Ragged Lake

by Ron Corbett

  “What was her name?”

  Again she did not answer. But this time she lifted herself from her chair and walked to another room. When she returned, she was carrying a book.

  “She came to me three days ago. She was alone and she was scared. She said someone had come back for her.”

  “Come back for her?”

  “That’s what she said. It didn’t make a lot of sense, what she was saying. She was talking crazy and she knew it. ‘Better safe than sorry.’ She kept saying that. ‘Better safe than sorry.’”

  “What did she want you to do?”

  “She wanted me to look after something. She said she was being silly and she would come back in a few days to get it.”

  “It’s that book?”

  “Yes.”

  She reached over and put it in Yakabuski’s lap. He picked it up and fanned the pages. A journal. Black leather and of good quality, although not exceptional. It looked like the writing journals you found in most bookstores. The first entry was dated several years before, May 2, 2010, though most of the journal was a single entry, written under the previous Sunday’s date.

  Yakabuski went to the front of the journal and stared at the nameplate inside the cover. In perfect penmanship, on the sole line put there for the purpose, was written Lucy Whiteduck.

  “Lucy,” he said, and raised his head to look at Anita Diamond.

  “Prettiest girl I ever saw at Five Mile. Her father was Johnny Whiteduck.”

  Yakabuski turned back to the journal. Between the first and last entries were few others, and most of those were brief and had no date. The final entry was the exception, a long piece of prose that would have taken hours to write, the sort of writing people did late at night while waiting for the sun to come up, wondering what sort of day was coming for them.

  There seemed little sense in reading anything else. Yakabuski turned the journal to the window for better light and began to read.

  FIREFLIES IN THE SNOW

  I have begun to think I should hide this journal. Put photos of Cassandra and Guillaume in it and stash it somewhere. So there is at least a record of what happened. What Dr. Mackenzie always said was important. A record.

  Am I losing my mind? I’m not sure anymore. I see ghosts. I tell myself that. Lucy, you’re seeing ghosts. You’re not thinking clearly. Maybe Tommy Bangles was a dry-drunk. You never spoke to him. You never touched him. You’re cracking up from the stress of being an adult in this screwed-up world. Get some rest. The good days haven’t disappeared.

  But it seems like the good days are leaving. And if that is what is happening, would I be doing anything more than preparing myself, coming up with a backup plan the way you are taught on the Northern Divide, if I were to stash this journal?

  We will fight. Of course we will fight. It is what Guillaume is doing right now. Preparing to protect our home, our daughter. But if we lose, this journal is the only direct evidence that there was once a beautiful little girl named Cassandra Roy. Is it wrong to want to protect that?

  I need to think this through. That was something else Dr. Mackenzie always said. Start at the beginning, Lucy. Think it through scene by scene, see your role in each scene, step back — that is what writing is good for — step back and see where things could have gone differently, if different decisions had been made.

  Great advice. But where is the beginning? I have always had a problem with that one. My last entry was more than two years ago. Do I just go on from there?

  No. That would be absurd.

  Should I start two days ago? Get right to the problem and write about what happened two days ago? How our home is now barricaded and we are living with tripwires in the forest and guns on the ledges of our windows, scanning the land around us with field glasses, searching for what we know is coming?

  What would be the point in starting there? That’s just a description of the situation we have found ourselves in. How does that help us figure out where to go? No, I need to go back further. The danger we are in has something to do with Ragged Lake. There is a connection. I am sure of it and if I can figure it out, maybe we stand a chance. All I want is a chance.

  I’m going to start with the day I got this journal.

  . . .

  I met Dr. Mackenzie two days after I was released from the hospital. Met him at his office in Cork’s Town, and that’s when he gave me this journal. Our first session.

  “I want you to write in this journal as often as you can,” he said. “I don’t want to say every day and then have you come to the sessions feeling guilty if you fail to do this. But as often as you can. Write about your day. How you are feeling. The decisions you are making. If you stay with it, I suspect you will start to see some interesting patterns. Most people do.”

  “What sort of patterns?”

  “You’ll see repetitive behaviour and certain situations that make you act a certain way with almost one hundred percent certainty. If you are like most people, and can stay with the writing, within a few months you will be quite surprised by what you have learned about yourself.”

  I was not that interested in learning more about myself. I’m still not. If anything, I would like to know a whole lot less. But Dr. Mackenzie was right about the journal. In how writing things down can sometimes help collect your thoughts. Help you come up with a plan.

  Dr. Mackenzie was my favourite therapist. He didn’t act like he knew all the answers. Was never preachy or condescending. He was a middle-aged man who always wore stiff white shirts with sweater vests, even on hot days. That first session, we talked about why I was in the hospital, the reason I needed to come and see him. At the very end, we went through the court order, making sure I understood all the conditions. My first AA meeting was the next morning.

  . . .

