The Landing

by John Ibbitson

  And that was just the basics. The cottage needed to be painted, but he hadn’t even started taking off the old paint yet, so the place looked like sin, and rotten planks on the front porch were a menace. There were things that needed fixing that he knew he didn’t even know about yet. So, yes, there was lots to do on the island.

  They finished breakfast in silence, until Henry shoved himself away from the table and limped outside, on his way to the dock. Ben sometimes wondered whether it hurt Henry to walk. Maybe that’s what made him always on the edge of losing his temper. Henry was already shorter than Ben, who was still growing, and he was so thin that you could count his ribs when sweat stuck a shirt to them, and his skin was darkened and roughened by sun and work, but it was the limp that defined him. It was really a lot more than a limp, though Ben didn’t have a proper word for it. With each step, he threw his right leg forward, swinging it around in an arc, transferring his weight to it while advancing his good left leg, and then he did it all again. He had fallen under a thresher when he was a child, and there was no money for a doctor. The bones had never set properly, and he hadn’t walked right since and had never married. Who would marry a man crippled like that?

  Ben went to help with the dishes, but his mother shooed him out of the kitchen, because she wanted him on his way. The list was long: a fifty-pound sack of flour, kerosene for the lamps, lye soap, lard, tea, salt, that sort of thing. She took the money out of a battered old cash box that she kept in the pantry and counted out the dollars.

  “There, that should be enough. But get your hair cut first.” She ran a playful hand through the thicket that he never tried to comb, making him duck away. “Lord knows, you need it.”

  He headed to the barn, where his mom had already milked the cows and let them out to graze, picked up a straw hat he’d left there and then loped down the broad slope to the dock and hopped into the launch. It had probably been a fine boat, twenty years ago, but now the engine belched and the mahogany had been painted over and everything was worn and chipped and frayed. It had seen half a dozen owners before Henry finally took it off a cottager’s hands in exchange for fixing up a boathouse, and Henry was probably the only man on the lake who could keep it dry and running. They tied a scow to the side for big jobs like hauling dirt or wood, but even without the scow it was the slowest boat on the lake — or seemed like it to Ben. But it could get you to the Narrows in twenty minutes and to town twenty minutes after that.

  Henry was on the dock, spreading whitewash around the planks with a broad brush, because Mary insisted everything had to look just so for the tourists. Ben knew Henry was watching him, disapproving, as he got behind the wheel. A deep breath, a silent prayer, and he turned the key. The starter groaned, the engine coughed, and died. He let out the choke a bit more and tried again, but the motor just sputtered, and now there was sweat trickling down his neck. Henry started to get up with a “let me do it” grunt, but Ben turned the key one last time, and the motor caught. He pushed in the choke and revved the engine.

  “Don’t hang around in town. There’s too much to do.”

  “I won’t.”

  And he slipped the lines, edged the boat away from the dock and was on his way.

  A string of islands, rock rising from water, fringed with birch and crowned with pine, each standing a couple hundred yards offshore, ran down the west side of the lake, forming a sort of channel that protected boats from the open water, which could get very unpleasant very quickly if your boat was small or, more likely, you were a cottager who didn’t know what you were doing. The launch could handle anything the lake could throw at it, but the channel was still the shortest route to the Narrows, so Ben pointed the boat south, perched himself on the back of the cracked leather seat and tried not to think too much.

  Thinking was driving him crazy these days. It was all he did now, and it was mostly misery. He would think, as he tried not to think now, about how hard life was in Henry’s shadow, how no one understood that he couldn’t spend forever pumping gas on a dock or tending a failing farm. “You can get a trade,” Henry had told him once during a rare, out-loud argument about what Ben was going to do with himself. “You could apprentice as a carpenter, maybe.” But Ben didn’t want a trade. His hands didn’t understand wood the way his father’s had. His dad had been a fine carpenter, a craftsman; the china cupboard in the kitchen was his, and people said you couldn’t have gotten anything finer if you’d ordered it from Eaton’s. Ben wasn’t his father’s son when it came to driving a nail, or his uncle’s nephew, for that matter, when it came to fixing a balky motor or welding two pieces of broken metal into one.

