The Island Walkers
Page 1
“Rhythmical prose, a strong sense of physical place and a restrained, moving atmosphere of mourning for the past.”
— National Post
“A finely wrought first novel.…”
— Kirkus Reviews
“A compelling human story.… [This] beautifully crafted debut novel should earn [John Bemrose] a place in the Canlit pantheon.… Bemrose’s descriptions of Attawan and its environs are vibrant, reminiscent of the skill with which Margaret Laurence painted her fictional town of Manawaka.… Ultimately The Island Walkers offers a hope that trumps regret, a hope that comes from the continuity of generations and the determination of individuals.”
— Edmonton Journal
“The book’s sense of place, its sense of the acceleration of time between generations, its sudden, surprising insights, give the sprawling story its impressive weight.… A riveting read.…”
— London Free Press
“Bemrose has a talent for capturing the sad lyricism of ordinary lives.… Bemrose’s poetic touch finds beauty in obscure corners and grandeur in small victories.”
— Baltimore Sun
“Bemrose weaves a compelling portrait of small town life with all its conflicts, compensations, hopes and frustrations.… The story never flags and it’s a huge compliment to the author that the readers don’t want it to end.”
— Windsor Star
“The story feels at once intimate and effortlessly universal.… Bemrose offers us nothing less than a template for embracing the core of life’s meaning.…”
— Globe and Mail
“A sheer joy.…”
— Ottawa Citizen
ACCLAIM FOR
The Island Walkers
“A clear-eyed eulogy for a town and way of life that is gone forever.”
— Sandra Martin, Globe and Mail
“We don’t have many novels that cross generations like this and give us both the interior of lives, a sense of social history, and an incredibly strong sense of place. The story is ambitious, and yet simply, beautifully told. The whole thing flows along like a river — a real page-turner with Dantean echoes and lyrical insights that are often breathtaking.”
— Marni Jackson
“A powerful debut novel.”
— Library Journal
“The Island Walkers is thick with natural beauty and social insight.… A profoundly sensitive portrayal of a family’s efforts to find its way through the tangled threads of desire and nobility, guilt and love.”
— Christian Science Monitor
“As fine as any novel you will read this year.”
— New York Sun
“Richly textured and multilayered.… Masterful.… The Island Walkers touches on such universal themes as honour, loyalty, love, lust, history, community, family, ambition, greed, betrayal, shame, loss and regret. As a modern moral fable, it investigates the consequences of both the choices we make and the choices we fail to make.… A beautifully realized and emotionally resonant novel that stays with you long after you turn the last page.”
— Kitchener-Waterloo Record
“[An] accomplished first novel.…”
— Publishers Weekly
Copyright © 2003 by John Bemrose
Cloth edition published 2003
First Emblem Editions publication 2004
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bemrose, John, 1947-
The island walkers / John Bemrose.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-693-6
I. Title.
PS8553.E47185 2004 C813’ .54 C2004-902326-8
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between its characters and any persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
I wish to thank the Ontario Arts Council for a Works in Progress grant, 2000.
The stanza from Johnny North’s poem, this page, is taken from a poem by Bobby West, eccentric, riverman, and entertainer of Paris, Ontario, who died in 1941. Originally published in the Paris Star, it was reproduced in D.A. Smith’s superb local history, At the Forks of the Grand, privately printed for Paris’s centennial celebrations in 1956.
SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN
EMBLEM EDITIONS
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com/emblem
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
About the Author
For Cathleen
and for Alix
A TOWN OF TWO RIVERS, its plunging valley an anomaly in the tedious southwestern Ontario plain.
Bridges. Water at dusk. The play of ghosts on the sloping face of a dam.
High windows shot with gold, glimpsed among maples. Streets that beckon and disappear. The traveller, coming across this place, might be forgiven for imagining that life is better here.
The Victorian facades of the downtown stores, the deep centre of town. The backs of these buildings fall straight to the Shade River. From the Bridge Street bridge, you can savour the Old World atmosphere conjured by their wooden balconies, perched randomly above the water, above the cut stone of foundations, which seem to move upstream as the Shade brushes past through
a flecking of shallow rapids. The cries of gulls.
Farther south, under the steep, wooded bulwark of Lookout Hill, you can make out the gap where the Attawan River enters the Shade. Just now, a shaft of light, playing from the hills to the west, kindles the vicinity of the forks. But even as you watch, the conflagration fades, saturating the air with the melancholy of an early dusk.
