by Mary Lawson
And like two pieces of a jigsaw suddenly coming together, that was that.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Edward
Struan, February 1969
The thermometer read thirty degrees below zero this morning. It was so still out there, so silent, it was as if the air itself was frozen. You felt it might crack at any moment and shower down around you in infinitesimal slivers of ice.
In the summers we get a lot of tourists up here and there’s no denying it is very beautiful then, what with the lakes and the forest and the long hot days. You hear people—Canadians, Americans, even some from overseas—say they’d love to buy a place in this area when they retire, and live here all year round. I’d suggest they come and spend a winter first. Cold is one of those things it’s very hard to imagine in the abstract; you have to experience it for yourself.
And it isn’t just the cold that makes the winters hard; the snow means communities like ours are effectively cut off from the rest of the world for significant stretches of time. Now that there are Ski-Doos and decent snowploughs it’s better than it used to be, but we’re still frequently snowed in and the sense of isolation can be profound. A few weeks ago—on Christmas Eve, in fact—American astronauts orbited the moon, arguably the most significant achievement in the history of the human race, and I read afterwards that “The whole world” had watched it on television. Not us. For a start we don’t have a television—we do not need another source of noise and irritation in this house—but even those in Struan who do saw nothing. The first blizzard of the winter hit us that week; all the power lines were down and the roads and the railway were blocked for three days. By the time we read about it, saw that staggeringly beautiful photograph of our Earth suspended in the infinity of space, the event itself was already history.
The photograph made me feel lonely. Not just for myself but for all of us, living out our insignificant lives on this small planet. For the first time I understood why people the world over feel the need to believe that we are part of some great purpose, that somebody “up there” cares what happens to us. Unfortunately, wanting something to be so does not make it so. My feeling is that we are very much on our own.
Personally I think there is dignity in accepting that. Whatever the once-Reverend Thomas might say.
At lunchtime today I braved the cold and went to the library to order Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He wrote it between 1776 and 1788 and I thought it might be interesting to read it alongside more modern texts.
Betty was wearing a sleeping bag, one of the old army issue ones that go right up over your head and cover everything but your face. She looked like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. I had been feeling out of sorts—this business of shouting at the boys has been on my mind—and it lifted my spirits in the most remarkable way. She’d made slits at elbow level so that she could get her arms out to stamp the books and so forth. I asked if she’d be able to get out of the bag quickly if there were a fire and she said she wouldn’t bother, she’d just stay where she was and get properly warm for the first time in six months. That reminded me of Robert Service’s The Cremation of Sam McGee. I asked Betty if she’d read it and of course she had. That in turn reopened our discussion about books I would want to rescue before she burns down the library. I told her I would like the Encyclopaedia Britannica and all of the Year Books to date. I asked if she were intending to take anything herself and she thought for a minute and then said everything ever written by Margaret Laurence plus Gone with the Wind and Little Women. When I confessed that the only one of those I’d heard of was Gone with the Wind, she looked shocked and said, “Mr. Cartwright, you’re not seriously telling me you haven’t read Little Women!”
I don’t think there’s anyone else in Struan I enjoy talking to as much.
After Reverend Thomas gave his sermon on the iniquity of those who set themselves up in judgment over their fellow men (about which I was not going to think ever again), she was one of the few members of the community who seemed to have no trouble meeting my eye. I know she would have heard the sermon—she’s a regular churchgoer. But Betty thinks for herself.
She says his wife has left him. Apparently she’s gone to stay with a brother in Ottawa, whether as a permanent thing or not nobody knows. So he’s alone in that house. Betty says she has knocked on his door several times and various other members of the congregation have done so as well, bearing food. (Women seem to think the answer to everything is food.) He answers the door and thanks them for the food but he doesn’t invite anyone in.
I still cannot find it in myself to pity him.
This afternoon, not an hour after my talk with Betty about burning down the library, Sergeant Moynihan came to see me for the second time in two weeks.
“You got a minute, Mr. Cartwright?” he said, standing in the doorway of my office. He pretty much fills it, excluding the corners. The doughnuts have something to do with that, but he’s a big man anyway.
“Of course,” I said. “Come in. Take a seat.”
He shook his head. “Somethin’ to show you outside.”
So I pulled on my coat and followed him out of the bank, through the parking lot at the side and around to the back. There’s no reason for anyone to go around there, so it doesn’t get ploughed and the snow was more than two feet deep. There were three sets of footprints—except they were more like “leg” prints—marching across the snow, leading to a trampled area under my office window. Right up against the wall there was a bundle of charred sticks.
I stopped dead when I saw them.
“Three people this time,” I said after a minute. There was an odd, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“Nope,” Gerry said. “One set of tracks is mine.”
“Oh, of course. When did you find it?”
“Just now. I was walkin’ through your car park—shortcut to Harper’s, haven’t had lunch yet. Saw tracks leadin’ nowhere so I followed them.”
