by Ron Corbett
We travelled on and before long passed the last access road to the Goyette Reservoir. The land began to change after that. Flatten. Could see the horizon in the distance, past pebbled riverbeds and clear-cut land. Soon we were travelling down the Northern Divide, the sound of running water so loud you would have thought you were in a ship. The conductor stopped the train at mile 372, where there was a thick stand of spruce, a gravel embankment, and a culvert with a creek running through it. The conductor told us when he was lowering the stairs that it had been “ten years, lordy, it must be more” since he had last stopped his train at mile 372 of the Northern Divide Line.
“There used to be an Indian camp in there. Is that where you folks are heading?”
“No,” lied Guillaume. “We’re heading to Old Duck to do some fishing. Make our way over to the Goyette after that and get a ride home with some friends.”
“That’s quite a trip.”
“We’ve been planning it a couple years.”
“You don’t have a canoe?”
“Friends have left us one on Old Duck.”
“Good friends. It’s not easy getting into that stretch of river.”
“They work for O’Hearn. They drove right in.”
“Well, that’ll do it. Take care of yourselves. Looks like you’ll have the weather on your side.”
“Thank you.”
“And you have a real sweetie there. What’s her name again?”
“Cassandra.”
“Yes, a real sweetie,” said the conductor, although our daughter was swaddled and he had seen nothing more than her eyes. With that, he pulled up the stairs, closed the gate on the train, pulled a cord, and the metal wheels started to turn. In a few seconds, the train rounded a bend, the engineer sounding his whistle once before he rolled out of view, and we were left standing by the side of the railway tracks, the sound of rushing water filling our ears.
. . .
It was strange, walking the old trail again. No longer a clear path through the forest but something hidden that needed to be divined from time to time. Once, we lost it completely, and Guillaume needed to take a compass bearing to find our way back, but we never worried. We were travelling river country. In river country you are never truly lost. You follow water and you arrive somewhere.
We reached Five Mile Camp just before dusk. Most of the cabins were gone, long fallen to the ground, although there were a few walls still standing. Some even had roofs, badly sagging but still supported by rough-hewn logs you could see through holes in the walls. An evening mist was coming in from the Old Duck River and it swirled around our feet as we walked past the cabins, the rusted cars, the broken pieces of dinnerware, a clothesline which had, almost as a miracle, a badly faded pair of jeans still clipped to the end of it. The jeans flapped in the wind, making the sound a large injured bird might make.
“How many people lived here?” Guillaume asked.
“A few hundred. Maybe close to a thousand for some years. It was a big place. People were always coming and going.”
“It was never an official town?”
“No. The Cree never wanted to live in O’Hearn bunkhouses. The company built bunkhouses, when the mill first opened, but they sat empty. So they tore down the wood and built a company store instead, here in the camp.”
“How long did you live here?”
“A year. Another two in Ragged Lake.”
We stepped around wooden planks that had rotted to mulch. Bicycles with only strands of rubber left hanging from the wheels. Piles of clothing so badly faded you could only guess what the original colours might have been. That first night, we stayed by the shore of the river, not even bothering to pitch our tent, hooking up our sleeping bags and sleeping with Cassandra nestled between us. As we fell asleep, we heard the hoot of a barred owl and both of us took that as a good sign.
At first light, we finished the hike to Capimitchigama. The trail to the headwaters was even less obvious than the one into Five Mile. It was possible no one had come this way in years. Even less of a reason to go to Capimitchigama than there was to go to Five Mile.
Guillaume never asked why we were walking the extra distance. Why we were not staying in the camp. So I never had to tell any of the stories I had rehearsed. We walked side by side down a trail I had not walked in twelve years, a day I remembered well, in spring, too, but later in the season, with buds already turned to small leaves that cast filigreed shadows on the trail. Two people walking in silence then as well.
In a few minutes we crested a knoll and saw Capimitchigama, a small dollop of cold blue water with ice still ringing the shore. Still not speaking, we walked toward the far shore of the lake to a dense stand of spruce, the trees crowding in on us the closer we came to the water, eventually forcing us to twist and switchback, the air turning colder, the world seeming slightly detached, slightly untethered as we moved through that forest, the way I remembered it. When we were twenty feet from the shoreline, still surrounded by trees, we stopped.
Guillaume put down his rucksack, and I paced in small circles with Cassandra bouncing off my chest. When he had rested a few minutes, Guillaume started the hike back to Five Mile Camp. I lay Cassandra on a blanket and started removing rocks from the spot we had chosen for our cabin.
. . .
We lived in a tent the first six months. Guillaume purchased it at an army surplus store in Springfield, the oldest one in the store, I think, but he had insisted on buying it, saying the thick, stiff canvas would serve us well and he wasn’t concerned about the weight. This was not a fishing trip, he said. This was not a vacation. We were going somewhere and staying. How heavy could anything be, really?
