Barefoot at the Lake

by Bruce Fogle

  I was more shocked than when I heard Grace swear. My father hated swearing, more than almost anything, and now he was doing what he told his children we must never do. All of a sudden he turned the car onto the asphalted road, so fast that even in the wet the car’s tyres squealed for an eternity, and he raced back to the cottage.

  It was raining harder when we got home. Dad and I, still saying nothing to each other, got out of the car and walked into the cottage.

  ‘Everett just killed his dog,’ Dad said to Mum.

  When he heard that, Uncle Reub got up from his rocking chair and walked over. Robert, Steven and Perry stopped playing triple solitaire, looked at the adults and said nothing.

  ‘I’m burying him in the field,’ Dad said.

  Of course, when my father felt something needed to get done it got done there and then, so he went to the tool house for his rain poncho and a spade, and us four boys silently and excitedly followed him. We too got out our waterproofs and slipped them over our heads. By the time we returned to the car, Uncle Reub was there, sheltering under the black umbrella.

  Dad opened the tailgate, stared at the dog for only seconds then lifted it from the car.

  ‘Morris, before you bury him, may I show the boys something?’ Uncle asked, and seeing acceptance in his brother-in-law’s eyes, asked him to carry the body to the front of the cottage and place it under the tree house where we would all be protected from the rain.

  ‘I’ll bring it back once we’re finished,’ he said, and my father busied himself removing his purchases from the car.

  ‘Boys, let’s have a look,’ Uncle Reub said, and we gathered under the tree house around the brown dog’s flaccid body. He lifted the dog’s head and it hung like a wilted flower. To us it looked as if the dog was only sleeping, but for the blood seeping from its nostrils and mouth. Whenever I accidentally cut myself I thought my blood was beautiful, but this blood dripping from the dog’s nose wasn’t. When Rob saw that blood he turned away.

  Uncle Reub ran his small firm hands deftly back and forth over the dog’s rib cage then its belly then back to the ribs. When he finished both hands were blood stained.

  ‘It’s been shot with a high-velocity rifle,’ he said. ‘See this? There’s almost nothing to see here, just a little hair pulled into these three small holes. That’s where the bullets entered his chest. See here? On the other side? That large hole is where all the bullets left the body. This dog was shot up close through the heart by a good marksman.’

  We were riveted. We squatted in a semicircle around the dog, bending over it as Uncle Reub rolled the floppy body on its back so that the dog’s limbs hung limply away, then from his back pocket he took a leather case, unzipped it and withdrew a scalpel and a pair of scissors.

  ‘The rain has helped. It will be easier to do a proper post-mortem if hair doesn’t get in the way,’ and saying nothing more he made a single long incision through the dog’s skin from its chest to its hips.

  ‘I’m going to puke,’ Rob said and he meant it. He never even gutted fish he caught, he left that for me to do and, now, to see an animal so much like his own dog being cut open was too much, and he ran into the cottage.

  ‘I’ll leave the chest closed,’ Uncle continued. ‘It’s filled with blood and the heart has been turned to pulp by the bullets. What’s fascinating, boys, is that the lungs will be good, just tracks where the bullets went through them. High-velocity bullets turn organs like liver or spleen or heart into hamburger.’

  ‘What’s different about the lungs?’ I asked, and my uncle explained that because they were so elastic they stretched then snapped back to normal when pierced by bullets. ‘Like spider’s web, bullets just pass through it. Other tissue doesn’t behave like that.’

  I peered closer.

  Uncle Reub made another swift incision with his scalpel blade along the dog’s belly, this time through the muscle wall, and intestines ballooned out over its hair.

  ‘I’m going to see how Rob is,’ Steve said, as the intestines settled in coils over the side of the dog, and he left the shelter under the tree house and returned to the cottage.

  ‘What’s that red thing?’ Perry asked. Uncle explained it was the dog’s spleen. He pulled more intestines out until they all lay on the dog’s fur then he spread open the now emptied cavity and asked Perry and me to look in.

  ‘Are you looking for its soul?’ I asked.