“When do you think they were made?”
“Last night. Gotta be. It snowed yesterday afternoon, stopped about six, so sometime after that.”
“At least you’ve got good footprints to work with,” I said.
“Nope. They stepped in their own prints on the way out, did a good job of messin’ them up. Anyway, wouldn’t help much. We all wear the same damned boots in this town. Even mine are the same.”
“Yours are significantly bigger.” Gerry’s prints wouldn’t have shamed a polar bear.
“Mine are bigger’n everyone’s,” Gerry said. “That’s why I’m not a criminal, I’d be caught’n ten minutes flat.”
I laughed but the truth was I didn’t feel any too happy. “It looks kind of personal,” I said. “That’s my office window.”
“If they’d wanted to hurt you they’d have set fire to your house during the night, not the bank when it’s shut. They just want to scare people. That’s a pretty amateur fire, not like the one at the Giles’s farm. That one went up like a torch. This one they haven’t used no gasoline, nothin’—I reckon it was out before they got ’round the corner of the building. Kinda strange. But I wanna catch them before they make a mistake and somebody does get hurt.”
“So what’s the next step?” I said.
“You made any enemies recently?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“You know anyone else who’s had a run-in with the Picketts? Not sayin’ it’s them, just wonderin’.”
“I haven’t heard anything of that nature.”
He nodded. “Okay. So. Next step is I go to Harper’s and have lunch. Can’t think on an empty stomach.”
He’s right, I know: if Joel Pickett and/or his sons intended me actual bodily harm they wouldn’t target the bank knowing I wasn’t in it. But still. Fire is my particular terror.
It is Sunday night already. I’d intended to spend the whole weekend in classical Rome, in a manner of speaking, instead of which I have spent
it in Northern Ontario circa 1920. All to do with my father, of course. This business of his anger, which he seems to have bequeathed to me.
Anger was his defining emotion, you might say. I’m not sure what lay behind it. In fact, considering his influence on me it’s remarkable how little I know about him. I suspect even my mother didn’t know much. I think he arrived in the North sometime in 1919 claiming to be a war hero, though there is no reason to believe the latter is true. (There is no reason to believe anything my father said was true; he lied as naturally as breathing.) My mother told me that he was from Hamilton and that while he was off winning the First World War his brothers had cheated him out of the family business, but that would merely have been what he told her.
She didn’t say what brought him north, but I can hazard a guess. Silver was discovered up here in 1903 when they were building the railway. According to local folklore a blacksmith who was working on the railway came out of his tent one morning and saw a fox prowling around the camp. He picked up a hammer and threw it at the fox, missed, hit a rock, chipped off a chunk of it and exposed a vein of pure silver lying underneath.
Whether or not that tale was true, the find triggered a spectacular silver rush. If my father hadn’t heard about it before he went off to war he certainly would have when he got home. By that time everyone in North America had heard about it. The largest chunk of solid silver ever discovered—the so-called “silver sidewalk”—was found less than thirty miles from where I’m sitting now. The ore lay close to the surface—in some places you could literally pick it up off the ground—so in theory at least, even men who knew nothing about mining had a chance of striking it rich.
Easy money. The kind my father liked best. I can just see him, newly arrived from the civilized south, stumbling around in the bush in his cheap city shoes, feverishly chipping away at bits of rock without the first idea of what raw silver even looked like. He wouldn’t have asked anyone because, firstly, that would have meant admitting that there was something he didn’t know, and secondly, he would have assumed whoever he asked would lie to him. My father had the lowest view of human nature of anyone I have ever known. In later years, when he made one of his many soon-to-be-proved-worthless discoveries and had to leave his claim in order to go to the recording office down in Jupe to record it, my brothers and I would be recruited to stand guard until he returned. He used to arm us with sticks of dynamite to chase off claim-jumpers. I’d have been about seven the first time. He made us practise lighting the fuse and throwing the stick at a tree. If he hadn’t been so deadly serious—“Aim for the head,” he’d roar, having notched the tree at head height—we might have considered it fun. As it was, I was so terrified I didn’t sleep for nights afterwards.
As it happened, he and the others who joined the rush at the end of the war were too late. Men had been crawling over the area like ants for well over a decade by then and the time of picking up raw silver on the surface was long gone. Fortunes were still being made, but only by the cigar-smoking “Silver Barons” from the south—Toronto, Chicago, New York—who came up to visit the area now and then in private railway carriages decked out with dining cars and libraries. They could afford to sink shafts and follow the seams of silver down into the ground. For the solitary prospector, though, it was over.
But nobody told my father that and he wouldn’t have believed them if they had. He believed—because he wanted to believe and because, as time went on and the days became weeks and then months and then eventually years, he had to believe—that beneath the next rock he turned over would lie a seam so rich, so pure, he’d be spooning out the silver like honey from a pot.