  The meetings were every Monday at St. Patrick’s Basilica, only six blocks from my apartment, in the basement where they also had Sunday school, so every Monday morning there would be new drawings of Jesus on the wall. The leader was a sheet-metal worker from the French Line called Andre, and he began with the Pledge, then asked if anyone wanted to speak.

  A middle-aged woman in a purple pantsuit put up her hand, so she went first. She said she had been arrested in front of her daughter’s school the week before. She suspected a teacher had called the police but she couldn’t say that for sure.

  “Annie saw the whole thing,” the woman said. “She was looking out the window of her classroom when the police came. They put me in the back seat of the car and made me take the breathalyzer right there. Can you imagine?” The woman said Annie was quiet and nervous around her now. She was thinking of changing schools.

  An old man spoke next, said he was returning to the meetings after an experiment with controlled drinking. We all laughed when he said that. He had his two-year pin when the experiment started.

  Then a used-car salesman who lost his job two days earlier. There was a woman sitting in the pews upstairs, crying, and that must have been his wife.

  When there was no one left to speak, Andre made some announcements and pins were awarded. A mill hand I recognized from the Silver Dollar got a five-year pin. Andre showed him his twenty-year pin when the ceremony was finished and the mill hand stared at it like it was the Northern Star. He asked Andre if he could touch it. It was all standard meeting stuff and I only went on about it because that meeting is where I first saw Guillaume. He spent that meeting looking out a window. Didn’t say a word to anyone. I remember seeing him that first day and thinking he must be court appointed. Like me. I don’t remember thinking about him much more than that.

  . . .

  The weeks after leaving the hospital were strange times for me. “In transition” is what my worker at Community and Social Services called it. In a fog would be more like it. Nothing was familiar, from my bed to my toothbrush to how I spent my days. I had no friends the courts
would allow me to see. My apartment was in a neighbourhood I had never visited before. Every morning when I awoke, it took me a few minutes to remember where I was.

  By our third session, I was looking forward to seeing Dr. Mackenzie. Just for the chance to leave my apartment and walk through Springfield. The quickest route took me through Sandy Hill and the main campus for the University of Springfield, then over two bridges — one spanning the Big Green River, the other the Springfield — and from the Springfield Bridge I could see the exact spot, far to the east, where a fur-trading post once stood, the first permanent settlement along the river. After that, it was fifteen minutes down the cobbled streets of the French Line to get to Dr. Mackenzie’s office.

  The third session started with Dr. Mackenzie needing to fill out some forms the courts had just sent him.

  “This should have been done earlier, so I do apologize,” he said. “June 10, 1989, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Born in Kesagami. Full status?”

  “Yes.”

  “Father Johnny Whiteduck, mother Gabrielle Laframboise. No brothers or sisters?”

  “No.”

  “Mother deceased?”

  “Yes.”

  “Father?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve lost touch with my father.”

  “No contact whatsoever?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Was there a falling out?”

  “No. I wanted to come to Springfield and he didn’t. That’s all.”

  “When did you last see your father?”

  I hesitated when he asked me that, wondering how accurate a person needed to be in order to answer such a question truthfully. Did you need an exact geographic location or would the name of a town or region be enough? I decided to be one hundred percent truthful.

  “Last time I saw my dad was at Lake Capimitchigama. That’s the headwaters for the Springfield. Not far from Five Mile Camp, where we lived for a while.”

  “Five Mile Camp?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t see that here. Your file has you going from Kesagami straight to Springfield.”

  “The file is wrong.”

  “Where exactly is Five Mile Camp?”

  “It’s on the Northern Divide. By Ragged Lake.”

  “How long did you live there?”

  “A little over a year. Two more years in Ragged.”

  “None of that is in your file. How can something like that be missed? This is not your first time in . . . I would have thought . . .”

  And he didn’t finish the sentence. Dr. Mackenzie did that a lot, like a thought would enter his head midway through a sentence and he needed to stop and examine the thought to decide if it was the kind of thought you should turn to sound. Being polite like that. Even when it made him look clumsy.

  “Well, why don’t you tell me about Five Mile Camp?” he said eventually.

  I remember thinking there was enough going wrong in my life right then to keep any therapist busy in the here and now, but it was nothing but Five Mile Camp for the rest of that session. Dr. Mackenzie asked all sorts of questions about the work camp, about Ragged Lake, how Johnny and I survived. I was careful with my answers. Only our third session.

  Dr. Mackenzie was a bit of an outdoorsman so we talked about that as well, what the fishing was like on Ragged, and at the Goyette Reservoir, which he had heard about. We talked about the way the seasons came over the land up north, how spring arrived and rivers overflowed their banks to run wild through the forests — so much water that people were swept away every spring and never came back. Summer, when the land was nothing but different shades of green. Autumn, when the rivers drained away and the winds came and everything you touched had a covering of grey silt. Winter, with as many shades of white as there were summer greens.

  “No hardwood trees?”

  “Nothing big. Some ironwood. Some tamarack. Not the trees you know.”