  ‘Good question. Some people think only humans have souls,’ he answered. ‘Personally, I think if we have them so do dogs, but it isn’t part of the anatomy so, boys, I can’t show it to you.’

  ‘There’s a kidney,’ he said. ‘It makes urine that travels down that tube there to the bladder, where it’s stored until the dog needs to pee.’ He showed us the dog’s bladder.

  ‘Here’s the stomach and if you look up there under the ribs that’s the liver. It cleans the blood and filters out anything unpleasant the dog has eaten. Food goes into the intestines here,’ and he showed us where the intestines began. ‘There’s a muscle that holds food in the stomach until it’s ready to go into the intestines.’

  ‘May I feel it?’ I asked, and both Perry and I ran our fingers over the still-warm stomach and intestines.

  ‘Run the intestines through your fingers and you’ll see how long they are.’

  We did, four hands inspecting it inch by inch.

  ‘Food is digested in the small intestine and once it gets past that thing,’ he pointed to the appendix, ‘it enters the large intestine where moisture is removed and all that’s left is faeces.’

  He paused and looked at us. We couldn’t take our eyes off the dog’s innards.

  ‘Boys, we are no different inside to this dog. If you become doctors this is your meat and potatoes. Now, let’s tidy up for your father,’ and he asked me to get my mother’s sewing box from the cottage, which I did. With a doubled strand of black cotton and a long straight needle, and asking us to squeeze the intestines back into the belly as he worked, he sewed up his incision with such deftness that when he finished it looked as if nothing had ever been done to that dog.

  ‘Tell your father we can bury him now,’ and to our surprise Uncle Reub picked up the dog’s body himself and, mindless that it was soiling the white shirt he was wearing and oblivious to the rain, he carried the body around to the back of the cottage and beyond to the field where Dad had already dug a grave. Bending down he got on one knee, then the next, and gently lowered the brown dog into the black earth.

  Dad had already started to shovel earth into the grave before I thought there should be a ceremony.

  ‘Shouldn’t we say a prayer?’ I asked. My father looked at his brother-in-law and knew he should stop.

  When Grace and I found the dead heron and I’d made a cross for its grave, Grace had asked me how I knew it was Christian. I had thought that was a dumb question. ‘Everything’s Christian,’ I’d told her, and I said a Christian prayer for it. But now I was thinking maybe some things aren’t Christian. Maybe some things are Indian.

  I moved to the edge of the grave, looked down at what I thought was, even in death, an elegant and beautiful animal and said, ‘Grandmother earth, we return this dog to you. The sun gave this dog its life. The sun will enter the earth and keep it warm for this dog,’ and I stepped back and let my dad continue shovelling back the earth he had dug.

  Perry asked me where I heard that prayer and I told him I made it up as I spoke.

  ‘Stop!’ I shouted. Another thought had entered my mind and I asked Uncle Reub for his pocket knife, then in the drizzle raced across the narrow field up to the county road, past the brick house to the next field where I cut off a sunflower head and ran back with it. By the time I got there Perry had become bored and gone back in the cottage. I put the sunflower head in the grave, Dad completed filling the hole, and the two grown men and I returned to the cottage.

  There was no lightning that day so the drive over the causeway to Pigeon Lake for our pickerel
meal at the fishing camp was uneventful and the meal was good. By the time we returned to the cottage the rain had stopped. I took a flashlight, went outside and sat by the shot dog’s grave until Mum asked me to come back in for bed. That night, I asked Angus to crawl under the covers with me and he stayed, sleeping by my calf, all night.

  At dawn the next day, I returned to the grave. Dad was already at work blowtorching the caterpillar tents in the peach tree.

  I knew a sunflower couldn’t grow overnight but deep in my heart I had hoped that this time there would be magic. I sat by the grave for a few minutes then returned to the cottage. Each day for the next three weeks I went to the dog’s grave each morning before breakfast and said a special prayer for it. By the end of the summer, sweet peas that had seeded themselves nearby covered the dog’s grave.

  SMOKED

  SALMON

  One August weekend Grace’s father took his family to Algonquin Park for a five-day canoe trip and I felt miserable. Grace had not come over to say goodbye to me.

