“No danger of that, Mr. Smalley,” Jed replied as he lit the match. He combed a swatch of hair away from the scalp, then quickly lit the hair with the match and as quickly snuffed out the spark between his fingers, leaving the hair blackened and singed. Ben jerked back in astonishment, and the other men looked hardly less surprised, but Gideon just smiled into the mirror, and Jed murmured on, about the Leafs and the heat and the town and its troubles — “but we’re going to turn the corner soon, I just know it, we’ll be turning that corner soon” — and as he moved his hands along, touching the flame to the hair, snuffing it out, repeat, repeat, the blackened tips seemed to give an added sheen to Gideon Smalley’s mane, making it even sleeker and smoother, reminding everyone else in the room that Jed was an artist and Smalley was a success and what were they?
Ben didn’t know, but for the moment didn’t care, sitting in that heat-stifled room with those men, as dust wafted in from the street and Jed sculpted Gideon Smalley’s hair with flame and grace, while Claude glowered and the fan carved uselessly through the thick, sticky early summer air.
Ruth Chapman
Ben stared glumly down at the rotting planks of the dock, wondering whether he was going to get an earful. From the defiant frown Henry had worn all day, Ben guessed that his uncle was thinking the same thing.
They were waiting for the new owners of Pine Island to arrive, to inspect the work that they’d done. Only they hadn’t done nearly enough. They had tried — Ben had been working morning till night seven days a week on the place, and Henry had come over whenever he had an hour free, which was almost never. But the place had run down, and they hadn’t even begun to run it back up again.
Take the dock they were standing on. The foundation was sound enough: the Boyd brothers had laid the cribs — stones encased in squared pine logs that would withstand half a century of shifting ice; and the broad beams underlying the dock had only been laid in the twenties and were good for another decade at least. But the overlying planks had been exposed to too much sun and too much rain, and some of them were rotting and some were cracked, just like the planks on the front porch. They should all have been replaced, but there hadn’t been time. There hadn’t been time for a lot of things.
The house was dry, at least, thanks to Henry showing Ben how to shingle a roof, though there’d been a lot of swearing and “Sorry” before he’d got the hang of it. There was half a cord of wood stacked along the north wall for the stove and the fireplace — though there hadn’t been a night that needed a fire since the end of May — and everything was clean. Ben had oiled the hardwood floors and fixed the sag in the icehouse and brought in enough ice, and covered it with enough sawdust, to last the rest of the summer. But he still hadn’t stripped the old paint, let alone laid down any new; three of the shutters needed fixing, and so did the floorboards in the pantry. The door to the root cellar at the side of the house where the milk and vegetables were kept cool was threatening to fall in.
Would they get someone else to finish the job? Would they demand their money back? Ben frowned, and Henry scowled, and they waited.
The settlers who came to the district in the 1860s and 1870s — the Mercers and the Schultzes and the Barneses and the Schells and the Clipshams and the Boyds and the Harbridges and the Heidmans and the two or three dozen other families who had opened the Muskoka District — had lived with failure and loss from the start. They had been promised free land and, yes, the land was free, but the land broke their backs. They cleared the trees — sold them off, if they could, burned them if they couldn’t — and dug out the rocks that littered the thin, sandy soil, and planted their first crops. But the rocks came back the next year, a mystery and a curse, until the settlers realized the frost was heaving more rocks up from the deeper earth with each thaw. Without the trees to anchor it, the soil washed away. There were patches of clay where indifferent crops could be grown, and Cook’s Landing was like that, which is why they still farmed it three generations after the first refugee from the Old Country had staked the claim. But no one got rich farming in Muskoka, and few were anything but poor, and most gave up and left after selling their waterfronts to the industrialists from Pittsburgh and the bankers from Toronto who had just discovered these pristine waters.
So it was the cottagers now who owned the lakes. The locals made what living they could from selling whatever the cottagers needed, or just wanted. The sons of pioneers planted flowers in the cottagers’ window boxes, and took the high and mighty to fishing holes and then cooked them their catch, and fixed their boats and replaced their propellers — because the rich are a menace on the water — and made as much money as they could pry from their guests until the guests went south with the first frost, leaving the locals to survive as best they could through the long snows until the tourists came back.
