by Mary Swan
Every morning now he opened his eyes in a dead boy’s room, though the bed he slept in had belonged to the dead boy’s brother, now a grown man with a family of his own, who lived out on the coast. Mrs. P., who came to clean, told him all about it, swishing a bleach-soaked rag over the countertops while he tried to eat a sandwich at the still-damp table. “Such a tragedy,” she said. “Those four young boys, such good friends. Far out on the ice when they fell through, and only one of them made it back to shore. Patch Coulter, who has the butcher shop, you’ll have seen him.”
“I guess,” Alan said, trying to chew faster, trying not to see the way her fat behind wobbled as she scrubbed at a stubborn spot. The story made him uneasy, reminded him of the nightmare he sometimes had. His arms and legs bound tightly, and cold water flooding into his mouth.
Mrs. P. said what happened to Alan’s father was a tragedy too, and she said she thought she remembered him, from when they were children. Aunt Edie had told him the day he arrived that his father used to come for the summer, and she brought out some old photo albums to find him a picture, turning pages filled with people in old-fashioned clothes. “Now here’s one,” she said, “let’s see if I can remember.” A larger photograph, a group of people laughing on the steps of some building, and Alan didn’t say but he thought they had one just like it, hanging up in a fancy frame. “There’s my mother,” Edie said, “oh, she looks so happy. And Aunt Kez and Uncle Charlie; my great-aunt Kez, I mean. You never knew any of them, of course. And this one’s Aunt Nan—you know, I always had the idea she once ran away to the circus, but that doesn’t sound very likely, does it.”
From his armchair across the room Uncle Robbie gave Alan a wink, as though he knew what he was thinking, and said, “You’ll be getting the whole family tree, son.”
“Hush you,” Aunt Edie said. “There’s nothing wrong with knowing where you come from. Now this one’s Aunt Clare—such a shame she never had children, she was so good at understanding.” Then she pointed to another woman who was holding a fat-cheeked baby, and said, “That’s Edith, I was named for her, but she died young. And Ben beside her, that one with the beard, now he’d be your—what? Great-grandfather, I suppose. And one of these girls is your grandmother, though I guess you never knew her either. Fanny, she was, I think she’s this one.”
Alan looked where she pointed and tried to listen but they were too distant, all these people with their similar hairdos, their long skirts and too-tight jackets. They had to go through another whole album before Edie found what she’d been looking for, a snapshot of three boys squinting into the sun, with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders. “That’s your father in the middle,” she said. “He was such a nice boy, such a live wire, and the fun they had together.”
On the facing page the same three boys stood beside a contraption that was taller than they were, made out of lengths of wood. “Oh, I’d forgotten that,” Edie said, and she told him it was a catapult that Uncle Robbie had helped them build, that they fired a watermelon clear across the street and made such a mess of Mrs. Todd’s front walk. “They tried to convince her that it was Science, but oh my,” Edie said, “wasn’t she cross.”
When he had unpacked his bag that first night there was an envelope with his name on it, tucked underneath his socks, and he thought it would be a note from his mother, telling him she didn’t mean it. Telling him she’d be there in a day or two, and they’d drive back home and everything would be fine. I’ll be good, he’d say, and he would be, and things would go back to how they were, when he was a normal boy with normal thoughts, a boy you’d want to have around. But it wasn’t a note, instead it was another picture, the one of his father holding him, a baby, on his knee.
He remembered that photo, from when she used to bring out their own album. He could picture the empty black corners left behind, and the smaller snap below it on the page. He’s not a baby in that one but he’s small, wearing a scarf over his mouth and a snowsuit so puffy that his arms stand out from his sides. “Your father was such a joker,” his mother always said, wanting him to laugh at the rest of the picture. Small pine trees dusted with snow and his father beside him, a mighty axe poised just above little Alan’s unsuspecting head.