  Grace had told me how exciting it was that they were going camping and the afternoon before, while Grace and I were swimming together by her dock, I had seen her father lift their canoe from the lake and carry it over his shoulders up to his Oldsmobile. Grace said they might not go. Her mother wasn’t feeling well.

  Now they had gone and, even though there were lots of cars behind the other cottages and it was another blue summer day, I felt empty, the way I felt when they left the cottage for the last time at the end of summer.

  Rob told me he was going up to Cedar Bay then they were all going to the fort but I didn’t join my brother. I loved the fort but hated what the other boys did there. Last time, Steve siphoned gas from his boat’s gas tank and put some in an oil can he had removed the top from. At the fort they tossed a match in the can, then frogs, and bet which frog made the most jumps before it burned to death. I told Grace about what the boys did at the fort and that made me feel better, just talking to her about it. In fact I felt better spending my days with her than with my brother or the other boys. It was sunny every day, even when it rained, when I was with her.

  I spent the morning on my bed doing nothing much – staring at the ceiling – then just before lunch I decided I’d collect some clay. I walked outside and the sandpipers bobbing their tails up and down on the shore flew away when the screen door slammed behind me. A seagull I called Popeye watched me from the dock. From the start of summer I left sandwich crusts on the dock and this gull had become so relaxed, now it walked right up to me begging for food. Uncle Reub was in his lawn chair and had been watching the sandpipers.

  Over the summer I had gradually come to realise that my uncle was somehow different to the other grown-ups. When any of us children talked to him he really listened. He was different that way. But there was also something missing, something empty about him. I looked at my uncle, sitting alone, his brown eyes reflecting the summer glow off the lake, and it seemed that his face had been washed of all expression. That wasn’t how he had always been. Two years before, when he returned from the United States to Toronto in a canary-yellow convertible, and was married to Samantha who was half a foot taller than him and so pretty she looked like a movie star, his eyes twinkled, the way they still did when he told us stories.

  ‘It’s funny,’ I said. ‘The more you like someone the less they like you back.’

  ‘That’s very profound, Bruce,’ my uncle replied. ‘So what do you do?’

  ‘I guess you just keep on liking them. You can’t help it,’ I said.

  My uncle sighed, looked out at the lake then looked me in the eyes.

  ‘That’s very true,’ he said ever so slowly and I knew his thoughts were racing from here to there and back here again, like whirlwinds dancing on the lake.

  We didn’t say any more but from that moment I felt closer to my uncle than anyone else, that with him I could say what I really felt.

  Using a trowel I started digging a wide hole in the sun-dried, ochre-coloured sand. The warm sand was muddy brown and digging deeper the excavation soon started to fill with water, but it wasn’t warm lake water, it was as cold as ice. A natural spring, only feet below the surface of the beach, fed into the lake right in front of the cottage. I dug further, through the cold water until my trowel reached clay, sticky, freezing cold clay, so thick it was almost impossible to dig up. Now I had to use all my strength, to push the trowel as deep as possible into the clay then lift it up through the cold muddy pool. I collected five trowels full of clay, washing the sand off each load by swishing it in the lake and stroking my hand all over it until it felt as soft and smooth as Grace’s arm. I collected the clay in a tin bucket, covered it with a wet cloth and put it in the shade of one of the cedar trees.

  At lunchtime, Mum brought our lunch outside and we ate at the garden table. Dad had brought a whole side of smoked salmon from the city.

  ‘Kid, you make the best smoked salmon sandwiches on the whole lake,’ my uncle told his sister, then he turned to me.

  ‘Do you know that smoked salmon played an important role in Canada’s history?’

  I had food in my mouth so I raised my eyebrows instead of answering.

  ‘The Americans think that Lewis and Clark were the first white men to cross the continent but it was a Canadian from Montreal, Alexander Mackenzie, who did, ten years before the Americans.’

  ‘Why do the Americans think they were first?’ I asked.