Most of the Muskoka-born just shrugged at the way things were because what could you do? But it gnawed at some of them; it ate away at Henry like beetles in a tree. He worked the farm that had twisted his bones, and skinned his knuckles loosening seized bolts on misfiring engines, and listened silently while the owner complained about the bill and demanded ten percent off — and got it, because both sides knew he could go somewhere else next time. Henry would watch, his face a mask, as the man took out his fat wallet and peeled off a couple of twos.
A few of them were nice, in that “And how are you today?” tone of voice, and a few tried to be chummy and told their friends “that fellow who fixed my boat is a good man,” though everyone knew who was the better man. Some of them treated the locals like dirt. Last year a fat face over a bloated belly had pulled up to the dock and yelled to Ben, “Boy! Do you sell smokes?” Ben would never forget that as long as he lived.
So who knew what the new owners would say when they found that their house in the woods wasn’t all pretty like they wanted. “This is egregious,” a cottager had once complained when Ben had planted the geraniums too close together, as though Ben knew what “egregious” meant, when everyone in Muskoka finished school in grade eight because that’s all there was, except for the merchants’ sons who went on to the high school in town. Would the new owner think Ben’s work was egregious, too?
He looked across the water to the Landing. The dock, the flat rock that formed the shoreline rising gently to the little plateau, the trim white house, two stories, the barn in back, the shambly henhouse, the toolshed, the outhouse, the vegetable garden behind, then the back field, all framed by bush, starting to fill back in now that the loggers had moved on because there was nothing left worth cutting. He would live in that house over there with his mother and his uncle until it became his house, and he and his wife would farm that miserable field and repaint that house with the same white paint, and Ben would try to fix people’s engines even though he wasn’t very good at it, and hope he bagged a deer in the fall even though he hated hunting. Cook’s Landing would be his life, whether he liked it or not. Unless he could find a way out, and there wasn’t a way out that he could even imagine, let alone find.
“There she is.” Ben looked up to see the bow of the Ahmic nosing into view as she cleared the south end of Pine Island. The Ahmic was one of the smaller steamers in the fleet and far from the prettiest, but it lifted Ben’s heart to see her, because she’d started to become a rare sight. She was a squat, two-decked workhorse, nothing to compare with longer and sleeker beauties like the Cherokee and especially the Sagamo, jewel of the fleet, with four decks and an oak-paneled dining room with real linen tablecloths and a dozen small staterooms for the rich who wanted privacy while they steamed up the lakes. But they were all beautiful to him, even the Ahmic. Their steel hulls were painted gray, and their wooden upper decks and wheelhouses white, with the smokestacks a bold red and black. They carried visitors from the railhead at Muskoka Wharf up to the luxury resorts on the upper lakes, and they carried the cottagers to their cottages. They carried the mail, and hampers of fine food from
Eaton’s to Millionaires’ Row, whose occupants were prepared to rough it, but not without pâté, and they carried supplies to the resorts and lumber and spare parts and, and — and they were serene and silent, gliding across the water, black smoke from their stacks drifting above the tree line to signal their approach. Ben worked on them now and then, when this ship or that was shorthanded and Henry could spare him. It was a filthy job, shoveling coal into the furnaces, but there was a grace to the boats that gave them a soul and made them loved, even by the crews, though you’d never get them to admit it. Watching two or three steamers rendezvous in the middle of the lake, one coming down from Lake Rosseau, the other up from town, gliding slowly toward each other then sidling up, bells clanging for “reverse” and “slow” until they were nestled side by side, transferring passengers and cargo, then easing away, a deep whistle of “so long,” then bells for “full ahead” — well, it was a thing to see. And they were seeing it less and less, thanks to the Depression and the newly paved roads.
