Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  The weather had become bigger small talk than the playoff prospects of the Toronto Maple Leafs or whatever outrageous comment Archie Bunker had come out with on the most recent episode of All in the Family. The combined melt and unseasonable rain had raised levels almost a metre on the Great Lakes, and the Muskoka River, which twisted and gently eddied through the town, was already clear and high. The ice remained relatively solid, however, on the two lakes that bordered Huntsville to the west and to the east, Vernon and Fairy—“Fairy” being an unfortunate accident of 1820s mapmaking and 1970s idiom. It had made the sign on Main Street identifying the weekly meeting place of the Fairy Branch of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows a standing joke among the local high school students who streamed down Brunel Road and onto Main Street at the end of the school day in search of chips and gravy and cherry Coke at Peter’s Restaurant.

  Several fish huts were still out on the surrounding lakes—one or two that were certain to be found floating and shattered once the winds came up and the ice went out completely. My oldest brother, Jim, was already counting down to opening day for speckles and lake trout. Our father, Duncan, then still working in Algonquin Park as a timber grader for the McRae mill at Rock Lake, would soon be walking out the copper line on his old banjo-reel trolling rod to mark off each fifty feet with a slice of Band-Aid. The closer summer came, the deeper down he’d have to get his minnow-tipped Williams Wabler, which he always spit upon just before he dropped it over the side of the boat, in the hopes of landing a big one.

  Jimmy Stringer was also from Algonquin Park. The elderly bachelor with the leprechaun grin lived year round at Canoe Lake with his younger brother Wam, who also had never married. Jimmy had travelled the sixty-five kilometres to town by foot and thumb—the brothers owned no vehicle—to pick up supplies to take back to their ramshackle home on Potter Creek, at the north end of the lake. As was his custom, Jimmy had taken a nine-dollar-a-night room in the Empire Hotel for a few days, as his custom was also to turn the supply run into a bit of a bender.

  “Laddie, Laddie,” Jimmy said in a near whisper from his unmade bed. “D’you mind going for another drink for Ol’ Jamie?”

  First, however, “Ol’ Jamie” needed some air. Or at least I needed some air. The stale smell of the room had been masked somewhat by the sickly sweet aroma of Amphora tobacco, as Jimmy had already smoked several pipes through the morning. And the only window in his third-floor room was shut and sealed with old paint. I yanked up on the sash as hard as I could, repeating the motion until, finally, it separated from the sill with a crack that sounded like a rifle shot.

  Real gunshots were not unheard-of around the Empire, which stood on Main Street, where the town’s business artery swept up from the river toward the theatre and the Gospel Hall. Not many months earlier, I had worked as a tap man at the hotel, drawing draft beer in the basement bar known locally as the “Snake Pit.” I was there the night one of the locals got tossed out for starting a fistfight, only to come back later with a twenty-gauge shotgun, climb up onto the roof of the Huntsville Grill (the Lum family’s “Chinese and Canadian Food” restaurant directly across Main Street) and nearly rip off a customer’s shoulder at closing time with a blast of birdshot. That he accidentally shot the wrong person didn’t count for much with the police.

  The open window let in a cool breeze, offering welcome relief from both the tobacco smell and the stench of a corner sink that was likely used as much for urine as for water. With the window up, you could hear the odd car go by, tires sizzling in the cold rainwater, and the early spring runoff rolling in short waves down Minerva Street from the bush around Reservoir Hill where my family lived.

  “What do you say, Laddie—will ya?”

  Jimmy was already drunk at noon, and it was as much my fault as his. I was then a twenty-four-year-old recent journalism grad, trying to gain a foot in the door by freelancing an article to Maclean’s magazine on the artist Tom Thomson and his various Algonquin Park and Huntsville connections, including some relatives of mine.