  ‘Because Alexander Mackenzie used Indians to help him. He left Montreal and travelled through one tribe’s land after another, hiring guides who spoke the language of the next tribe. He passed north of here and might have employed one of Mr Muskratt’s ancestors to guide him.’

  ‘What’s smoked salmon got to do with it?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, Brucie, the first time he tried to cross the continent he hired one guide who was all talk but not much knowledge who took him the wrong way, but it turned out OK because Mackenzie discovered the Arctic Ocean. He had to spend the winter somewhere near Great Slave Lake. Next summer he hired better guides and kept on walking and canoeing. He was just about to give up when he met a tribe that offered him smoked salmon like this so he knew he was near the Pacific and kept going.’

  As lunch finished Uncle said, ‘Let’s walk off lunch and I’ll tell you a story.’ We walked up to the road behind the cottages, past Grace’s cottage that looked unhappy and forlorn, at least that’s what I thought.

  ‘Brucie, while I was having lunch I was thinking that that salmon and I are similar. You know how your mother says, “Distant fields always look greener,” that’s what we both thought, the salmon and me. That salmon – it came from the Atlantic Ocean, not the Pacific – that salmon, while it was alive, its life was like mine. It was a restless fish. It didn’t realise how good a life it had and that’s how it ended up on our plates instead of swimming free in the Atlantic.’

  We reached the end of Long Point where my uncle and I sat down on a pile of granite boulders that had been cleared a hundred years before from the adjacent field. I picked some toadflax to play with, squeezing the snapdragon-like flowers to open them, counting the ants walking around inside.

  ‘Isn’t that interesting,’ my uncle said, ‘in North Dakota, Scandinavian farmers boil toadflax and put the liquid in glass bottles for attracting and poisoning flies.’ Then he continued.

  ‘On the farm where I grew up near Whitby, our family had everything, milk from the cows, eggs from the chickens. Cabbage. Pickles. That salmon also grew up in the most wonderful place in the world, on the Restigouche River in New Brunswick, but one day, after he had become an adult, he had an urge to leave so he did. He set out for a bigger world, a better world and he thrived in his new world. I did too. He grew into a powerful silver salmon. After I graduated in medicine I went to the United States. Do you know I have a commendation signed by President Roosevelt?’

  I shook my head ‘no’, but said nothing. I wanted to hear what happ
ened next.

  ‘Well, that salmon, amongst all the great riches of the sea, with all he would ever need, that restless salmon felt a powerful urge to give all of that up and go back home. So he did. From the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean he found his way back to New Brunswick, back to the Restigouche River. With his powerful body he nobly swam up that river, back to the place of his birth. He almost got there but in sight of where he was born and raised, a fisherman netted and killed him. That fisherman took him the same day to a smokery where he was smoked over logs from sugar maple trees for a few days then he was packed in ice and sent by train to Toronto where your father bought him, then your mother cut him into thin slices and after there’s nothing left of him she’ll feed his silvery skin to Angus.’

  ‘But what’s the same with you?’ I asked, and Uncle Reub continued.

  ‘That salmon felt a need to migrate but it didn’t help. He was never comfortable wherever he was. So he returned home, hoping he would feel better back there. Bruce, it’s good to return to places where you’ve been happy – or even sad. Even if the people that made it happy or sad are never there again, even if the buildings are gone, it’s good to return. In Mandan, I felt like that salmon. My wife wanted to stay but I told her we had to leave. Soon after we returned here she left me for another man.’

  I didn’t say anything at first. Instead I picked more toadflax but then I asked, ‘Is that why you always look sad?’ and my uncle quietly replied, ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘Is that why you’re here instead of at your own home?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes it is.’

  My questions continued, ‘Is that why my mother takes care of you?’

  My uncle replied, ‘You know I’m twenty years older than your mother, old enough to be her father but yes, she mothers me,’ and then he said, ‘Do you miss Grace?’

  I answered, ‘Yes I do.’

  We both sat with our backs hunched to the sun and said no more for a while, until my uncle said, ‘When you’re an adult, Bruce, and you think back to your summers here, all you’ll remember are the good things. I promise you that. You’ll forget how sad you feel today.’