The Ahmic edged alongside the dock — no easy task since the Ahmic, small as she was for a steamboat, was still half again as long as the dock — and Ben grinned when he saw Cal Moore throwing him the bow line. Ben and Cal had been best friends till Cal’s family had moved into town when his dad got a job at the paintbrush factory two years ago. Since then, the Landing had been even lonelier. Cal was as solid as Ben was slender, his open-faced grin as constant as Ben’s was rare, though Ben laughed more when Cal was around. Unlike Ben, Cal got his deer every year, and he could skate rings around Ben, and did.
“You’re not going to believe this, Ben,” Cal yelled, as the bells sounded “All Stop.”
“You’re not going to believe this, Hank,” Captain Corbett yelled out from the wheelhouse.
Two men rolled the gangplank onto the dock, and Ben and Henry stepped aboard and looked around. Ben scratched his head. There were boxes and crates and barrels and more boxes and more crates. There were sofas and chairs and bed frames, and they could even see paintings inside thin slatted boxes. “Paintings?” Henry shook his head. “It’s a cottage, for crying out loud.”
But it was a cottage that would have paintings. And crystal. And a piano.
“A piano.” Henry stared at it. “Christ.”
There was a lot more cursing after that. The ship was chock-full of furniture and supplies crammed into the lower deck, with a few boxes sprawled out over the upper deck as well. It had taken all morning to transfer the load from the boxcar to the steamer, and that was an easier job than getting it from the ship to the dock — taking care not to put any weight on the rotten planks — and up the steep stone steps that led from the dock to the cottage. But the new owners had booked the ship and paid the men their wages in advance, and there were six of them to handle the job, so they sweated the crates and barrels up the steps and navigated the piano — it took all of them to do it, and they wasted half an hour — and hauled up the sofas — who in this world needs two sofas? — and put together the bed frames and dropped the mattresses on the beds, though nobody was going to try to figure out where the paintings should go.
“Look at this, Ben.” Cal pried open the lid of one of the crates. “I heard it sloshing.”
“Lord,” Ben breathed, for there were twenty-four bottles of gin in that crate — more gin than even Ernie Franks could get through. Ernie was the town drunk — well, the town drunkest — and when he was liquored up he’d weave down the middle of the main street, kicking his right leg into the air and howling with laughter, because Ernie liked to boast that he could kick higher than any man, not that there was much competition. He made it a point to know the birth date of every single soul he met, and once he learned it he never forgot. Women hated Ernie Franks, even though he was a big, lean man who’d been good looking a couple of decades ago, because if he saw one of them walking along the sidewalk he’d yell out, in his piercing baritone, “Ada Robinson, May 13, 1887! How ya doing!” He’d yell and he’d laugh and he’d call out birthdays as he kicked and careened down the street, while women ducked for cover.
Even Ernie would have been impressed by the stash of booze the new owners had brought with them. A case of gin, a case of Scotch and a case of whisky and rum, and two cases of white wine and two cases of red wine — and, oh, another case of gin.
“And olives,” Ben marveled as he lugged them up the stone steps. “What do you do with twenty-four jars of olives?” Ben had never seen a jar of olives before, and now he was looking at two dozen of them.
There were other marvels in these boxes and crates. Records, a couple hundred at least, and a Victrola to play them on. The sofas were leather and so were the chairs, and Ben didn’t know much about art, but the paintings were a far cry from the Last Supper they had hanging in the parlor at the Landing. There were landscapes with forests and lakes that sort of looked like Muskoka, and others with mountains and bears, and then others that didn’t look like anything at all — just splotches of color that made Ben wonder if they’d been left out in the rain. The plates were china — ivory, with a band of blue and gold around the edge — and the glasses were crystal, as the sign on the outside cautioned, and the silverware was real sterling silver — and had been carefully counted, warned the note inside. “We wouldn’t want her to suffer,” Captain Corbett grunted, as he and Ben hauled a massive mahogany bureau up the steps.
