Barefoot at the Lake

by Bruce Fogle

  I didn’t say anything. All I did was pull spikes of plantain out of the soil at my feet, gathering the stalks in one hand until my uncle asked, ‘Do you know that women smile a lot more at people like the milkman and bread man than men do?’ and that made me grin.

  We walked back to the cottage. I spent the afternoon making clay perch. Uncle Reub asked my father to drive him into Bridgenorth for a shave and a haircut. Of course my dad did. He always did anything anyone asked. While in town my uncle visited the General Store where he bought a coloured shirt for himself and a Lazy Susan for the dining-room table for his sister.

  THE

  BUNKHOUSE

  A simple smell brings back sights, sounds, even tastes. I wondered why I was so good at smelling things but I never had the words to describe what I smelled. I couldn’t remember exactly what my Grade One schoolteacher looked like. I couldn’t remember what her voice sounded like either but when I smelled someone wearing the perfume she wore I was instantly taken back to exactly where I sat in her classroom, who sat next to me, even the sound of chalk on the blackboard. How can a smell, I wondered, trigger such memories?

  Our bunkhouse had a lovely smell all of its own. I recognised that it shared part of its smell with the lumberyard but it had its own unique smell, different to the cottage, different from the smell of Grace’s bunkhouse.

  The bunkhouse was a later addition that Dad built to accommodate weekend guests. It sat, squat and white, at the back of the cottage where us boys once played badminton when the cottage was first built. There was no window to the east to catch the morning sun, only a small one to the south opening onto the new row of poplars, another small one to the west facing the cottage and two to the north overlooking the lawn. They all had screens on them and short cotton curtains inside.

  After Anna had returned to the city, I was in my bedroom when I’d overheard my mother and my uncle arguing in the kitchen about something or other. It wasn’t that their voices were raised. They just sounded more tense. When I concentrated on what was happening I heard my uncle say, ‘Kid, I’m old enough to sleep on my own.’ I thought that was funny, that only children would say something like that. ‘You should be with people,’ I heard my mother reply. Soon after Uncle Reub bought himself his new bright shirt, when my father had finished the interior walls of the bunkhouse with new plywood and put the rag rugs and old Persian carpets back on the floor, and the bunkhouse’s old smell returned, my uncle had returned to it and slept there each night for the remainder of the summer.

  The day after Grace came back from Algonquin Park was bright and crystal clear but fiercely windy and unseasonably cold. Steven and Perry’s mother had driven down from Cedar Bay and taken my mother and uncle over to a friend’s cottage for the afternoon. Grace and I tried to escape from the cold wind by going to the woods but it was cold there too and we returned to my bunkhouse where we lay on the big bed and watched a corner of light edge its way along a window sill. Both of us felt good lying on the bed together.

  ‘That chipmunk is so annoying!’ Grace said. There was a busy scurrying of feet back and forth over the plywood ceiling above us.

  ‘It’s storing seeds for the winter,’ I explained.

  Grace replied, ‘Well, it should do it somewhere else,’ and she folded her arms over her chest.

  Early in summer I had learned something I thought quite important, and that was that the best way for nature to hide was to take on the colours of its surroundings. Black bass weren’t really black. They were as green as lake water on top and the colour of a cloud-filled sky on the bottom. The lake was the same. Sometimes it was a perfect reflection of the sky. On overcast days it looked like hammered pewter. Sometimes I heard a chipmunk’s chattering but it always took ages before I could pick it out of its perfect camouflage amongst the trees and shrubs.

  I actually liked the sound the chipmunk made, as much as I loved the smell of the bunkhouse. I thought my father liked giving needy animals a home – he was always bringing injured wildlife back to the cottage – and the chipmunk had simply taken up the offer and was doing its housekeeping, just like my mother did. In spring, when I returned to the cottage, even though the chipmunks had hibernated in the wall’s insulation over winter, I knew there would be piles of nutshells over an inch thick above the ceiling plywood.

  ‘What was the canoe trip like?’ I asked.