The first week he was in Inverhaven some kids had come around; maybe Aunt Edie had set it up. Two freckled brothers, both younger than he was but bigger, and another boy with a twisted foot who was called Gimp. There was a scrappy girl named Bet, and once or twice her sister, Pammy, who had rolling blind eyes and had to walk with her hand on someone’s shoulder. They mooched around for a few days, and one afternoon Uncle Robbie gave them all money for the show, Phantom of the Plains, and they sat in a row with their feet up on the seats in front. The others took turns whispering to Pammy about what was going on, not that she would understand it, even if she could see.
For some reason they never went to the lake, but instead waded in the scummy river near the place where it emptied, swatting at bugs and feeling the silt squish creepily between their toes. Once they hiked out of town to the place where there had been a bad train wreck, years before. The freckled boys said they’d find bones, but there was nothing to see except a spot where the bush was sparser and lower, marking the place where three cars had tumbled from the tracks. They told him that sometimes in town you would hear a long whistle, at the exact time, and they told him that once a man who was out near the tracks after midnight had seen a ghost train, all dark, hurtling by at this very spot. On the way back to town Gimp took a few pennies and a nickel from his pocket, and they laid them on the rails for the express to flatten. After it had blasted past they plucked them off, shrieking and shaking their fingers as if they were hot to the touch.
He tried to tell them things about the city, how tough his gang was and how tall the buildings, but they weren’t much interested. Bet asked if he knew any movie stars and he told her he once saw Ginger Rogers getting into a taxi. “Really,” she said, her voice hushed and her eyes big, but she held on to it too long and he could tell she was mocking him. Later that day they locked him into an old shed during a game of spies and soldiers, a stick dropped into the hasp, and it took far too long for him to stop calling, to understand that they weren’t coming back. The Man Called X had been in a similar spot once and blasted the lock with his revolver, but all Alan could do was bang into the door over and over until the rusty screws gave way.
His shoulder was sore for days, a reminder of his stupidity, and when they came calling the next morning as usual he told Aunt Edie that he had a stomach ache, and the next day that he’d rather hang about on his own. After that it didn’t matter, because they all went away to a church camp. All except blind Pammy, who he sometimes saw walking down the main street, one finger hooked into the belt on her mother’s dress. Or sitting on her front porch at a little table, sorting buttons by size and the number of holes, a thing she liked to do. Bet had told him that when they were all sorted their mother dumped the buttons back into a big tin, and the next day told Pammy they were a new batch. When he said he thought that was cruel, she gave him a shove and said he was the stupidest boy ever.
Mrs. P. was a nosy old bat; Robbie and Edie called her The Hoover for the way she sucked up information, and then dumped it all on you like greasy, clinging dust. They said it in a laughing way, not a mean one, one of the jokes they had together, like the way they always said, “It’s another case for Nick Carter, Master Detective!” whenever someone knocked on the door. Not that anyone knocked much in this town, they walked right in, even ones who didn’t belong. Like the smelly old tramp Alan found in the kitchen one morning, sitting straight in a chair with his hands folded in front of him on the table.
Alan had no idea what to do, but Aunt Edie was right behind him. She touched his shoulder as she moved past and said, “I’ll make you a sandwich, Rolly, but you’ll have to take it with you,” her voice sounding firmer, like a teacher’s. “The war,” she said, after the man had shuffled out, alre
ady cramming the bread into his nasty mouth. “The first one, I mean, poor thing. He used to be so dapper, and such a good dancer.” Even with all the windows open the whiff of him lasted for hours. “Did he sit?” Mrs. P. asked, when she came, and she gave the chair a good scrub.
That day she didn’t have much to report, just a girl who’d run off to be married, leaving a note on her pillow. She and Aunt Edie agreed that the tighter the leash, the harder the pulling to break free. Outside a steady, steamy rain was falling. There was nothing he felt like doing, and he was glad when they sent him up to the attic to fetch a box of old books for the church sale. It was stuffy up there and the light was dim when he pulled the chain, nothing to see through the dusty, small window but more rain, hissing through green leaves.
