by Mary Lawson
He grinned. He looked as if he’d just won a million dollars.
Mr. Aaronovitch arrived and they filed into the room and sat down. They were pros at this now—it was almost a shame it was all coming to an end. Aaronovitch handed out the papers and said ready, set, go, and they all flipped the paper over and started scribbling. For three hours Ian poured out onto the paper everything he had taken in in the past two days, and when it was over his brain felt as empty as an old boot, nothing in there at all.
Afterward they milled around restlessly, talking about how great it felt to be finished but how it didn’t seem real, and how it was going to take a long time to sink in. Somebody suggested they go to Harper’s, but Ian decided against it. You could predict exactly what the conversation would be. They’d do a postmortem on the exam, question by question, until they’d all convinced themselves they’d failed. He didn’t fancy it. He caught Pete’s eye and nodded questioningly at the door, and Pete nodded in reply. Ian felt a huge relief. Almost as good as Jim Lightfoot getting away was the fact that Pete seemed to be back to normal.
Their fishing tackle was at Pete’s, and his grandfather had told him to stay out of the way of the Mounties, so they decided to hike up to the Leap. It had been years since either of them had been there; fishing was so addictive it left time for nothing else.
The Leap was a sheer granite cliff over three hundred feet high, rising up out of the lake. It might have been possible to scale it if you had the right equipment, but as far as anyone knew it had never been done. Instead you approached it from the rear, where the climb was merely steep rather than precipitous.
They went past Cathy’s house to pick up Ian’s bike, cycled to the point where the road came closest to the Leap and then abandoned their bikes and set off. The going was easy at first, rising gently across great rounded humps of pink lichen-encrusted granite, bare but for the occasional tuft of grass or rich green pillow of moss. Here and there, in hollows deep enough for a little soil to gather, there was a knotted jack pine, hanging on tight.
Then the rocks got steeper and they had to pick their way, climbing as fast as they could, both feeling the urge to push themselves physically, to get the blood moving again after the concentrated mental effort of the morning. Partway up there was a giant turtle-shaped boulder they remembered sitting on as kids, so they climbed up and sat on it again to get their breath back.
“It was your grandfather who brought us here the first time, wasn’t it?” Ian said breathlessly. “Years ago. We were really young.”
Pete nodded.
“Was it your birthday or something?”
“Yeah.”
Ian had a dim memory of the old man helping him up a rock, saying something encouraging to him in a language he didn’t understand, then saying it again in English. There. Now up this one. Good. Good. He was a great old guy. And now there were Mounties prowling around the store. Asking questions.
“How’s he doing? You know—with everything that’s going on.”
“He’s okay. Worried.”
“About Jim?”
“About everything, man. About everything.”
Below them a couple of crows were bouncing about on a boulder, yelling at each other. Then a third crow joined them and added his opinion, then a fourth. They stood around bickering for a moment and then, abruptly, they seemed to reach agreement and they all flew off.
Ian put his hands flat on the rock and lifted himself fractionally, easing his backside into a more comfortable position. The rock was warm from the sun and under his hands the rough rounded surface felt like the skin of an ancient beast.
“How old are these rocks, do you think?” he said pensively.
“They’ve been here forever,” Pete said. “These are some of the oldest rocks in the world.”
Ian looked at him curiously. “Really?”
Pete nodded. “Bits of the Shield are coming on for three billion years old.”
“Three billion?”
“This is top-quality rock, man. It was a mountain range once. High as the Rockies. Then it was under the sea…then there were glaciers on top of it.” He patted the rock approvingly with his hand. “Still here.”
They climbed on. The rocks rose up more steeply and sometimes they needed to search for handholds and haul themselves up. And then abruptly they scrambled over a crest of rock and found themselves at the top, the lake spreading out below them, dazzling in the sun.
“Wow!” Ian said. “I’d forgotten how fantastic the view is.”
The sun on the surface of the water was so bright that he had to shield his eyes to look at it. In the distance the shoreline looked like lace, hundreds of bays and rivers and inlets running off from the vast pool of the lake itself and disappearing into the wilderness.
“What’s that at the edge of the cliff?” Pete said.
“Where?”
“There’s something in the air.”
They were still thirty feet or so back from the edge, but now, looking more closely, Ian could see that the air appeared to be dancing in a strange way, almost like a heat haze but not quite. At first he thought it was a trick of the light but as they got closer he could see that Pete was right, there was something in the air. Many things, in fact. Thousands of things.
“Holy shit!” Pete said. “They’re dragonflies!”
A curtain of dragonflies was hanging in the air at the very edge of the cliff, hundreds upon hundreds of them, like a vast army of tiny helicopters, hovering, almost motionless apart from a slight swaying to maintain their position on the updraft of warm air from the lake. All of them were facing inward as if they’d been on their way somewhere and had come smack up against a sheet of glass.
“What the hell are they doing?” Ian said, getting as close to the edge as he dared. Three hundred feet below, the waves were frothing around the foot of the cliff.
“Dunno.”
“Have you ever seen them do that before?”
“Nope.”