Ben had expected the new owners to be on board, but there was only one, he was told, and she was coming up on her own. “She bought a boat from Greavette’s, don’t you know,” Cal explained. “Said she’d drive it up herself. So we’ll get to haul all this stuff back to town after she flips it over and drowns.” Ben smiled. If there was anything in this world more dangerous than a cottager driving a fast boat, it was a woman cottager driving a fast boat.
However hard the work, at least the day gave Ben a chance to catch up with Cal, who was a happy guy, always laughing and joking around, the opposite of Ben, though maybe that’s why they got along so well.
“So how’s it going?” Cal huffed as they lugged a big leather chest up to the cottage.
“Okay. Same as always. You?”
“Okay. Hard to find a job, though. How’s the Landing doing?”
“Same as always, I guess. Maybe a little worse. So is it true you’re going out with Elsie Clipsham?”
Cal flushed. “Who told you that?”
Ben grinned. The barbershop was a better source of news than the Gravenhurst Banner. “So it’s true.”
Cal tried to shrug, though it wasn’t easy with both hands gripping the chest. “I dunno. Maybe.”
Ben wouldn’t admit how jealous he was. Elsie Clipsham was fine, if a bit big-boned. There wasn’t a girl near Ben’s age within five miles of the Landing, and it was starting to get to him.
“I think that’s her,” one of the crew called from the dock. Ben hurried down the steps to get a look. What a beauty. Long and trim, all dark mahogany, about twenty feet, the bold Greavette bow thrust out of the water, red leather seats, a tapered stern, a throaty, growling engine that said power, all you want, whenever you want it. And a scarf and sunglasses behind the wheel, an arm resting casually on the gunwale, throttle wide open.
“She’s coming in too fast.”
The driver throttled down, lowering the bow, and started her turn, but she should’ve been at dead slow by now, and she was coming in quarter speed, at least.
“What’s she doing?”
“She’s going to pile that thing on the rocks.”
Captain Corbett pumped his arm, thumb down, warning her to slow up. But the boat kept com-ing in, angling now toward the dock, still way too fast. So how would this end? Ben wondered. Would she run the side of the boat up against the dock, or plow the bow onto the rocky shore? One Greavette boat lost, after a lifetime of thirty minutes on the water.
But no. At the second before the point of no retur
n, she slipped the engine into neutral, then threw it into reverse, The motor revved, the bow heaved then settled, and there she was, flush to the dock, pretty as you please. Ben grabbed the bow line while Cal went to the stern, and Captain Corbett stepped forward to give the lady a hand, but there was no need because she was out of the boat and onto the dock in two swift steps, and she was wearing pants.
Ben had never seen his mother, or any woman for that matter, wear anything but a dress or a nightgown. But this woman was wearing beige cotton trousers and a blouse that looked more like a man’s shirt. And she was tall and thin, and she had the kind of weathered tan that said she’d spent a lot of time out of doors. She reached up and slipped off her scarf, revealing a head of gray hair that now fell free, and the lines around her keen, blue-gray eyes when she took off her sunglasses and the creases in her skin, because she wore almost no makeup, suggested a woman in her fifties, with a sharp chin and high cheekbones and a tilt of the head that suggested she was used to being in charge. She must have been a looker when she was young.
The woman sized up the situation, hands on hips, half smiling. “Afternoon, gentlemen.” A low, alto voice, all Scotch and cigarettes but still feminine, somehow. “Which one of you is Hank Cook?”
“That’s me.” Henry stepped forward and accepted her handshake.
“Ruth Chapman. Pleasure to meet you. I appreciate all the work you’ve been doing here.”
“My nephew’s been doing most of the work on your cottage.” Henry nodded in Ben’s direction.
“But not on the dock.” She looked down at the rotten planks, frowning.
So it was egregious. “I’m sorry,” Ben stammered. “There was … we figured the house …”
“We only had a month,” Hank interrupted, in his I’m-not-going-to-take-any-lip voice, “and there was a lot to do.”
“Of course there was,” she answered calmly, ignoring the storm signals. “The house sat empty for four years. How bad is it?”
The Landing Page 3