In the opposite direction, a hundred yards north of the bridge, a dam has stilled the river to a dark lake. Two tall stone abutments rise from the water, to support a rail trestle that disappears among the trees on the west bank. Higher still, just visible among pines, the severe windows of the Bannerman mansion look down the valley with an air of confident, hard-earned plenty. Hidden behind it are the middle- and upper-class houses of the North End. There, a late sun still pours its ripeness down treed boulevards, across spacious lawns, into verandas shaded with striped awnings and trellises of Dutchman’s pipe.
But down here, at the bridge rail, all is water and failing light. A lone fisherman in hip waders casts towards the dam. Eastward, on the Flats, the small houses huddle against the coming night. They seem not so much poor as crammed together, and somehow hastily assembled, as though their builders did not make the same claim to permanence as those of the North End.
On the edge of this neighbourhood, you will find a forest of sorts, sumacs and scrub maple forming a patch of wilderness in the heart of town. Much of this wilderness, curiously, has a cement floor, littered with broken liquor and wine bottles that glint in the dimming light, the blackened remains of bonfires. You might make other interesting discoveries: rusted, nondescript bits of machinery, a few soot-stained bricks. It seems, almost, that by some scarcely imaginable act of violence, an entire building — a vast complex of buildings — has been torn up and carried away.
Nearby, the Attawan Historical Society has established a small park. Tidy beds of petunias and a couple of benches uphold an air of beleaguered propriety, under a solitary street light. An asphalt path leads to a metal plaque supported by a cement base.
BANNERMAN’S MILLS
On this site stood Bannerman’s mills, in their time the largest knit-goods manufactory in the country. The mills were built by John Bannerman (1850–1932), a native of Boston, who arrived in Attawan in 1876, establishing his first mill on the Attawan River. In 1892, he built these larger premises to take advantage of the greater water-power potential of the Shade. At the height of its fortunes in the 1950s, Bannerman’s Knitting employed more than 900 people out of a total population of 5,200. The mills turned out socks, stockings, sweaters, T-shirts, and underwear, including the famous #99 long johns, popular in the hills and forestry camps of Canada’s north. In 1966, the mills were destroyed by fire.
Little of importance is now made in Attawan. It has become a bedroom town, a place for strangers, where tour buses stop for half an hour and ladies with tinted hair take quick shots of the older houses, the popular view from the bridge.
At Willard and Bridge, the little park continues to dream in a kind of bland, perpetual Sabbath. On its benches, a few old-timers linger. Some, no doubt, are veterans of the mills and the great work that went on inside. But you will find them reluctant to talk about the past. Ask about the fire, or the investigation that followed, and they will look at you, an outsider, with the rheumy far-sightedness of the old and murmur that they really don’t know about that, no, they can’t remember. You would almost think they favoured the argument suggested by the maples thickening each year towards the river: that Bannerman’s mills had never been.
1
THE SMALLEST OF ATTAWAN’S working-class neighbourhoods, the Island lay tucked behind the downtown Business Section, separated from it by an old, disused millrace that formed a kind of watery shortcut across a bend of the Attawan River. This sluggish canal was shaded by black willows and bordered by a narrow trail that ran past vine-freighted fences and decaying sheds. The Island contained about two dozen houses, crowded along its two intersecting streets, Water and West. For several generations, the people of the Island — mostly mill workers and their families — had considered themselves quite separate from the town’s other residents: a state of mind most pronounced among the children, who conducted ongoing crabapple and hockey wars with their enemies on the Flats or in South Ward and the North End.
The Walker house sat at the bottom of West, overlooking the cul-de-sac where the street met an earthen flood-dyke. Nearly a hundred years old, it had walls of plastered lath-work, with shuttered windows and a front door of solid oak boards. The unstable ground of the area — which was still, in some sense, the province of the river, still prone on occasion to floods that topped the dykes — had over the years skewed the frame of the house and tilted its floors. But it was a well-kept place, the walls cleanly whitewashed, the shutters and doors painted a deep forest green.