  ‘I was bored,’ my neighbour answered. ‘We camped the first night and that was OK but Mummy felt sick and Daddy knows Mr Kates, so we stayed at his hotel but I wasn’t allowed to visit his summer camp.’

  ‘What did you do then?’ I enquired with a genuine curiosity, and Grace said she canoed on Little Joe Lake with her sister and fished but not much else.

  ‘I did see a moose,’ she continued. ‘When we paddled down to the narrows there was a mother moose and her baby standing in the water. She was eating water lilies and her baby was having a drink of milk. That was neat.’

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked and Grace told me they just floated in their canoe, watching until they got bored and started paddling again, through the narrows into the next lake.

  ‘I saw a moose up at Mud Lake while you were gone,’ I told Grace.

  She turned her head and stared straight into my eyes, just inches away, and it took only seconds before I couldn’t look at her any longer and turned away.

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ she said.

  My mother was always saying, ‘Believe half of what you hear but be wise enough to know which half,’ and I wondered how on earth Grace knew I was lying.

  Before I could admit I’d lied, Grace said, ‘Did you miss me?’ and I replied, ‘Sort of.’

  She moved closer to me until our shoulders touched. Grace didn’t need perfume. She had her own sweet smell and I thought it was just perfect. We spent the afternoon lying on the big bed, staring at the ceiling, watching flies walk on it, talking about this and that, until Grace got bored and went home for supper.

  THE MALLARD

  Each spring the mallards returned to the lake long before the summer people did, sometimes so early the lake was still frozen and the only water to stand in or drink from was melt water in hollows in the fields. The ducks were there in May when my father and I had dug the vegetable patch, squawking and quacking and being all dramatic about who’d mate with who. Their urges were so great some of the males, when they failed to find a female, tried mating with other males. By summer the ducks were more civilised. Sometimes I saw flocks of males hanging out together on the lake. At other times I saw pairs, a fluorescent green-headed male with his rather nondescript speckled brown female, paddling in unison this way or that. More often I saw single females and I knew they had eggs somewhere nearby.

  From the day I arrived at the cottage I walked the shoreline. I looked for changes from the previous summer, trees that had fallen or wooden docks that winter ice had torn from the shore and spring storms had impaled into the cedar trees. I looked for treasure – fishing line, life jackets, oars, wooden lures, beautiful driftwood. Right through summer I patrolled the shoreline and in late July I found a new mallard’s nest in thick grass and black raspberry canes less than ten feet from the shoreline by the marsh just beyond the new neighbour’s never-used boathouse.

  The nest wasn’t much – a depression in the grass, bits of weeds and rushes, some fluffy belly feathers. When I stared at those downy feathers long enough, they became winter mountains, their soft curves covered in snow.

  Each day the number of eggs increased. I couldn’t decide whether they looked slightly green because of the lushness of the surrounding grass or really were a dull green. By the time she had finished I thought there were nine eggs. I didn’t know because from that time on, whenever I approached she was always nesting on them, never moving, even when I quietly crept near her. She didn’t seem to mind my being there and was as tame to my presence as Popeye the seagull was.

  One Saturday in early August my father had nothing else t
o do so he decided to install an old porcelain bathroom sink, complete with running hot and cold water, in the cedar hedge by the lake. By the time I saw what he was doing Dad had dug trenches and laid in rubber pipes.

  ‘What’s that for?’ I asked and Dad answered, ‘To wash your hands after fishing.’ I thought that I could do as I’d always done and wash my hands in the lake but I didn’t say so.

  ‘I’m going to the ducks,’ I said to no one in particular and Uncle Reub, who was sitting on his lawn chair watching his brother-in-law install the sink, asked if he could come along and I was happy he had asked. I was proud of my find and wanted to show the mallard nest to my uncle.

