by Mary Lawson
FIVE
TOWN LIGHTS OUT:
Air Rifles Banned
50 YEARS OF SILVER PRODUCTION
—Temiskaming Speaker, May 1957
Mrs. Christopherson had been Dr. Christopherson’s nurse as well as his wife, so when she left, Ian’s father was in a fix. After a week or two of chaos he seemed to realize that he was going to have to do something about it, even if only (as he told Ian) for the short term. At that stage, it was clear to Ian that his father still believed his wife was going to come back.
In the meantime, the doctor placed an advertisement in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. RN wanted, he wrote, for small northern town. He should have left out northern. And maybe small, as well. There were only two replies and one of those dropped out when she realized just how far north Struan was. The other one, Jessie Armitage, came out of ignorance.
By then it was summer, and the lake was at its most benevolent. The sun shone every day. It had been a dry spring and there were remarkably few mosquitoes. The nurse—twenty-two years old, Toronto born and bred—was enchanted. “It’s so beautiful up here,” she said to the patients as she changed a dressing or gave an injection or extracted a pea from a child’s ear. “I had no idea there was someplace so beautiful in my own country!”
But then came autumn and the equinoctial gales began to blow, stripping the trees of their leaves as if they were disgraced. The lake turned gray and sullen and the swells weren’t gentle anymore: they heaved ominously, and tattered rags of spray blew off their tops. The wind barreled down from the north, driving before it clouds as dark as slate. Pale curtains of rain swept across the lake. Someone in the town said to Jessie Armitage, “This is nothin’. You wait till it’s snow ’stead of rain out there. Then you’ll see somethin’. Then you’ll learn what cold is.”
Jessie Armitage went back to Toronto.
Ian found his father down at the lake one evening, watching the waves hurl themselves at the shore. It was working up to a major storm.
“I can’t understand how anyone can fail to love it,” Dr. Christopherson said. His tone was almost apologetic, as if he were making a confession. Then he added—and Ian saw that it was a confession, in a way—“Your mother hated it. The north, I mean. I thought in time she would come to feel the same about it as I do. But she didn’t.”
Ian said nothing. His father made a lot of excuses for his mother, in those early days, as if he were trying to convince Ian that she was justified in deserting them. The night after she left he had said, with a wretchedness that brought Ian close to despising him, this man whom he had always admired above all others, “You mustn’t blame her. It is my fault, really. She was bored here. It wasn’t fair to bring her here.” Ian had stared at him, sick with disgust. Was that supposed to be an excuse for deserting her family and running off with another man? That she was bored? He thought of Laura, who never stopped working from the moment she got up in the morning and whose companion in life was the most boring man on the planet. You didn’t hear her moaning about it. She would have said, if you had asked her—Ian was convinced of this—she would have said that her place was with her husband and children, and that was all there was to it.
In the spring Dr. Christopherson placed another ad in the medical journal and got no replies at all.
“How would you like to be a nurse?” he said to Ian, and Ian said, “Very funny,” though he knew his father was only partly joking. What choice did he have, after all? If he really needed help, who else was there to give it? Mrs. Tuttle would faint dead away if she were asked to so much as put on a Band-Aid.
A new teacher, Stanley Bannister, came to take the place of the geography teacher Ian’s mother had run off with, and brought with him his new wife, Margie, who happened to be a nurse, and Ian thought he was safe. But after about six months the Bannisters built a house out on Crow River Road, too far away for Margie to be of any help if there was an emergency outside of office hours. And a surprising number of people managed to have their emergencies outside of office hours.
Ian resented being called on. He knew his father had no option, but he still resented it. It wasn’t the work itself he minded; blood and gore didn’t bother him, and it turned out that he was good at calming kids—maybe even better than his father. So it wasn’t that he particularly disliked the things he was asked to do. What he minded was the fact that he had to do them. The reason behind it.
“Getting a little bit of practice, are you?” the patients would say. Or, “You’ll have a head start, when you get to medical school.” Ian, helping to hold a struggling child, or preparing the mask for chloroform, would nod and say nothing, because it wasn’t worth denying it.
But as time passed, the patients got used to him filling in for Margie out of hours, and no longer commented on it, and Ian got used to it too. He still felt resentful whenever he thought about it, but he didn’t think about it much anymore.
The day before his seventeenth birthday was a Saturday, and Laura baked Ian a cake. It had pride of place on the kitchen table when he and Arthur came in from the fields at lunchtime.
“It’s not really a birthday cake,” Laura said, “because it’s bad luck to celebrate your birthday early. That’s why there aren’t any candles. It’s just a cake.”
It was huge and round and covered with gooey chocolate icing—a kid’s cake, but it did look good. They had some for dessert, and then later in the afternoon when Ian and Arthur took their tea break, there was more cake to go with the tea. They sat on old burlap potato sacks that Arthur tossed down on the tall grass at the edge of the field. Robert and Edward were behind them, still harnessed but unhitched from the plow, cropping grass with a sound like tearing bedsheets. It was hot, and the grass smelled sweet and new, and the bees were droning around as if it were high summer, though it was still only May.