Pete sat down, cross-legged, at the edge of the cliff, face-to-face with the dragonflies. He watched them and they watched him. Man and bug, Ian thought, grinning at the sight. Man and bug, eye-to-eye on the brim of the oldest rock in the world. He sat down beside Pete, edging cautiously closer to the brim, and focused on one individual dragonfly. They were hovering quite close together, not more than four or five inches apart in any direction, but they maintained their positions so well that it was easy to pick out just one. It was less than three feet away—he could have touched it if he’d leaned out over the edge—but it didn’t seem in any way perturbed by his presence. They eyed each other, mutually uncomprehending.
“So how old are dragonflies?” he said at last. “Since you know so much.”
“You mean these particular ones?”
“No. Like, when did the first dragonfly fly?”
“Two to three hundred million years ago.”
“That’s not a very satisfactory answer—give or take a hundred million years. Can’t you be a little more precise?”
“Two hundred and seventy-six million, three hundred and ten thousand, four hundred and twenty-two years ago on the fourteenth of December.”
“Thank you.”
“Anytime,” Pete said. “If there’s any little thing you need to know, just ask.”
They sat on in silence, or almost silence; if you listened closely you could just hear a faint thrumming from thousands of wings. Beyond the dragonflies the sun was sinking slowly, casting its rays across the lake, and on either side, everything, as far as the eye could see, was slowly dissolving into the haze.
Ian thought, If I live to be a hundred years old, I will always remember this.
It was after dark by the time they got to Low Down. Most of the others were there already and had a bonfire going. Cathy was there, huddled in a little group of girls who kept shooting dirty looks at Ian. He avoided looking at them.
Someone had spread a couple of old blankets out on
the sand a few feet back from the fire and Ian sat down and stared into the flames. He felt strange, distant and detached. Part of his mind was still back on the cliff and the other part was too tired for a party. He tried to shake himself out of it—this was probably the last get-together they’d have before they all went their separate ways—but the others didn’t seem to feel particularly hyped-up either. Someone passed him a Coke and someone else held out a king-size bag of potato chips; he took a handful and ate them slowly. People were standing around in the shadows at the edge of the firelight. Others were down by the water. Pete was down there, looking out over the lake. Maybe he was back with the dragonflies too. Or communing with his mythical muskie. Or wondering what the Mounties were up to on the reserve, and how his grandfather was making out.
It was getting cold. The fire had died down enough to cook the hamburgers and hot dogs people had brought, so they did that and then heaped more wood on the fire and huddled around it. There was a bit of petting going on, but nothing serious. Someone tried to start a singsong, but it petered out almost immediately, and they sat mostly in silence, like a bunch of cavemen, watching the flames.
Earlier they’d talked about staying all night, greeting the sunrise together, but in the end people started drifting away about one in the morning. The good-byes were quiet and subdued.
Pete had disappeared some time before, so Ian went home alone. He cycled slowly, wanting to hang on to the feeling of detachment that had taken him over. A state of not-being. A state of no-time. No past, no present, no future. No decisions. He thought it would be good to stay like that for the rest of his life.
When he got home the car was gone; his father was out on a call. Ian went up to his room. He lay on his bed, thinking of what Jake had said about leaving the North, then thinking about Jake himself. It must be strange, coming back after a long absence to the place you grew up in. Strange to see again things that were once so familiar they were almost a part of you. Though it was hard to imagine Struan or anything in it being a part of Jake. He didn’t look as if he had ever belonged. He was a city type. Sure of himself. Confident. Ian envied him that. He looked like someone who had no doubts about himself or where he was going. Someone who knew exactly what he wanted out of life. Someone who had all the answers.
TEN
VICTORY LOAN NEARING OBJECTIVE
RUNAWAY TRUCK FINISHES UP IN MILL CREEK
—Temiskaming Speaker, May 1943
The cows needed milking, so he had to get up in the mornings. If it hadn’t been for that, maybe he wouldn’t have. Maybe he would have stayed in bed, sagging into the mattress, too weighed down with loss to move, while the forest crept in and took over the farm. But the urgent lowing of the cows reached him where he lay under his heap of gray blankets, and it wasn’t a sound anyone with a heart in him could ignore.
Once he was up, other things couldn’t be ignored either. The frosts had gone but until a week ago the soil had been too wet to drill. Now it was ready and the oats and barley—the crops the animals depended on during the long winter months—needed to go in straightaway. He was going to need more feed than ever before because they’d increased the size of the dairy herd, thanks to their arrangement with Otto, and if he sold them now he’d make a loss. And then there were Otto’s pigs. The piglets could be sold when they reached market weight but he couldn’t sell the sows. Otto depended on them for his livelihood.
So there would be the pigs to get through the winter, and the cattle, and the horses. He didn’t see how he could manage it. It was only ever going to be possible with the use of Otto’s land and one man alone couldn’t work two farms. He and his father had figured out that between them, using the tractor and both teams of horses, they could just do it. The tractor. Whenever Arthur thought of it he saw the giant wheels clawing the air, saw his father’s face—purple, eyes bulging out. The day before the funeral he’d driven it, for the first and last time, back to the Luntzes’ farm and stuck it in Otto’s barn. He didn’t want to see it ever again.