  Besides, Ben had a trade. It was the violin.

  Because he had begged, his parents had saved their money and started him on piano lessons when he was only five. But they didn’t have a piano themselves, couldn’t afford it yet, and one day the furniture store on the main street brought in a violin and a guitar, with books on how to learn to play. His dad had bought him the violin and the book that went with it, which proved useless. But Ambrose Heidman lived in town, and he was a fine fiddler — went down to Toronto once and played in a square dance competition, and the only reason he didn’t win was because it was fixed, everybody said — and he gave Ben lessons for twenty-five cents a week, and then, after the funeral, he gave them for free whenever Ben could get into town or he could get out to the Landing, “because that boy can play like nobody’s business,” he’d told Ben’s mother.

  Ambrose was a happy man, with no hair but lots of gut and a huge laugh and nimble fingers, and it was fun to be around him and a joy to play with him, because he knew all the things Ben didn’t know, like how to get your fingers around a certain scale or how to make the violin play two notes at once. Ben would have practiced with him every day and certainly needed to see him every week, but it was more like once a month, if they were lucky. They’d spend an hour or two together, and Ben would show Ambrose what problems he was having, and Ambrose would show him the fingering to fix it, though last time they were together he’d shaken his head. “I don’t know how you do that. I’ve never even tried it.”

  And at the end they’d pick up their fiddles and play some tunes, because Ambrose Heidman’s great gift was his ear — he could hear a tune once and play it and could improvise freely on anything, and there was a lilt to his playing that meant you just had to dance another one, even if it was late.

  “You got it, too,” Ambrose had told Ben, and in the last year they’d played at a couple of weddings together and a couple of dances, and people said they were so good together you couldn’t hear better on the radio. Ben had brought home a dollar after the first gig and given it to Henry, who’d shoved it in the cash box without a word, as though he resented the money. Ben burned with anger, and the next time he put the dollar in the cash box himself, in front of Henry, making a show of it. He and Henry spoke even less to each other after that.

  Most days, though, Ben played alone, practicing the studies, etudes they were called, in the books that Ambrose had given him — “I’m too old for practicing, anyway. You might as well have them” — and playing and replaying his prized pieces of sheet music: “Who Is Sylvia?” “Long, Long Ago,” “Shall We Gather at the River?” and his favorite, “Air on a G String,” by J.S. Bach, which was so sad and so beautiful, “and that’s real music, let me tell you,” Ambrose had agreed. He practiced in the morning until Henry made him stop, and he practiced if he could get free of his chores and Henry was away, and he practiced at dusk sometimes, until the dying light and Henry’s protests — “Will you quit that infernal noise?” — forced him to give up. He wished he had a hundred songs, a thousand, to play and practice, but all his mother could afford was three or four at Christmas, when sheet music was the only present Ben asked for.

  He squinted his eyes against the sun. It was hot, and not even ten, and the first trickle of sweat dribbled down his back beneath
his shirt. But when he came to a gap in the islands, a gust of breeze from the open water beyond freshened the air. His thoughts turned back, against his will to what he was going to do, if anything, after the summer. He knew his mother was worried about it, too, but “maybe something will turn up” was the most she could think of, with a helpless shrug. He wanted to play the violin. That’s all he wanted to do. That’s all he wanted to be. But there weren’t enough weddings and dances in the district to provide more than pocket money, an extra dollar for the pot now and then. He had to think of something else or life would become the Landing, forever. But what? He wished, as he still wished every day, with a dull ache, that his dad were alive.

  His father had been up in the bush with a logging crew near Algonquin Park, where a lot of the local men went in the winter because there was nothing else. He was leading a team of horses pulling a sled of pine logs through the bush. But it was muddy and slippery, and the logging road was too close to a bank that led down to a creek, and the bank gave way, and by the time they got the logs and the sled off him it was too late, though they saved the horses.