The tea came out of a Thermos but was still hot enough to take the roof off your mouth. The cake—two great slabs of it—was carefully wrapped in waxed paper.
“So what you doin’ for your birthday?” Arthur said. His voice, breaking in on the quiet, made Ian jump. Days spent with Arthur consisted of vast rolling plains of silence with the odd half-dozen words dropped into them like stones, and the stones always took him by surprise.
“I haven’t really thought about it,” he said.
Arthur was trying to shake the icing back onto one of the wedges of cake—it had glued itself to the waxed paper. He shook it violently and it sagged in the middle and then dropped down onto the cake with a nearly audible thud.
“Here you go,” Arthur said, passing him a slab.
“Thanks,” Ian said. “It’s great cake.” They were practically having a conversation! When he’d first started working for Arthur, the silence had seemed spooky. Whole days with scarcely a word. He didn’t mind—in fact, at the time he was relieved not to have to make conversation. He could absolutely rely on Arthur not to ask how he and his father were making out.
In any case, it wasn’t really silence. There were plenty of sounds, mostly from the horses—the heavy, regular thud of their feet, the powerful sawing of their breath, the clanking and creaking of their harnesses. And there were birds and cicadas, and the buzzing of insects and the barking of the dogs and the odd woodpecker hammering away in the distance.
He’d tried having silence at home once or twice. For years he’d automatically switched on his radio when he walked into his bedroom, but after working for Arthur for a while he tried leaving it off. The quality of the silence at home was different, though. It seemed to make his mother’s absence more noticeable. And the sounds that broke it were anything but restful—babies howling in the waiting room, sometimes yells from his father’s office, the phone ringing, Mrs. Tuttle answering it and muttering anxiously as she made her way along the hall to his father’s office. She hated answering the phone: What if someone died while she was talking to them? What if someone was having a heart attack and breathed his final words down
the phone line? In the evenings, if there were no calls for his father and genuine silence descended on the house, it had a heavy quality, as if it were laden with the depression which had settled on Ian’s father since his mother left. So he switched his radio back on, and let Elvis and Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly fill the silence for him.
Now he sat beside Arthur and listened to the bees and the tearing bedsheets and Arthur, slurping his tea out of a chipped enamel mug. There were half a dozen heavy, lumbering footsteps behind them and Edward’s gigantic nose appeared over Arthur’s shoulder. He was intrigued by the cake.
“Geddoff,” Arthur said, and smacked him with a backward sweep of his hand.
Edward tossed his head and backed away; then paused, and Ian felt his gaze. He hunched his shoulders and curled himself over his cake.
“Geddoff!” Arthur said again, threateningly. Edward gave up and thudded back to Robert, and blew petulantly into his ear. Robert shook his head violently. Edward was the younger of the two and Robert had no patience with him.
“Aren’t you havin’ a party? A few friends around?” Arthur said, breaking all records in the conversation stakes.
“I don’t think so. I’ve got an exam on Monday. I’m going to have to study tomorrow.”
Arthur nodded sympathetically and slurped his tea, and Ian was swept by a wave of shame. Because Arthur, whatever his limitations, was a really nice guy, and he still didn’t have a clue that Ian was only there because he was in love with his wife. And even less of a clue that sometimes, after dark, Ian returned to the farm. Returned, and stood silently within the black shapes of the trees at the edge of the farmyard, like some dark ghost, haunting her.
“Do you have a girlfriend, Ian?” Laura had asked a few months ago, and he’d been momentarily gripped by panic. Why did she ask? Had she noticed how he watched her? Did she know how he felt about her? Maybe she could see through him, maybe she had known from the very first time he had come to the farm, asking for a job. But she looked merely interested; not mocking or teasing him. And so he mumbled yes, sort of, he did.
He wasn’t quite sure how he’d managed it, but he had a girlfriend all right. He’d acquired her about a year ago, when a whole group of them from his class went out to Low Down Point the night after their last exam for a little end-of-year celebration. They’d made a fire on the beach and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows, and a couple of the guys had smuggled in some hooch, and they all got drunk. They went swimming in the dark. Some of them had had the foresight to wear their bathing suits under their clothes and the others, Ian included, swam in their underwear. A few boys—the ones who spent their entire lives showing off—and a couple of girls—the ones you’d expect—went skinny-dipping. There was a lot of splashing and screaming and falling about, but remarkably, no one drowned or fell into the fire or cracked his head open by diving onto one of the rocks off the end of the point. The water was still very cold, and when they got out their teeth were chattering so hard that no one could speak. They threw more wood on the fire and everybody huddled around it—close as they could get without singeing their eyebrows—and passed around the hooch and yelled, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog” at the cold and distant stars. Every now and then someone threw more wood on the fire and the sparks whooshed up and vanished into the night.
Pete was there to start with but he kept to the fringes, like he tended to do in groups. He wandered off soon after they got out of the water. Ian found himself sitting beside Cathy Barrett, whose dad worked for the hydro company. She was pretty, and nice, and very cold, and he was quite drunk, so he started rubbing her back, vigorously, to warm her up. One thing led to another and in the morning he discovered that they were going steady.
