish had more weight out of the water and there Daniel did help Madelyn heft it but he didn’t have to help much. Murray had set his beer down long enough to fetch the net. He handed it to Daniel and stepped back. Daniel went to the bank with the net in hand. Madelyn worked the reel. The girl had beads of sweat at the corners of her freckled brow. She brought the fish up as it bucked and spun on the line. When she had it a few feet out of the water, Murray came around to make sure the fish cleared the overhang while she kept the rod high and walked it back from the bank. Daniel stood at river’s edge with the net and waited.
He netted the fish and brought it inland and set it down in the grass. Five-pound pike hooked through the gill, and yet it beat the ground hard, drummed its tailfin to the turf. Sucked air. Daniel kneeled down and reached into the net and got hold of the thing.
“Yeah,” he said.
Madelyn came close in time to see the pike show its teeth. Daniel put the fish down and reached into his back pocket and pulled out a cutter-clamp and snipped the line. Then he laid the tool in the grass.
“He’s done for,” Murray said.
Daniel nodded.
Madelyn knelt down. She touched the pike but once with her fingertip.
“What can we do with him?” she asked.
“Even if we wanted to put him back we can’t,” Daniel said.
“Will we eat him?” she said.
“It’s your catch. You’d have to clean it.”
Madelyn thought on it.
“Can you show me how?” she said.
“Okay,” Daniel said. “Now, go over and grab me that cooler.”
The girl nodded and got up quick. Daniel watched her take three steps before he dropped the underside of his fist onto the pike’s head and left it flat and lifeless. He pushed the barb through and took up the cutter-clamp again and pulled the hook clear, five inches of slime-sodden line that trailed it.
The sun hung low to the treeline as they left the woodland trail and came out into the clearing. Daniel and Murray led with the rods while Madelyn pulled the cart, the bait cans rattling on the metals as it rumbled over rock and soilclod. There were fishguts smeared on the top of the one cooler. Haul of three fish inside, two smallmouth bass and Madelyn’s pike. One bass y
et lived and when the girl stopped to switch her grip it could be heard sloshing in the riverwater they’d filled the cooler with. She’d tried to wash by the shore after she sunk the innards of the two fish but her hands had dried filthy.
Sarah and Ella sat in chairs near the bank, side by side. They had drinks at their chair arms, shirts sleeveless to the shoulder, bare feet heeling the dirt as they spoke to each other. The conversation stopped and Sarah sat up straight and turned. Madelyn called out and Sarah waved. Sarah turned back to Ella and spoke in a hush. Then she stood up and pulled at her wrinkled shorts. She lent a hand and helped Ella to her feet. The old lady went ahead to meet the cart. Stood in front of the girl.
“So missy, how did you do?”
“We did good,” Madelyn said. “We got three fish.”
“You catch ’em all yourself?”
“Murray got two. I got the big one. Dad helped.”
“It was all her,” Daniel said. “I didn’t catch nothin’.”
Ella took the rods from Murray and Daniel. She squeezed the meat of his right hand as he gave his up and asked Madelyn to show her the catch. She lifted the lid and pointed and turned over her hands to show Ella what she’d done. Murray came over to rib the girl. Daniel watched them a minute and then he walked the clearing and sat in the chair beside his wife. She looked at him just brief and drank deep. Tried again.
In the Cage Page 14