I don’t know how he met my mother but my guess is he went looking for her, or someone like her, soon after arriving in the North, not for the normal reasons but because prospecting costs money. You need to eat, your boots wear out, you run out of dynamite; maybe you want to buy a stake in a promising claim. You don’t want a job because that would mean time away from prospecting, so what better than a wife from a well-to-do family? By that time my mother’s family, canny hard-working Scots that they were, had a prosperous farm and shares in several profitable mines. So no mystery there.
The mystery is what attracted my mother to him and what possessed her parents to allow the marriage. Possibly they were starting to fear that time was running out for her. She had a strawberry mark on her cheek, not a very large one but maybe it counted against her in the marriage stakes. By the time she and my father married she was twenty-four, which was old to be unmarried back then. And of course my father was a stranger to the North so they would have no way of checking whatever story he told. He could be very charming, very convincing.
He was handsome in a rough kind of way. From what I’ve read (I’ve finally started going through her adult diaries) it’s clear that my mother thought he was the man of her dreams.
Emily thought I was the man of her dreams. I know that because she told me so after I got home from the war. Tears streaming down her face. She said I had deceived her, which was not the case. In fact, it was the other way around; she deceived me. She made me think we shared the same dreams when in fact her dreams were limited to a ring on her finger and a baby at her breast. She had—still has—no more curiosity about the outside world than an oyster.
But that is by the way.
I spent the whole of yesterday in a welter of frustration, trying to do justice to the books about Rome and instead reliving things from the past that would have been better left forgotten, and as a consequence, of course, I couldn’t get to sleep last night. I kept seeing the image of my father I dreamed about a few weeks ago—him standing on the roof of the farmhouse, outlined against a wall of flame so vast that it seemed to fill the whole horizon.
Anyway, after lying awake for what felt like half the night I came downstairs and got out the box file containing the diaries from my mother’s adult years. It wasn’t that I expected to learn anything from them, just that I decided it was better to know what was in them than to keep wondering.
As I believe I said earlier, very little of what my mother wrote in adulthood survived the fire, and many of the scraps that did survive were so frail and brittle they began to disintegrate as soon as I touched them. It took me several hours last night and most of today to get them into any sort of order, and it would have taken longer had my mother’s handwriting not provided a clue. I was able to see straight away that the writings related to two separate periods in her life, one at the beginning of her marriage and the other about fifteen years later. In the early ones her writing is firm, rounded and flowing—the writing of a confident young woman. In the later ones it is tight and cramped, as if scribbled in great haste; there is a kind of fearful urgency about it, as if she was afraid of being discovered, of being “caught in the act.”
I haven’t got as far as reading those later portions yet and I don’t think I’m up to it this evening. But in the earlier ones I did find the answer to a question I have wondered about for years, namely why, given that they lived less than thirty miles away and must have known at least something of the situation, my mother’s parents didn’t help the young couple out in the desperate early years of their marriage.
It turns out that they did; in fact, they were extremely generous. As a wedding present they gave my parents a considerable sum of money, enough not only to build themselves a house but also to start up an outfitters in the nearest mining town, supplying necessities to prospectors and townspeople.
There is no other outfitter within two days’ travel along bush roads—my mother wrote—so there is genuine need of such an establishment. Father and Mother feel that it will provide a more reliable income than investing in a mine, and Stanley agrees.
So the four of them had discussed the plan and my father let them think he went along with it. But then, shortly after they had moved to the new mining town and before work on the new house had begun, came this:
Stanley says there has b
een a great discovery in Quebec, which he believes we must inspect before others learn of it. He says there is no proper town there yet, but that will be to our advantage as we will have our choice of sites for our camp.
I wish that it were not so far away from Mother and Father but I told Stanley, truthfully, that I did not mind where we lived so long as I was with him.
There is no suggestion that she was concerned about abandoning the plan they had agreed on. Perhaps my father told her it was just a temporary detour. In any case, at that stage she probably trusted his judgment; she hadn’t had time yet to find out that he had none. What he had instead was a lethal combination of pride and stupidity that was going to take them straight to the bottom, but she clearly had no inkling of that.
Conditions in the mining camps back then were very primitive but that didn’t seem to worry my mother either; in fact, she seems to have enjoyed the challenge.
… no streets, just tents and shacks amidst a great swamp of mud and tree stumps. Water must be fetched from the lake and I cook our meals over the campfire in front of our tent. Last night I procured a dining table—a dynamite box (empty!), turned on its side. It serves very well and I am proud of it!
All day the woods ring with the chinking of picks and hammers on rock, with now and then the deep boom of blasting. The men talk of nothing but silver. They say this is the richest discovery that has ever been made! Stanley has bought a fifty percent share in a mine. He is tremendously excited …
I find it painful even to read those last two sentences. The writing is all fast, looping, free-flowing curves, the hand of a young woman carefree and optimistic almost to the point of foolishness. And still not the faintest hint of concern about my father’s use of their money.