He poked around for a bit, after he’d dragged the books to the centre of the floor. There was a stained duffle bag in a corner where the roof sloped down, old letters inside and a jacket with dull brass buttons. He put it on, even though it smelled, and tried to imagine Uncle Robbie wearing it, sailing off to the war with two arms in its sleeves. Behind the bag was something wrapped in a grey blanket that he thought might be a rifle, but it turned out to be an old banjo, with curls of broken strings. Everything else was just attic stuff, skis and poles with brittle bindings and boring board games in a pile, a set of dumbbells. Boxes labelled Curtains and two labelled Christmas, that he didn’t bother opening. He’d be long gone by then, back home, back at school, and with any luck there’d be a big storm or the car would break down and they wouldn’t have to go to the party at the hospital, with the pathetic tree and the streamers and tinsel, the horrible singing along to the banging piano. Sometimes, when Robbie and Edie were out, Alan opened the photo album and stared hard at the old pictures of the boy who was his father, when he was still a live wire, a joker. He had the same big ears, but otherwise he was as much of a stranger as those long-dead grandfathers and aunts, as the dead boy at the bottom of the cold lake.
His mother called on Tuesdays after supper; she said she knew it was an extravagance, but she needed to hear his voice. “It’s sweltering here,” she usually said. “You’re so lucky to be by the lake.” But after that there wasn’t much to talk about. She asked if he’d been swimming and what else he’d been doing and he said, “Not much.” Once she told him about a funny noise the car was making, and asked him what he thought it was. “Don’t know,” he said, “you should ask Uncle Robbie,” but she didn’t want to right then. He’d almost forgotten the annoying way she did that, asking him about the car or if he thought the furnace would make it through another winter, whether they should get a new armchair while the sales were on. As if he really was the man of the house, as she liked to say, as if he had any idea about any of it.
The calls never lasted long; “Well, it’s almost time for Nick Carter,” she said, and he knew she must have timed it like that. They used to listen together, although she often dozed off and woke with a start, asking what she’d missed and then he missed things too, trying to explain quickly. He could picture her, suddenly, settling down in the chair that had the lacy thing draped over the hole in the arm. Her heavy glasses on the little table beside her and the sore-looking marks by the bridge of her nose. “We miss you,” she always said, just before she hung up, and he wished she’d make up her mind. One minute he was supposed to be the man of the house, the next a little kid who believed his father could actually form a thought. “It’s not easy for your mother,” Aunt Edie said, as if she knew anything about it. He picked up the bowl of ice cream that was waiting for him, the first mouthful sliding cool and easing the burning in his throat.
The dead boy’s name was Stevie and there was a framed photograph of him on the mantel. “You have a bit of the look of him,” Mrs. P. said, “only he wasn’t so scrawny.” She said that poor Edie never got over it, well you wouldn’t, would you. “Maybe that’s when her trouble started,” Mrs. P. said, and Alan knew she meant the weeding and the times her eyes had a blurry look, as if she were peering up through water. He thought about how things can start, if you leave a crack open, and then there’s no stopping them, no matter how hard you try.
Alan didn’t see anything of himself in it, but the picture was a good one; it made you feel like you knew that boy, or had seen him somewhere. He’s nine or ten, just his head and shoulders, and he’s laughing so hard you can almost hear it, his hair a mess, standing up all over the place, and all kinds of mischief in his eyes. Mrs. P. said Robbie’s mother had taken it, as well as some others they had in the house. She’d been dead for years, but a lot of people still remembered her, with her long skirts and her cameras, and they remembered seeing her, in all but the stormiest weather, a small, dark figure, walking by the shore. The photograph of Stevie had been taken the summer before he died, and you could tell he didn’t suspect a thing.
Uncle Robbie was a teacher but he still had things to do in the summer, and Aunt Edie went to teas and to meetings at the church when she remembered that she was supposed to. “I think I forgot that one on purpose,” she said to Alan, after someone had called to see where she’d been. They left him little jobs to do, cutting the grass and snicking the edges neat with the big shears, scraping the back porch ready for painting or washing the old car that got so dusty on the gravel roads around town. “We used to be quite a double act, didn’t we, Robbie,” she said, and she told Alan that when they had their first car, after the war, Robbie could steer just fine but she had to shift the gears for him. “People dove for cover when we were about,” she said, “and once we got stuck on the courthouse lawn.” They were both like that, telling him things about their younger days, what they thought of as adventures. He paid more attention after he’d been there for a while and knew the places they were talking about, had seen older versions of some of the people.