  Before dropping in to see what, if anything, Jimmy knew about Thomson and his mysterious death at Canoe Lake in 1917, I had gone to the Liquor Control Board of Ontario store to pick up something that might help loosen Jimmy’s tongue. Knowing well what he liked, I went immediately to the letter “S” on the master board. A twenty-six-ouncer of London Supreme sherry was selling for $1.50 and a twenty-six-er of Brights President, for $2.20; deciding to go for the good stuff, I pencilled in “562-B” for the Brights and took the order slip to the cash, where “Babe” Malloy, the store manager, took it into the back of the store and quickly returned with the bottle. He laid it down on the counter back of the cash wicket so I could confirm the label and then deftly slipped the bottle into a plain, brown-paper bag so no one would ever guess you’d been to the liquor store. It made you feel as though you were purchasing condoms.

  Somewhat reluctantly, I set out to buy the requested second bottle of Brights. I was starting to worry I might lose Jimmy if he drank too much—a legitimate concern, since he was already snoring as I shut the hotel room door.

  I’d known Jimmy was staying at the Empire because he’d already called in at our house three blocks away. My mother, Helen, had been born in Algonquin Park, at Brule Lake in 1915, and the Stringer family had later moved there. Her father, Tom McCormick, had been a fire ranger with Jack Stringer, Jimmy’s father. Tom and Bea McCormick had five children: Mary, Helen, Roy, Irvine and Tom. Jack and Kate Stringer—always called “Pappy” and “Mammy”—had an even dozen: John, Dan, Cy, Albert, Wam (whose given name was “Wilmer”), Omer, Roy, Jimmy, Dellas, Moon (whose given name was “Stella”), Mabel and Marion. While both families eventually left the tiny railway depot at Brule for other destinations in Algonquin Park—the McCormicks building a log home at Lake of Two Rivers, the Stringers moving to their whitewashed board-and-batten home at Canoe Lake—the connection remained close.

  In winter Jimmy and Wam often dropped in for a meal at our place before heading back to Canoe Lake, where they would haul their supplies over the ice by toboggan. It was at our red Formica kitchen table, over a cup of sobering coffee, that Jimmy had first dropped hints that he’d not only known Tom Thomson, but also knew something about the enduring mystery that is the painter’s life, death and even afterlife.

  It was impossible to grow up in this area and not know about Tom Thomson. I cannot recall when I became aware of his existence, but it would have been close to when I learned to walk and talk. His story had interested me as a child—he’d painted in the park where, with my brothers Jim and Tom and sister, Ann, I spent every moment when not in school, my grandfather the ranger had known him, my great-aunt’s spinster sister had been engaged to him—but the tale came to fascinate me as I grew older. Winston Churchill might have called Russia “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” but Tom Thomson’s story struck me as equally unknowable. How had he died? Accident? Suicide? Murder? If murder, by whom? And where, exactly, was he buried—in the family plot, as family and the Ontario government claimed, or still at Canoe Lake, as the park oldtimers had always maintained? I was hooked as a child; obsessed as an adult.

  Writing now in the early months of 2010, I can—to my own surprise—claim to have been actively researching Tom Thomson’s life and death for nearly forty years, right back to that very first freelance feature for Maclean’s. Over these four decades, I have accumulated dozens and dozens of interviews with various people directly or indirectly involved with the story, the majority of whom have since died. During these years I also wrote about Thomson from time to time in magazines and newspaper columns. In 1980 I published a novel inspired by Thomson’s life called Shorelines (which was republished in 2002 as Canoe Lake). By 2010 I felt that the time had surely come for me to put together all the research and interviews and speculation and, indeed, scientific and archaeological evidence so fresh the book could not have been written even a year earlier. But all the same, forty year
s is a long, long time to sharpen a pencil.

  I then recalled that my research had gone on even longer than that, for most of half a century, in fact. In the summer of 1963, a decade before this meeting with Jimmy Stringer in the Empire Hotel, I helped a cousin clean out the home and cottage of Winnifred Trainor, the Huntsville woman Tom Thomson was supposedly to marry the same summer he died on Canoe Lake. His body had surfaced not far from where her little summer cabin stood.