But Otto’s land was going to be ruined if it wasn’t tended properly; that was another worry. He needed to write to Otto and tell him what had happened, ask him to come back and sort things out. Sell the farm, or find someone to rent it to. He knew he had to do it but the thought of putting all that down on paper defeated him. How would you say it? “Dear Otto, Dad was killed your tractor fell on him.” How could you write that? His mother would know what to say but she got upset when he asked her to do it. There was no point in pressing her. She wasn’t in a state to deal with anything at the moment. He would have liked to talk things over with her, tell her of his worries, but it was out of the question. It would have been a relief to tell someone. To have someone else share his fear that they would end up in debt again. That they could lose the farm.
Some days he felt he didn’t care. Let it go. He had no heart for it, now that his father was gone. There seemed no purpose in it anymore. But then he’d think about his mother and Jake. If they lost the farm, what would they do? Where would they go?
So Arthur kept working. In the mornings after the milking was done and he had been over to the Luntzes’ to see to the pigs, he harnessed both teams of horses and took them out to the fields and worked them alternately, two hours on, two hours off. They worked sun-up to sun-down, plowing, harrowing, seeding, up one furrow, down the next. The same thoughts kept going around and around in his head, keeping pace with the heavy footsteps of the horses. Keeping pace with his grief. He ached with grief, felt sick with worry. Once he said aloud, startling himself and the horses, “What am I goin’ to do, Dad?” And the silence rushed in so hard, so fast, it knocked the breath out of him. He stopped in his tracks and the horses came to a halt and looked around at him inquiringly. “It’s okay,” he said, but he was crying all at once and they looked uncertain. “It’s okay,” he said again, wiping his face with his sleeve. “Move on.” They moved on, and he followed along behind, tears running down.
Sticking to the routine was all he knew how to do, but the routine was of his father’s devising, and memories ambushed him at every turn. For a few days after the accident the imprint of his father’s behind was still visible, alongside Arthur’s own, in the long grass bordering the field where they’d been sowing the potatoes. It seemed incredible. Just days ago, so recently that the grasses hadn’t straightened up yet, they’d sat together, sipping hot sweet tea, surveying how much they’d done and how much was still to do. Not knowing.
Had they spoken, that last time? He couldn’t remember. Probably not. They didn’t speak much. There was no need. One of them might say, “Soil’s heavy,” or “Lookin’ pretty good,” and the other might nod. Or they might just finish their tea in silence and heave themselves to their feet and go back to the teams.
Now he found he couldn’t sit down for his break. He drank his tea standing up, beside whichever team he was using. His father’s horses were gentle with him. He’d expected them to play up, unsettled by a strange hand on the plow, but they did not. It seemed to him that they understood. They were the only comfort he had, out there alone in the fields all day.
At dinnertime and again in the evening he’d walk back to the house along the track and for the first couple of weeks the prints of his father’s boots were still there, like his signature written on the land. Then it rained and they were gone. That had seemed a treachery, that his footsteps could be erased so easily. How many thousands of times had he walked along that track? All his life. His own father, Arthur’s grandfather, had brought the track into being, had cleared the land and plowed the very first furrow behind the broad swaying back of an ox. Their footsteps should have stayed forever.
Last thing at night he went out to the barns for a final look around before bed, as he and his father had always done, just to check that everything was okay. They used to stand for a minute or two in the farmyard afterward, studying the sky, and Arthur did it still, couldn’t break the habit, though of all the moments
of his day it caused the greatest pain. He stood alone in the silence of the night, remembering. In his mind’s eye he saw the two of them—always saw them the same, standing together, faces turned upward. Clouds pale against the blue-black of the night. Stars cold and bright. The moon hanging there, pale and brilliant, clouds drifting across it like smoke. The sky and the silent land beneath it stretching on, and on, and on, so that he and his father were shrunk to almost nothing by the vastness of it. Two tiny insignificant specks, side by side, faces upturned, staring at the sky.
They had to write to Otto. There was no way around it. It was mid-July now and Otto’s fields were a mass of sow thistle. They couldn’t keep putting it off.
He said, “Mum, we’ve gotta tell him. He’s gotta sell the land or rent it to someone else, or it’s goin’ to be ruined.”
They were at the supper table. Jake was there, for once. Arthur hardly ever saw him anymore. School had finished for the summer but Jake was always “out.” Their mother was in a permanent state of panic about him. “Where could he be, Arthur?” she’d say at five-minute intervals. “Where do you think he is?” As it happened, Arthur knew where he was, some of the time at least. He was very close at hand, in the hay barn, to be exact, with a girl. Not always the same girl—at the moment it was Susan Leroux, a thin, wiry, dark-eyed girl who lived with her drunken bum of a father in a shack down by the sawmill. She was several years older than Jake and had a “reputation,” and Jake was busy enhancing it.
Tonight though, he was at home, in body if not in spirit, sitting at the table with them, reading a comic book while he ate.
“You’re gonna have to write to Otto,” Arthur said to his mother, trying to speak firmly. He had to make her understand.
She was instantly upset. “But Arthur, they don’t know yet what they want to do. They might want to come back. Surely we can keep it in order for them.”