I was laughing at that, when we paid extra money to buy the oldest tent in the store: how heavy could anything be, really? Guillaume can get by on six hours’ sleep. Less than that. And he likes to stay busy when he’s up, can’t stay still, so hard work tends to be a thing he welcomes. He’s practical, too, could see the utility in that old tent, so of course he’d see no problem in hauling it all the way to the Northern Divide. It ain’t heavy. It’s my home.
He was right, of course. We were never wet in that tent. Or cold. Not even in November, when the lake had frozen and there was already snow on the ground. In the morning, the canvas sponged up the dew, and at night, it gave off the scents it had gathered through the day — white pine and wood smoke, lilac and wild mint. I cannot recall a room I have lived in that I loved more.
Guillaume fashioned a sled from sheets of plywood he found next to the old company store, and he used that to start hauling out the lumber we used to build our cabin. Two-by-fours. Two-by-sixes. Support beams. He would pry the wood from the collapsed cottages, looking for any that had been covered up or fallen a certain way, that hadn’t been exposed to twelve years of rain and snow.
The tools were all there. As I promised him they would be, explaining that people would have left everything behind, taken not much more than the clothes on their backs, certainly nothing heavy. Guillaume thought about that for only a few seconds before saying, yes, he could see people doing that. He found a crosscut saw hanging from the branch of a white pine, as though someone had placed it there that morning and would be coming back after lunch. Screwdrivers of every size and description. Nails. Pry bars. Mallets. An ash-handled hammer was found in the trunk of a car, the head balanced against the shaft so perfectly it swung on its own weight. It was the only thing Guillaume found at Five Mile that truly surprised him. That someone would leave behind a tool like that.
While Guillaume built our cabin, I prepared the cooking area and the hearth, picking rocks from the shoreline of the lake, organizing them by size, small boulders to fine pebbles, then burrowing a circular trench, laying the stones down largest to smallest, pacing atop the pebbles and tamping them down. Like Guillaume, I do not mind work and I take my time when doing a job, knowing I will be
looking for another task as soon as this one is completed, preferring to do a proper job anyway.
“Do you know that is a macadamized rock line?” Guillaume asked me one afternoon. “What you’re building there, that’s what it’s called.”
“I didn’t know it had a name.”
“Laying down rocks largest to smallest, tamping it all down so it becomes a level surface. Those were the first roads. Before gravel and asphalt.”
“How do you know that?”
“They still have roads like that over in Bosnia.”
He stopped what he was doing and helped me with the cook pit. We paced side by side. In perfect unison.
The company store had been built with roof trusses, and Guillaume separated them and brought them back, but they were difficult to align and we briefly considered building a horizontal roof. But we knew that was being lazy. The weight of the snow would be too much. So we hung the trusses as best we could, not perfect, but solid, and after that Guillaume lay down plywood and Typar, then shingles he made from old pop and beer cans.
He found the cans in an old dump, thousands of them, half-buried in peat moss and pine needles, lying in the remains of green garbage bags. Guillaume brought back several sleds of cans that first week and worked on them for months. His last chore of the day. He liked the work — labour that came with a number, that could be assessed and judged by simply counting the number of flattened tin cans stacked beside the hearth when we rose for bed. I enjoyed seeing him do it, the hammer ting sounding through the forest, the moon taking shape overhead, and the pickerel rising to the surface of the lake, their long sleek bodies cutting across dark water.
By the time the snows came, it seemed as though this had always been our life. I had no memory of another time or place. I tell you that honestly. It really did feel like I had been reborn.
. . .
The first person to visit us was an old fishing guide. John Holly. I remembered him from the Mattamy, one of the guides that showed up each spring and pitched a tent beside the lodge.
“Morning,” he said, and Guillaume stopped working on the roof, came down his ladder, and shook the guide’s hand.
“You’re putting up a cabin,” said Holly. “You with O’Hearn?”
“No.”
“They have timber rights to this land. Did you know that?”
“It’s government land. Timber rights can’t stop a man from building a cabin. You got to be logging the land to do that.”
Holly looked over at me and nodded.
“Been a while since I seen any Cree out here by Five Mile. How you doing, Miss.”
“I’m doing well. My husband is right about the timber rights.”
“Of course he is. O’Hearn has timber rights to half the known world. Means fuck all. He may not like you taking stuff out of his work camp, though.”
“It was never his,” I said. “That was an old Indian camp. And it’s abandoned. When was the last time anyone lived there?”
“Been a while. You’re right about that, too.”
Cassandra woke up right then, and I don’t think Holly had noticed her until then. She was wrapped in a blanket and lying beside me. He smiled when he heard her scream and then walked over and squatted on his haunches to watch while I lifted her up and began to rock her.
“How old?”
“Three months.”
“She’s beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
Then he stood up and turned back to Guillaume. “Well, good luck to you. I heard people were living out here, and I just wanted to drop by and see. You’re cashing a cheque at the Mattamy?”
“That’s right.”
“We’ll probably see you in town. My name is John Holly. I guide out of the Mattamy.”