He was allowed to do what he liked, and in the hot afternoons he usually went down the winding path to the lake and walked the length of the crowded beach, spurts of fine sand flying out when he jammed his crooked stick down with each step. No one seemed to notice and he thought of the invisibility potion Aunt Edie had told him about, a story of her father’s that she’d really believed when she was small. Women lay on patterned towels with their eyes closed, others stood down by the water with their children, holding hands and laughing as they ran backwards from the waves rolling in. The sun beat down and sparked off the pins in their hair and he felt it on his own head, the same heat, and the shrieking voices sliced through him.
Most days he walked on farther, right to the end and around the little point, and then it was better. A narrow curve of empty sand and all kinds of things washed up, fishing floats and water-smoothed glass, and tree trunks bleached pale and smooth, with huge tangles of roots washed clean. Aunt Edie had also told him that when she was a little girl she had the idea to put a message in a bottle and her father threw it far out in the lake, almost to the horizon, it seemed to her. Her father said that maybe it would come back and sure enough, a few days later a bottle was there, bobbing right near shore; she held up her skirts and fetched it, used a thin stick to fish out the roll of paper inside, and he read her the message. It was from a girl named Amy Jane, who lived deep in the forest on the other side of the lake, and she wanted to know what Edie’s favourite colour was. Aunt Edie told Alan that she never wondered how her bottle had ended up in the middle of a forest, and that in her memory she and Amy Jane sent messages back and forth all summer; she didn’t seem to mind a bit that it was all her parents playing a trick. Though it was just a silly story he kept his eyes open, on the shore, in case a real secret message came rolling in.
Uncle Robbie was going to teach him how to swim but he hadn’t yet, and Aunt Edie made Alan promise to just wade near the shallow shore. That was all right, and when the water was calm he took his crooked stick, sharpened with Robbie’s penknife, and tried to spear the minnows that flashed around his feet. A castaway on the empty beach, maybe a pirate captain, set adrift
by a mutinous crew. He made a shelter, a scooped hole surrounded by bigger pieces of driftwood, and watched for the sails of a ship that could be friend or foe. Once he tried to start a signal fire, using matches he’d taken from the kitchen shelf, but the wood was sandy and water-logged and the breeze off the lake sent the trails of smoke right into his eyes, made tears run down his face. Sometimes he wondered how far he could walk out, before the bottom fell away and the water closed over his head.
Alan understood the joke about the Hoover, but Mrs. P. always reminded him more of a leaky tap. Sometimes trickling, sometimes gushing, but never completely shut off, making him think of the way dripping water could wear a hole in the hardest stone. She was always asking about his mother and father, where they met and when they’d married, and was it true what she’d heard, that they’d run off together and their families had disowned them. So hard it must be for his poor mother, Mrs. P. said, and did she ever talk about—well, she was still a young woman, wasn’t she, and it would be easier for her, wouldn’t it, if she could marry again.
Alan kept his mouth shut, like a POW would have, and though she kept on sneaking in her questions he knew that soon enough she’d get caught up in the flow of her own voice and move on. Mrs. P. knew everything about everyone, it seemed, and it was hard to keep things straight, the way she wandered off into the backgrounds of brothers and grandfathers and cousins. She wandered through time too, one minute talking about the unhappy English brides, with their accents and pale skin, then something about Uncle Robbie’s mother and a hotel. What she’d read about Lana Turner that very morning, then back to dead Stevie and his brother, Rob, who was so wild for a time, and how Robbie and Edie hoped to travel out to meet their grandchildren before school started up again. She told him about Hook, the grocer, with his fat thumb on the scale unless you kept your eyes on him, a thing everyone knew. “Like his father before him,” she said, and that reminded her of another old scandal, Hook’s mother caught laying down poisoned meat, after dogs had been dying for years.