  While I took no notes—I was a teenager dreaming then of a life in hockey, not journalism—the images stuck with me. It seemed Winnie had kept every newspaper and magazine that had ever come into her Minerva Street home, which stood, coincidentally, kitty corner to the Empire Hotel. The papers were piled so deep and high that there were mere rabbit runs between them to move about in. Her bathtub was filled with empty paint cans and partial cans of long-hardened house paint. My cousin Terry and I hauled out the newspapers and magazines, box loads of trinkets and souvenirs and letters and any furniture that could not be sold or given away. We took most of the stuff to the town dump and threw it all away. Then we emptied “the barn,” the large shed on the corner of her lot, taking more papers and boards and canvas tarpaulins, old bed frames and broken furniture to the dump. We saved other letters and documents and a number of keepsakes—one being a World War I soldier’s uniform that had likely belonged to Roy McCormick, Winnie’s brother-in-law, who was also Terry’s father and my grandfather’s brother.

  Once the contents had been tossed or taken away, Winnie’s home was rented out—for a time to my grandmother, Bea McCormick. Eventually, the property was sold and the building was torn down.

  It seemed appropriate that Bea McCormick would live for a while in the upstairs apartment where Winnie had lived out her final years. Bea and Winnie’s sister, Marie, had married brothers Tom and Roy McCormick. But as Winnie never married after she lost her Tom, and as she had no other family, the extended McCormick family became hers as well.

  There was also the Algonquin Park connection. Thomson first visited the park in 1912, the same year the Trainors took possession of an old ranger cabin on Canoe Lake. At the time the McCormicks were living at Brule Lake, about 10 kilometres north and slightly west along the Grand Trunk tracks. My grandfather knew Tom, but it would be wrong to pretend they were friends. Quite the opposite, in fact. For reasons he never expanded on to his grandchildren, Chief Ranger Tom McCormick would quickly dismiss Thomson as a “lazy bum” if a park visitor happened to ask about Algonquin’s most famous personality. Thomson, after all, had not been famous in the park while he was alive; he had not even been well known. If pressed, the old ranger might further describe the painter as “a drinker,” which in his temperate circles was considered a condemnation of the first order. If, when I was a child, he’d also called Thomson a “philanderer,” as others did at the time, I would not have understood what such a strange word meant.

  But it was more than just family connections that drew me to Thomson. On the landing heading up to the second floor of the red-brick Huntsville Public School, between Miss Parker’s three-four-and-five class and Mr. Cairns’s grade six room (both of which I passed through), there was a huge print of Thomson’s famous Northern River. And there was another, The West Wind, on a wall on the first floor close by Principal Jack Laycock’s office. Absurd or not, I felt the paintings were part of who I was, as they were of the park where, the moment school let out, I would go to live with my grandparents at Lake of Two Rivers until September. To me, those two prints were far more meaningful than the framed photographs of Queen Elizabeth II and, curiously, United States president Dwight D. Eisenhower that graced the main hall of the school. I felt I owned Tom Thomson the way other classmates might feel they had a claim on the captaincy of one of the town teams in hockey or lacrosse.

  Yet if Tom Thomson was a presence in the 1950s as I was growing up, he’d become a celebrity in the years leading up to my rendezvous with Jimmy Stringer. In 1969 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had produced a TV documentary, The Mysterious Death of Tom Thomson. And a year after that, Judge William T. Little’s The Tom Thomson Mystery had become a national bestseller. The ingredients for fascination were undeniable: an overturned canoe when Thomson was said to be an expert canoeist, a missing paddle that should have floated and been found, a body rising from the water with fishing line carefully wrapped around one ankle, no water in the lungs, bleeding from the ear and a nasty bruise on one temple.

  The television special and book did much to elevate the artist to the iconic status his life and work enjoy today. Tom Thomson was only thirty-nine when he died in the summer of 1917. He was just beginning to find recognition for his work and was unknown beyond a small artistic circle, mostly in Toronto. But he did not pass by unnoticed. He was handsome, tall and dark—and quiet in his ways. Though he was often described as shy, and sometimes as moody, women were easily attracted to him and he to them, though he’d never married. He’d been known to enjoy a drink. Little’s book, in fact, had used an argument between Thomson and a Canoe Lake cottager that broke out at a drunken summer party as the pivotal moment in the longstanding puzzle the provincial family court judge believed he’d finally solved.