In some ways he was pleased. He hadn’t had a girlfriend before, and wasn’t sure that not having one was entirely his own choice; ever since his mother left it had been in the back of his mind that where girls were concerned, he might have been tainted by her disgrace. So Cathy’s choosing him—it was she who had sat down beside him, not the other way around—was reassuring. Plus he liked the look of her, and the smell of her, and the way she leaned against him and let him slide his arm around her right away.
Compared to Laura, she was nothing special, of course. He knew he shouldn’t compare them, but he couldn’t help it. Cathy was small and rounded, with clear pale skin and dark shiny hair, whereas Laura was tall and slender and golden, and in another league as far as beauty went. And Cathy was just a girl, whereas Laura was a woman.
They hadn’t got much beyond kissing, that first night. Ian would have liked to go further, would have liked to go all the way, come to that. Who wouldn’t? But there were two kinds of girls, the “nice” ones and the “easy” ones, and Cathy definitely fell into the first category. Even if she’d been “easy,” though, he probably wouldn’t have gone all the way. He wasn’t drunk enough for that. Lots of other guys his age did, he knew that, but the idea of sex outside of marriage made him think of his mother. Also, he could never rid his mind of the possible consequences. Sometimes he thought that too close an acquaintance with consequences was ruining his youth—though at other times he thought this was just an excuse and the truth was that he was chicken. You were supposed to do crazy things when you were young, but he never could. Like going out onto the ice too soon after freeze-up, for instance. Kids did it all the time, but they hadn’t seen the bodies of other kids, who had gone through the ice, whereas he had. It happened practically every winter, and made his father speechless with rage.
The same problem applied to going all the way with girls. He knew with complete certainty that if he “did it” with a girl just once—once!—she’d get pregnant. Even if he managed to get hold of a safe—and how was he supposed to do that in a town where his father and the pharmacist had known each other all their lives?—even if he managed to get hold of one, from a friend, say, it would turn out to have a hole in it.
Still, when he was out with Cathy, he always pushed things as far as he could. Over the past few months he’d managed to persuade her to let him touch her top half, and he kept trying to work his way further south. It was a long, slow process, though. There seemed to be a number of stages you had to go through. Initially, she let him feel her breasts but wouldn’t let him see them, which was strange and frustrating, though better than the other way around. The softness of her breasts astounded him. The way the nipples hardened under his touch. They were incredible. Miraculous. He couldn’t get enough of them. Though sometimes, right in the middle of fondling her (these sessions took place at the Jessops’, who were friends of Cathy’s parents and whose two-year-old Cathy babysat most Thursday evenings), he would find himself wondering what Laura’s breasts would feel like. The idea made him breathless, dizzy with lust. Made him try to slide his hand up the warm, silky skin of Cathy’s inner thigh and force her down onto the Jessops’ sofa, his erection throttled by his jeans. Cathy would push him away, hissing, “Ian, stop it! Stop it!” Though despite her fierce commands Ian was pretty sure she liked it when he got so steamed up. She couldn’t know that she wasn’t the sole cause. It made him feel vaguely ashamed, though not ashamed enough to stop doing it.
His mother sent him a present for his birthday—a large package, wrapped carefully in brown paper, which arrived several days before the event. He opened it at once, to get it over with. Hope you like it, darling, his mother’s note said. I’ll be thinking of you all day. It was a jacket, waterproof, lined with some material light and warm as goose down. He would never wear it.
His father gave him a canoe. They already had a canoe that had belonged to Ian’s grandfather, but it was broad and beamy and paddled like a pig, whereas this one was long and slender—you could see that it would slide through the water like a knife. It was cedar strip and had been varnished, inside and out, until it glowed like warm honey.
“Where did you get it?” he asked his father. He’d never seen anything so beautiful. It was tied to the dock,
resting on the water so lightly you’d think it weighed no more than a leaf. It was their own dock. Ian’s grandfather had bought the plot of land between their house and the lake and had cut a path through the trees so that they’d have access to the water. There was a bell on the dock, a large brass one, hanging from a gallows, that could be rung to summon the doctor if he happened to be out fishing when his services were required. Ian’s grandfather had been a keen fisherman and so was Ian’s father, though nowadays he seldom had the time. They had their own small bay, with a crescent of beach sheltered between two long points of rock. On a rough patch of ground behind the beach they’d built a boathouse, where the old canoe and the rowboat lived. The doors to the boathouse were open and Ian saw that another rack had been fitted for his canoe to rest on.
“Temagami,” his father said. “I asked John Raven to keep a lookout for one. He spotted it when he was down there a while back. It’s been in the boathouse down by the docks for the past month. Pete brought it over for me last night.”
“It’s beautiful,” Ian said. His father looked at him and smiled, and Ian had to look away. His father so badly wanted him to be happy that it made him sad. I’m fine, Ian wanted to say, which was true, most of the time. You’re the one who’s not. You should worry about yourself.
“Think I’ll go for a little test run,” he said, crouching down to unlace his shoes. “Want to come?”
His father shook his head. “Another time. Don’t be late for church.”