One Saturday in the summer of 1965, Joe and Alf Walker climbed onto the roof and spent the better part of the morning stripping the old shingles. By eleven they were busy nailing down the new ones. Joe, who had turned eighteen that July, worked on the slope overlooking the backyard. He sat shirtless, on his duff, and hammered sullenly between his legs, aware of the sun-baked expanse of tarpaper stretching up the slope behind him. From beyond the peak, his father’s hammer thundered without rest. It seemed crazy to try to keep up.
He shifted his weight, placed the next shingle, and looked across the yard with its picnic table and apple tree, its narrow lawn and rows of vegetables — beyond the flood-dyke blooming cheerfully with his mother’s flowers, to the Atta, flowing through the shadow of Lookout Hill. Under its far bank — a dim cave of limestone and darkly rippling water — it looked cool and inviting: another world. He was labouring under protest, under a sense of injustice that drove him on in angry spurts then dragged him into a sloth so deep it was like a spell. Why were they doing this today? Today — as he’d mentioned to his father last Wednesday, he was sure — he and Smiley were planning to go hunting with Smiley’s new .22. His friend had gone on without him. A few minutes ago he’d heard a shot echo down the valley.
He dipped into the bag beside him and the sharp nails bit his fingers. For weeks the shingles had sat beside the house in their paper wrappings, under a paint-spotted tarp. A dozen times at least his mother had said, “Alf, I am getting so tired of that heap out there. You’d think we were living in the Ozarks.” His mother’s idea of the Ozarks came from television, but she used the phrase to convey a sense of social embarrassment, of appearances that were not up to the mark. He always thought it sounded funny in her English accent. His mother was a war bride. Hearing the words as a young boy, he had imagined her striding off to battle in skirts and helmet. The vision had made him slightly wary of her, as if she could lay claim to secret, irresistible powers. Yet there had been nothing but weary exasperation in her complaints about the roof, the mechanical recitation of an old war cry that no longer frightened anybody: an act for tourists. She had grown up in a finer house than this: she’d told him many times about the books, the grand piano, the holidays in Normandy. “Your father’s uniform fooled me completely” — this was another of her stories — “For all I knew he was a millionaire’s son.” It had become a family joke, told at the right time at parties: her coming down in the world was a mistake, based on her inability to read his father’s status by his accent or his clothes. It was not until after she’d arrived in Attawan in the spring of 1946 that she realized what she’d done. She hadn’t given up, though: getting the roof shingled was only one in an endless series of assaults on their rough edges — on their house that, by her standards, was too small and, despite their relentless improvements, still too shabby, not to mention situated in the wrong part of town. Joe looked back to the river. Such thoughts were troubling, leading to shadows, sadness. Better to hunker down like his father and pretend he wasn’t affected.
Yet his father wasn’t impervious. His wife’s complaints might seem to sink into him without a trace
, snow into dark water, but they could achieve a critical mass. This morning he had roused Joe early and announced that today they were shingling the roof. But why today, Joe wondered, the hottest so far of the whole summer? At breakfast, over a trembling forkful of fried egg, he dared to question the decision — maybe they should wait till it was cooler, he said, thinking the whole time of Smiley’s gun, of the wafer of silver light at the end of the scope and even of the word “scope” itself, so pleasing and final, like a bullet smacking into mud. “It’s gonna rain,” his father said, and when Joe said, “It’s rained before,” meaning and you never bothered then, his father had said quietly, looking at him with those ice-blue eyes the colour of Lake Erie in spring, “No arguments.”
He thought there was something fanatical in his father that came from a place of silence and brooding Joe couldn’t read: something extreme and overbearing and violent that thank God was not there all the time but that could leap up like a blade you hadn’t been careful with and nip you. Now it was his arbitrariness that bothered him most. What gave him the right to decide? Why did he have to obey? Why didn’t he just throw down his hammer and leave the roof? He suspected that if he did, he would have to leave the house as well. He had absorbed some old notion that work was something you did for everybody, without complaint. He had worked for as long as he could remember, washing floors, washing the car, digging gardens, stacking cans at the A&P; this summer he was at Bannerman’s. He expected to work, but this morning some remnant of an ancient grievance had surfaced: the need for unquestioning obedience was an injustice and so was the loss of his day. He felt, irrationally, as if his entire future had been torn from him.
The hammering from the other side had stopped. A moment later he heard his father’s heavy, braced steps come down the slope behind him. The pack of shingles slammed into the roof-boards like a body.
Then the labour of his father’s breathing as he surveyed Joe’s work.