  “When we lost Jake Mercer, we lost the best we had,” one of his father’s friends had said at the funeral, as Ben sat in the pew staring at nothing, holding his mother’s cold, trembling hand. Muskoka was a beautiful place, the tourists said, and on a warm summer’s day, when the blue lake glinted in the morning sun, framed by granite and pine, Ben knew what they meant, understood why they traveled so far to stay there and never wanted to leave. But part of him hated the place. It had killed his father. He spat into the lake and turned the wheel, swinging the boat to starboard.

  He had reached the Narrows. The lake ended here, except for a narrow channel barely wide enough for the steamers that plied the lakes — delivering passengers and provisions and mail to the islands and resorts — to squeeze through. There was a tiny lighthouse at the entrance that Isaac Barnes looked after for a hundred dollars a year, guiding boats and ships that had stayed out after dark, because without the lighthouse the Narrows would be impossible to find. It could be tricky to navigate if the wind was fresh from the west and the water was choppy, but not today, and Ben steered the scow between the rocks and trees that lined each side of the shore until he passed into Muskoka Bay, which was really another lake, though a smaller one.

  What little breeze there was left him when he left the lake. The bay was dead calm; sweat dampened his shirt; sun burned his forehead. To heck with it. He idled the motor, kicked off his sneakers, shucked his clothes and knifed into the water.

  The familiar shock of cold slapped his skin, then dissolved as he thrust himself forward underwater, enjoying the coolness, the freshness of it, surfacing twenty feet from the boat. A quick check to make sure it wasn’t drifting, and he began to swim, a forward crawl, almost silent as he sliced cleanly through the waveless surface. He’d been swimming since he’d been talking, as his mother joked, and he could crawl across the quiet lake for an hour, back and forth, hypnotizing himself with his own rhythms, feeling the water course against his pale skin, which never properly tanned, propelling himself with his feet, pulling himself forward as his arms reached out and drew away, stroke, stroke, stroke.

  But there were things to do. He circled the boat, one broad ring, then a narrower one, then out of the water and onto the boat, and one quick dive back in, a sprint out and back, and he pulled himself out of the water and slid on his pants, dipping his shirt in the bay before putting it back on. It would be dry again by the time he reached town.

  The town was Gravenhurst, twenty minutes later, at the end of the bay, a ghost bay of failure and foreclosure. Ben scanned the empty sheds of the Mickle sawmill that dominated the western shore. A year earlier lumber had screamed beneath its saws, gray smoke had belched from its stack and drifted across the bay, hovering over the great piles of sawdust that lined the shore. But the clear cuts had stripped the district of timber, and the hard times had stripped away business, and the mill had closed the year before. To the east, near Muskoka Wharf, the freshly bankrupt Ditchburn boatworks sat idle; everywhere along the shoreline sheds sat empty, uncared-for, defeated.

  Muskoka Wharf, however, was still the town’s pride, wide enough to host a station and train tracks for the Muskoka Express, which steamed north from Toronto every weekend — every day it had been, sometimes, before the Depression hit — emptying its carloads of vacationers, who promptly walked all of ten steps to where a steamer was waiting to glide them up the lake to their cottages or resorts. There was no train this morning, and only one steamer idled at her moorings: the Cherokee, white-painted, gray-hulled, sleekest and most beautifully proportioned of all the ships of the Muskoka Navigation Company. They were beautiful on the water, ambling lazily between the islands, black smoke drifting from their stacks, decorated with passengers in carefully chosen outfits of this-old-thing corduroy and cotton. But bad times were bad for the steamers, too. It didn’t help that the government had paved the road as far as the town to give men work, and there were plans to keep the road going up the west side of the lake to Bala. “These boats won’t be around much longer,” the captain of the Islander had warned Henry last summer. The Islander steamed empty past the Landing most days, delivering little but mail.