  Little made extensive use of the daily journals kept in those years by Mark Robinson, the park ranger posted to Canoe and Joe lakes. Relying on the journals, later notes and interviews with Robinson, as well as his own speculation, he built a circumstantial case against Martin Blecher, Jr. (spelled “Bletcher” in Little’s book). Little also contended that Thomson’s remains had never been removed from Canoe Lake, as the Thomson family had requested and as the undertaker who had taken on the task swore. Little believed he had proof of this in a skull and bones that he and others uncovered at the Canoe Lake cemetery in the fall of 1956—only to have the Ontario government, with the backing of forensic science, claim the remains were not those of the painter. Little’s book and the CBC special that was largely based on Little’s work had the effect of turning Tom Thomson, the Great Canadian Painter, into Tom Thomson, the Great Canadian Mystery. Actually, two mysteries in one—what had happened to him and where, exactly, his body was buried—and old Jimmy Stringer was about to tell me what he knew about the story.

  When I returned from my second trip to the liquor store, Jimmy was still lying on the bed, snoring. He was in his long johns—greyish-white, mottled long underwear—the garb, it seemed, of all the men who worked in the bush. Every one of my grown-up male relatives wore them. Unlike my then-new “insulated” long underwear, which came in two pieces and had a thick, ribbed look, these long johns were thin, like a second skin. My father wore “educated” long johns—took them off when school let out and put them back on when school went back in.

  Jimmy had an elfin look to him. His hair, black when I was a child, was now white. Having been born at the turn of the century—“I’ll be seventy-three this coming month, Laddie,” he told me when I asked—Jimmy looked his age only from the collar up, his hair a snowdrift over a deeply weathered face. From the collar down, however, he was thin and boyish, with not an ounce of fat on him, and he moved with the lithe grace of a man who could still paddle and portage a canoe to match any of the vain, young, tanned guides with the bandito headbands who led summer campers up Canoe Lake and into the park’s interior.

  Jimmy’s eyes, a striking blue, were hooded but managed to look sympathetic and conspiratorial at the same time. He had the same hawk nose as my grandfather, though they were not related. It seemed at times that the McCormicks and Stringers were merely slight variations of an Algonquin Park subspecies, human fauna native to the environment. My mother and her siblings were all expert canoeists. Jimmy’s younger brother Omer, master builder of the Beaver Canoe, was legendary for his ability to leap into an untethered canoe the way the Lone Ranger used to board Silver. With the canoe skimming out over the open water, Omer would then go into a headstand, using the portaging thwart for neck support.

  But the
best Stringer stories always seemed to involve Jimmy and Wam. The most famous tale, apocryphal perhaps, involved their own precious Tom Thomson painting, which they kept on the wall of the old home on Potter Creek. One dark, cold night toward the end of a very tough winter—the brothers were usually the only ones to spend all year at Canoe Lake—Jimmy and Wam were killing a bottle of rye and got into a furious brothers-only-will-understand debate over whose turn it was to go out to the woodpile and return with enough split wood to get them through the night. The argument became increasingly heated, though not heated enough to keep the windows from frosting over. Finally, to settle matters, one of the brothers—neither ever admitted to this—ripped the Tom Thomson original off the wall and hurled it into the woodstove.

  Though both of the bachelor Stringers were now old, they were still known as “The Boys.” They had lived hard. Jimmy and Wam had survived bush accidents and river tippings and winters that could be so bitter the brothers claimed their pee sometimes froze into icicles before it hit the ground. Joe Runner, a Canadian actor and Canoe Lake regular for many years, claimed Jimmy came back from the Portage Store at the south end of the lake one dark night so drunk that he stopped in the middle of the lake, stepped out of the boat and nearly drowned. Runner also claimed to have been a witness when Wam, who had passed out with his hand still locked around the throttle, ran his boat up onto some logs and stayed passed out as the bow tilted back down and lifted a screaming propeller clear of the water.

  Jimmy liked to call himself “The Mayor of Canoe Lake” and once hosted a Labour Day weekend bash at the Stringer home. He borrowed a barge normally used to haul building materials about the lake to bring in a piano for Wam to play. Jimmy wore a chain of office constructed from the snap-off caps from beer cans and mix cans, sat in an ornate barber’s chair that had been his father’s and made a simple stump speech.