  “I have always wanted to get to that part of the country. Why did you leave?”

  “They closed the mill in Ragged Lake. Everyone left after that.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “High River. Buckham’s Bay. Most went back to the reserves.”

  “No one stayed in Ragged Lake?”

  “How could you? Everything shut down. The store. The train station. Maybe you could get a little work guiding, but not enough to make anyone stay.”

  “You came all the way to Springfield when the mill closed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why so far?”

  “I wanted a new start. I wanted a big city.”

  “And you have been on your own ever since?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old were you, Lucy?”

  “Thirteen.”

  . . .

  Arriving in Springfield is one of my most vivid memories. A thing that has clung to me. I was hitchhiking outside High River when a truck driver picked me up and took me the rest of the way. Ten hours, including the lunch he bought me, and the last hour I don’t think I said even a dozen words. Just stared out the window at the Springfield River, not believing this river with the white caps on a far horizon was the same river you could walk across just outside Five Mile Camp. Then the first buildings appeared: old warehouses and forward-steerage offices. Lumbermen cottages. An abandoned saw mill. Then we rounded the big bend in the Springfield that turns the flow of water from north-south to west-east and the city was right there before us. As though a curtain had just been raised. I saw silver church spires and high-rise apartment buildings, an east-west highway with eight lanes of traffic, factories by the river with stacks pumping pillars of white smoke, thousands and thousands of houses sitting on every inch of cleared land — more houses than I thought you could possibly put in one clearing by a river.

  The truck driver took me around the city for more than an hour, laughing every time I pointed at something that seemed marvellous to me. The Madawaska Hotel, with its copper roof and turrets. The Grainger Opera House. The Springfield city hall, with a courtyard the driver told me was designed after one in Italy, right down to a fountain in the shape of Neptune, although water to the fountain needed to be turned off early November of every year to make sure the pipes wouldn’t burst, so it was useless a lot of the time and Neptune seemed to scream all winter for no good reason.

  We drove past Strathconna Park and the Claude Tavern, the Lafayette, the outlook for Kettle Falls, the truck driver gearing down as low as he could when we reached the Falls so he could turn around in the parking lot, a manoeuver that took him nearly five minutes to execute, and I looked at the Falls the whole time, the mist from the river mixing with low-hanging clouds so you couldn’t see the actual river. Just hear it.

  When we were finished, the truck driver asked where I wanted to be let out and I hadn’t given it much thought until then, so I asked him where a good place might be. He thought the YWCA in Cork’s Town would be good, so that’s where he dropped me off after giving me twenty dollars and not asking for anything in return. So he was a decent man, like I said. Looking back now, I would say that was a good day with plenty of good signs, plenty of optimistic signs. My first day in Springfield.

  Even though the YWCA was a block and a half from the Silver Dollar. Which maybe wasn’t such a good sign. Or good planning in any sort of way on the part of the city.

  . . .

  I was working at the Silver Dollar within a month. The cops would come by from time to time to check the dancers, but I had a decent driver’s licence made and I’ve always looked older than my age, so the licence was normally enough. A couple times I was taken out and brought to child and family services, but just a couple, and I was dancing by the weekend each time.

  I would work at the Silver Dollar, off and on, for the next ten years. Th
at nightclub was my life. It was where you would find me any day. Where you would find my friends. Where you would find my boyfriend. Because of that, it was hard for me to do some of the things the court was telling me to do.

  Looking for work was like that. The court order said I couldn’t step foot inside the Silver Dollar, or any place that served liquor, but I had only ever worked at a nightclub. At first I tried getting an office job, thinking that might be easy, but there were a lot of girls looking for office jobs in Springfield back then. Boys too. The economy was not in good shape. Another thing I never had to deal with before. When you work as a dancer in a nightclub, it’s the same guys spending the same money the same night after night. Nothing changes. There is no recession. There is no depression. Economists should come down and study it. Maybe they already do.

  One company seemed interested in hiring me, an insurance company downtown — or, the man doing the interview seemed interested — but when I came back a second time, there was a woman there who must have been his boss and you could tell she was annoyed to be there. She even rolled her eyes a couple of times. Before the meeting was finished, the man from the first interview was being nasty to me, like I had tricked him into coming back.

  I started looking for a store job after that. The closest I came was a kids’ store in the Springfield shopping mall called Tiggy Winkles, which brought me in for a group interview with the Tiggy Winkles personnel committee. That’s what the owner called it. The committee consisted of him, two women who worked at the store, and his grandson. The owner said his grandson was there because children had always played an important role in the running of Tiggy Winkles, the reason for the store’s success, really. He told me this in a whisper, to make sure I understood I was hearing important stuff. Children are important to a children’s store.

  I sat on a mushroom-shaped chair and regretted wearing a skirt. The other women wore sweatpants. Sat with clipboards on their knees. It was the grandson who did most of the talking, an eight-year-old boy named Xavier whose first question was, “Would you describe yourself as a Knex person or a Lego person?”