  The night had been windy and the shore was a tangle of seaweed and driftwood so we walked along the grassy shoreline rather than through the shallows. We stopped at the patch of black raspberries and ate all the ripe ones we could find. While we were there I found an exquisite feather and handed it to my uncle. It was in perfect condition, shades of grey that abruptly changed to yellow at the tip, as if someone had painted sunshine on it. Uncle stroked the soft feather towards the tip, then ran his fingers back towards the small quill. ‘Bruce,’ he said, ‘I know this sounds mad but a woman is just like this fine-looking feather – it’s a cedar waxwing’s feather so there’s probably a flock of them nearby, here for the berries. They’re both beautiful and alluring but they’re both unforgiving if you stroke them the wrong way.’

  I was more interested in presenting the mallard’s nest to my uncle, so I walked over to the nest with my uncle following me but when we arrived it was empty. The mother and her eggs were gone. I was sure a mink had killed and eaten them but when I looked through the bulrushes, into the purple pickerelweed, pond lilies and wapato, there they all were, the mother and her ducklings. The eggs had hatched and she had successfully led them to the safety of the marshy waters.

  Uncle Reub and I walked to the edge of the still marsh, its waters protected from southerly winds by a peninsula and from northerly winds by the long dock beside the neighbour’s boathouse. Stepping from one granite boulder to another I walked out into the marsh as far as I could. It was hard to count them, I had to start over and over, but finally I counted thirteen ducklings, wet little balls of feathers with brown backs spotted with yellow, and bright yellow faces. Their mother was silent – not a quack from her.

  Each day for the next three days my uncle and I returned to the marsh and watched the mother and her ducklings dabble. Uncle explained that mallards were mostly vegetarian, that they fed on seeds and berries, wild rice and leaves and bulrushes, but they were also happy to eat tadpoles and fish eggs, worms, insects, even small fish or frogs when they were plentiful. He told me how that mother duck used her bill to filter food from mud at the edges of the marsh.

  He corrected me about something that I had got wrong. I thought there were two different types of ducks squawking on the lake but there weren’t. It was just that female mallards quacked like farmyard ducks but male mallards made the softer, lower-pitched sound I sometimes heard. Uncle explained that mallard pairs always returned, or at least tried to return, to their previous nesting site. ‘Your parents are much like those mallards, Brucie, returning to your cottage each summer. It makes me feel good, seeing this rhythm of life.’

  On the fourth day, we didn’t go to the marsh because the mother had brought her brood out onto the lake and they were paddling near the shore in front of our cottage.

  ‘Watch Popeye,’ Uncle advised me. ‘He might like one of those ducklings for breakfast.’

  Popeye didn’t show the slightest interest but, to be safe, when Popeye was floating in the water or standing on the dock, I always waded out so that I was between Popeye and the ducklings. The ducklings and their mother didn’t mind me. On one occasion a brave duckling paddled right over to me and pecked at my bathing suit.

  When he was back at the cottage the following weekend, I proudly showed the thirteen ducklings to my dad, and explained that I was in the lake because I was protecting them from being eaten by Popeye, who was standing on the dock. Angus wasn’t a problem. He never took any interest in birds, only mammals.

  The air was perfectly still and the lake so calm it looked as if I was standing in a giant puddle of mercury. I was intently watching Popeye when suddenly a tidal wave surged towards the ducklings and there was a ferocious splash. When the waves subsided and I counted the brood there were only twelve.

  ‘Goodness gracious,’ Dad exclaimed. ‘That was a muskie!’

  ‘No,’ I shouted. ‘That’s not fair!’

  Uncle got up from his chair and walked to the shore. The mother mallard just kept dabbling and the brood that had fled in all directions reformed and crowded their mother.

  My first thought was that it couldn’t be a muskie. There weren’t any rocky drop-offs or sand bars in front of the cottage. No one ever fished for muskies there. And besides, I’d never seen one anywhere near the cottage in my flying dreams. But then I remembered the weed beds, and the time I was paddling the rowboat when a mouth as big as the Loch Ness monster lunged at the end of the rope trailing in the water behind the boat. It must be the same fish. It had to be. That horrible fish had waited motionless until the duckling got close then it lunged and swallowed the defenceless duckling whole, and alive.