They shook hands one more time. When Holly left, we went back to work. We knew people would come eventually to see what we were doing, and we both thought it a good first visit. Holly had neither threatened us, nor tried to be our friend.
O’Hearn sent someone later that month, a bull rigger from the bush camp at Simon Lake. The man had never been to Five Mile but, when he toured the old camp and saw what we had built he laughed and kept slapping Guillaume on the back, calling him a “ruddy genius.”
He spent the night in a tent he pitched by the lake and left early the next morning, saying as he packed up his ATV that we were no doubt crazy, but the stuff we had taken was junk and we were living on government land — even if O’Hearn had the timber rights — so if we fucked up in any serious way it would be someone else’s problem, not his.
“So, have yourselves a right ruddy life,” he yelled, and with that he took off. This visit also pleased us. It seemed that we were well on our way to falling off the edge of the planet.
. . .
For the next twenty-seven months we never had another visitor. Never heard a noise outside our home that was anything but animal or weather. Never saw a face in the morning or late in the evening we did not love. A seclusion and a repetition like I had never experienced before, as though the good moments of the day had expanded and pushed everything else aside. Love. Work. Family. The fine high rise of that. Those were our days.
We grew herbs and root vegetables in a plot of land I cleared by the lake and there was always pickerel or smoked venison in crockpots that Guillaume buried in the ground. He’d brought a Remington 870 with us and several boxes of shells. He is a skilled marksman. He has yet to waste — I do not believe I am exaggerating — a single bullet. He hunts in the fall for the most part, preferring to fish in spring and summer. He checks the maps we have brought and sometimes goes in search of new lakes. When he is hunting, he will sometimes be gone a night or two. He reminds me of the old hunters from Kes’. Not the young ones, who fly around on snowmobiles and drive around the village with heads mounted to the hoods of trucks owned by a finance company down south.
Cassandra began walking before she turned one and by the time she was two was already helping us around the cabin. She works with me in the vegetable and herb garden, helps her father stoke the cook fires. She looks like me. Not her grandmother. A part of me wishes she looked like Guillaume, so a circle could be broken.
It has been a time of healing. We both needed it and I am glad it came for us. Even Guillaume’s body has healed. When we arrived I talked him into trying an herbal press, and although he didn’t think it would make any difference, he agreed. I made the press with golden root and white cedar and made him wear it for two weeks. When we unwrapped the press, the scars on his chest looked like lines of ink from a writing journal left outside in the rain. Today, you can barely seem them at all.
The only interruption to our routine comes when Guillaume goes to Ragged Lake to cash his cheque and get provisions. Sometimes we accompany him. The old village has changed almost as much as the work camp. Not halfway toward becoming forest again, but leaning that way. The roof on the community centre built by O’Hearn in the late ’50s, a large building that used to have a hockey rink, tavern, and two twenty-desk schoolrooms, has caved in. No doubt from the weight of snow. During the winter there always used to be men shovelling snow off that roof at the end of their midnight shifts. A task given to mill hands as a reward and rotated every week, a chance to finish their shift outside the mill instead of inside with the chemical smells and noise. Snow now blows through every window. The tavern has been looted of all its wood. The desks are gone.
The railway station is just as abandoned. The small building where you used to buy tickets is boarded up. A train goes through the village three times a week but stops only when needed — to deliver mail and supplies to the Mattamy or to a survival school that has opened up in one of the old bunkhouses. The conductor on the train has the waybills. And passenger tickets, if anyone ever wants to leave, although everyone did that years ago.
The two-storey homes that used t
o surround the railway station are also boarded up. The wraparound verandas — the thing that used to distinguish the homes of the rich from the homes of the poor — have gone, useless appendages winter storms must have obliterated years ago. The cottages by the lake, where I lived with Johnny for two years, are in better shape. The Mattamy rents them out as fishing cabins, but it has been a long time since anyone painted one, or changed a curtain. All of the curtains are yellow and tattered, like rags hung on a rod.
In the centre of town, right by the shore, is the mill. I’m not sure if a thing not living, not breathing and moving around, should be able to scare you. You wonder how such a thing would be possible. Yet there is something about that mill that frightens me. Perhaps it is merely the size of the thing, a red-brick building the length of two football fields, a building that would seem large even in Springfield. Or maybe it’s the smoke stacks that are blackened and chipped and don’t have a purpose anymore, that remind me of hardwood trees stripped of their leaves, as though we are always living in late November. There is something about that mill that leaves me thinking of hospital rooms and bad smells and uncertain futures. So it must be possible. For a thing not living to scare you.
The Mattamy is the only place still living, still breathing. Guillaume cashes his cheque at the bar and we will pick up items we have ordered from the Stedman’s catalogue or buy provisions from the kitchen. We do not need all the money the government sends, and we try to overspend so no one will think we have money stashed in the cabin. The cook is a greedy man but he is stupid as well, because he could be far greedier. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that it had been years since I had thought about money. I sat there confused, like a child might be, trying to remember why it had once seemed so important.