  On a busy weekend, the wharf would still be crammed with people and boats, and it could take forever to find a space to squeeze into. But on this Monday morning, with no train today, there was hardly anyone about, and Ben eased the launch alongside and quickly jumped out to secure the bow and stern lines. He’d have to wheedle the Passmores into helping him bring down the supplies, because the main street was almost a mile from the bay, and the flour alone would be more than he could carry. But first the haircut, his mother had said. Passmore’s would always be there, but who knew how long Jed would stay on the job.

  There was a decent hill, rising from the bay to the main street at its crest. The road leading up from the bay was lined with elms, maples and oaks, guarding broad lawns and substantial homes with verandas and bay windows, houses of brick, or white paint and black trim, with everything kept just so. The homes had been built by mill owners, mostly, in the days when Muskoka Bay was lined with sawmills, and logs choked and fouled the water. Now the town doctor and the owners of the better stores lived there — though even here, Ben noticed as he walked gratefully beneath the shading trees, the paint was peeling on a couple of houses, and everything wasn’t just so anymore.

  “Gravenhurst Barbers,” announced the painted sign on the grimy window, where a row of green spikes in pots — mother-in-law’s tongue they were called, and a barbershop was a good place for gossipy plants — hid the interior from view.

  Ben stepped inside and searched for a chair. Three men in work clothes, caps or straw hats still guarding their hair, slouched patiently, waiting their turn. Silent, tanned and creased faces stared at knees, and everyone was hot, because the slow-turning fan overhead did nothing, really, to stir the air. The place was crowded, and the wait would be long. But they would wait. They had been ordered to wait.

  Ben slipped into the only available chair, the one closest to Claude. No wonder everyone avoided him, and avoided looking at him, with his beak for a nose and claws for hands and the disorderly wisps hanging from his scalp, a poor advertisement for his services. He shot Ben an expectant, hopeful look, but sank back into his own chair at the “Thanks, I’ll wait” shake of Ben’s head. They were all waiting for Jed to finish with Gideon Smalley.

  Gideon was shorter than most men, and richer than most men in town. He boasted the smooth skin and confident good humor of someone who had made a success of himself, and he smiled in satisfaction as Jed the barber clipped and snipped and sculpted his pompadour of snow-white hair. Gideon owned the good restaurant in town and had a phenomenal memory, so that if he met you once when you visited Smalley’s Dining Room, where the blueberry pie was talked about in two provinces and three states, he wo
uld remember you again, even if it was years until your next visit. Gideon Smalley’s perpetual smile, his amazing memory and his business smarts had made him rich and made him mayor, three terms in a row, and earned him and his gentle, nervous wife the right to sit in their own pew in the Presbyterian church, which was the largest in town. And only Jed, of course, could touch Gideon’s hair.

  Jed’s eyes were the saddest thing Ben had ever seen — large, brown eyes framed by the bags beneath them and the gray brows above them. Only his apologetic smile could lighten them. No one knew what it was that made Jed so sad, because he always smiled, and his voice was as soft as cat’s fur as he clipped away, comforting, reassuring, wanting no one to have a care in the world as long as they were in that chair.

  “Now the Leafs, I think they can go all the way, Mr. Smalley, I really do.” Jed’s voice floated through the room, his scissors hovering in one hand, comb framing the next batch of hair to be cropped in the other. “Red Horner’s got a lot of heart, and there isn’t a better forward in the league than Charlie Conacher. You don’t want it too short, now, do you?”

  “Whatever you think is best, Jed. You’re in charge,” Gideon purred back. “But I don’t know about the Leafs. They always break my heart.”

  “Oh, I never give up hope, Mr. Smalley, never,” Jed replied. “Shall we do same as last time?”

  “Certainly, Jed.”

  Jed took a wooden tube from the shelf and drew out several long, wooden matches.

  “Now don’t set me on fire, Jed,” Smalley chuckled.