  ‘It’s just not fair,’ I said once more as I walked, with slumped shoulders from the lake.

  ‘No,’ Uncle Reub replied. ‘It’s not fair but that’s the way the world is. The strong devour the weak.’

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ I replied, for my mind had wandered from the duckling to its mother.

  ‘She did nothing. She didn’t care. It’s as if nothing happened. If God made mothers because he can’t be everywhere then why isn’t she at least sad,’ and as I talked I dried my legs with a beach towel and sat down on the grass.

  Uncle was silent for a moment. ‘She might have tears in her heart but she doesn’t want to show them. That sometimes happens,’ he replied. ‘She knows that life – it goes on, for her and for the rest of her brood. Maybe she thinks to herself, “OK, that was sickening but now it’s the past. I need to look after the rest of my brood. Myself too.” Maybe she thinks the most important thing is to get on with life.’

  I thought about that for a moment, then said, ‘I’m going over to Grace’s.’

  THE TENT

  The tent was made of oiled canvas and even when the sun was not beating down on it, the air inside was syrupy sweet. It was a small tent, so small you had to crawl on all fours to get in. Grown-ups found that difficult but Uncle didn’t. He was already small. Rob and Steve were growing so fast they were now taller than he was. Sometimes Uncle Reub and I would sit in the tent together, one on either side, talking about whatever came into our minds. When Grace joined us she sat beside me.

  Dad set up the tent on the front lawn as soon as summer began and it stayed there until he took it down just before we returned to the city at the end of August. At first only the older boys were allowed to sleep overnight under canvas, but by mid-August the parents had relented and when the weather was fair and the night sky sprinkled with sugar they agreed that the younger children could spend the night in it.

  At the beginning of summer it had seemed to me that my uncle wanted to separate himself from the world around him. He’d said little – nothing at all to my father – and only talked to my mother when she talked to him. He did little with his days, sitting, reading, sitting with a big book but not reading, although he was funny and interesting and told stories when there were children to talk to. ‘Thanks, Kid’ was all he’d say when my mother brought him a sandwich at lunchtime or a sweater when the air chilled. When one of the other pretty mothers visited the cottage his face lit up like a rainbow. That’s how it looked when he was in the tent. Shiny as an orange.

  Now, in August, my uncle seemed more cheerful even when he wasn’t in the tent. Now, some mornings he’d sit on his lawn chair and strum his brother-in-law’
s ukulele, plucking tunes like ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ and ‘Lover, Come Back to Me’.

  One day, while he was playing the ukulele, a terrible thing happened. A ruby-throated hummingbird flew straight into the cottage’s big picture window and knocked itself unconscious. I had been watching it, listening to its wings hum as it hovered like a helicopter, taking nectar from the petunias in the blue painted containers in front of the picture window, then it took off and flew straight into the glass.

  ‘Bruce, pick it up gently and take it into the tent,’ my uncle told me, and while I did so my uncle fetched honey, water and a glass eye dropper from the cottage. He crawled into the tent and with the dropper he put diluted honey on the bird’s long, thin needle-like beak.

  ‘I don’t know if this will help but at least we can try,’ he said.

  I stared intently at the bird, limp in my uncle’s hand, and there was no movement.

  Eventually my uncle spoke.

  ‘I’m afraid its head injury was too great, Brucie. D-O-A-T, dead on arrival in tent.’

  We took the bird from the tent and buried it in the petunia planter where it had just been feeding. This time I felt sad but didn’t feel the need for any ceremony and we returned to the sultry warmth of our canvas igloo. Uncle Reub took the ukulele with him.

  ‘Uncle, do you know modern songs?’ I asked, and my uncle started to sing.

  How do I knowwwww

  My life is all spent?

  My get and go

  Has got up and went.

  I lay on my back, looking at the shimmering shadows made by the branches above us. Outside, I could hear the ducks squawking again and carrying on like nobody’s business. My uncle had stopped singing but continued strumming chords.