Hummingbird

by Tristan Hughes

  A long and troubled night stretched out in front of Mr Thomson’s acquaintance. I pictured him sitting in front of his fire making desperate and gloomy calculations: what kind of cold would tomorrow bring; what type of ground had to be crossed; how much blood had been lost; how much would he need.

  Looking up from the notebook and out of the window, I was surprised to discover a tiny orange light moving slowly along the tracks. It was as if a spark had spiralled up the chimney and managed to make its way there. As I watched, it stopped abruptly and began moving in the opposite direction. After a hundred or so yards it again shifted direction. Back and forth it went, glowing bright and then dim, going out and then, apparently, reigniting. It took me a minute to figure it out: it must have been one of Eva’s green deaths; or actually several of them in chain-smoked succession.

  From behind his bedroom door, I could hear my father shifting on his mattress. Some part of his anatomy knocked against the headboard, another thudded against the wall. He couldn’t sleep (he often couldn’t). After stirring the remains of the fire with the poker I sat back in the chair and closed my eyes. It was no use. The leering faces loomed instantly onto the undersides of my eyelids, this time taking on the lurid colours of the embers.

  I tried opening my eyes quickly and pretending for a second I’d arrived in this place for the very first time, had stumbled upon it like an explorer. But the fire was still there and the cabin and the orange light moving along the tracks. The whole familiar night was awake with restless and unhappy spirits. And, like Thomson’s acquaintance, I would wake up knowing exactly where I’d gone to sleep.

  Night Swimming

  The next night, determined not to dwell on the prison site, or anything else for that matter, I lay in bed reading one of my grandfather’s old collection of Field and Streams. They were often a great comfort to me and usually had at least one story about boys fishing for pike, though most of these boys were more concerned with catching them than watching them. I was in the middle of reading such a story when the orange tip of a cigarette passed right by my bedroom window. Whether or not the boy in the story caught his pike, I don’t know – I was dressed and outside in about half a minute. The moon hadn’t risen yet and it was very dark.

  The tip had already reached the Schneider’s cabin. I was about to follow it along the path when it veered suddenly away, disappearing behind the cabin where Mrs Schneider had her garden. I picked it up again beyond the rhubarb patch. There were lamps lit in both of the back rooms and I made sure to keep beyond the light that was spilling out from their windows. I didn’t want to be suspected of snooping.

  I was about twenty feet from the rhubarb when the tip broke into a tiny shower of sparks and disappeared. I stood there without moving. I still hadn’t actually seen Eva.

  ‘I can see your problem,’ I heard her say. ‘It’s so much harder to stare at people in the dark.’

  I followed her voice until I could just about make out the pale oval of her face through the rhubarb leaves. She was sitting on the ground, holding her knees.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ I whispered.

  ‘I might ask you the same.’

  ‘I followed your cigarette.’

  ‘How sweet of you,’ she said. ‘Good leech day?’

  ‘Not too bad,’ I said.

  ‘Except for the leeches – not so great for them, I’ll bet.’

  Some moths, headed for the light of the windows, bumped against my head and, startled, I swatted at them as if they were giant mosquitoes. ‘Just moths,’ I said.

  I heard a fish jump somewhere out on the lake.

  ‘That was probably a fish,’ I said.

  ‘If you’re going to hang about you might as well sit down,’ Eva said.

  By the time I had she’d already lit another cigarette.

  ‘I don’t know what they do to humans but these green deaths sure keep the bugs off,’ she said. ‘Better than the crap I’ve been using.’ She was covered in mosquito repellent. I’d smelt it the moment I’d opened our front door and up close the smell was so strong it was almost choking me. She must have used a whole bottle of the stuff. All around us in the dark insects must have been dying.

  From where we were sitting we could see right into the two back rooms of Mrs Schneider’s cabin. In one of them, Judith was sitting stooped at a desk sorting through a pile of what appeared to be letters and papers. In the other, Mrs Schneider was sitting in a chair, knitting, surrounded on all sides by colossal piles of junk.

  ‘What’s with all that?’ Eva asked admiringly.

  ‘Oh, that’s just Mrs Schneider’s room.’

  ‘That bit I kind of guessed.’

  ‘It’s where she puts her stuff.’

  I didn’t really know how to explain it otherwise.

  Another of Mrs Schneider’s daily routines was her walk along the tracks. She’d take it a half hour before noon, alternating the direction she went in each time, and during the course of these walks she’d pick up anything she found and carry it back with her. It was endlessly surprising what you could find near the railroad. People seemed to throw the oddest things out the windows of the trains. And invariably these objects would find their way into Mrs Schneider’s back room, a room she appeared to keep solely for the purpose of storing them and which bore very little, indeed no, relation to the rest of her cabin, or indeed her life.

  While the rest of her existence was meticulous, everything in this room had been thrown pell-mell in random heaps and piles. It was a chaotic mess – the only space kept open being the one for her chair. Over the years, through secret glances and glimpses (obviously, she didn’t show anybody the room) I’d watched these heaps and piles grow. I’d seen umbrellas, shoes, innumerable hats; including an actual top hat – a relic from when the circus trains had passed by this way. I’d seen books, magazines, paper lanterns; the arm from a tailor’s dummy; a pair of red silk gloves; a wax couple from the top of a cake. The list could go on.

  I could never work out, and never would, the reason for this hoarding; as far as I know it was Mrs Schneider’s version of Dorian Gray’s portrait. It was one of the things about the lake my mother had told me and my father when we’d first come here, explaining how it was something we shouldn’t bring up. In fact, we rarely mentioned it among ourselves, except if we lost something when we were at the lake. ‘I guess that’s for Mrs Schneider’s room,’ we’d say.

  ‘Wow, just look at all that shit!’ Eva said, swaying her head from side to side in appreciation. ‘Is that a rocking horse?’

  Inside the other room, Judith was still sorting through the papers and letters. It was her old bedroom and there was a large brown trunk on the bed. Occasionally she’d lean over from where she was sitting at her desk, pluck some more papers and letters out of it, and add them to the ones on the desk. There were already too many. The desk – an oddly miniature thing, no doubt left over from her childhood – had been almost overwhelmed by them. A large pile, covering most of its surface, swayed and tottered. Stray sheets kept falling off its sides onto the floor. Underneath it, in a sort of mirror image of this excess, Judith’s legs were cramped into a space far too confined for them. Everything in this room appeared too small for her.

  Whether it was because of this confinement and clutter, or because of the content of what she was reading, it was evident that Judith was becoming gradually more irritated. She began knocking individual papers onto the floor. She brought her fist down onto the pile. And then, suddenly, she stood up, knocking the whole desk over. After a second or two, she picked up a handful of the fallen papers and letters and, standing back up, started tearing them up one by one. I liked seeing this version of her – not slouched or stooped but at her full height: shoulders back, chest thrust defiantly forward, as if in rebellion against the puny world.

  Next door, Mrs Schneider continued with her knitting.

  ‘Jesus, someone’s pissed at something.’

  ‘That’s Judith,�
�� I said proudly.

  As we made our way out of the rhubarb patch and back towards the path, Eva asked me if I wanted to go swimming.

  ‘But it’s dark,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve never swum at night?’

  ‘But I don’t have a bathing suit.’

  ‘That’s what I like about you, Zachary Taylor – you’re so spontaneous! Don’t you live next door?’

  ‘I’m not sure what the water’s like?’

  ‘Wet, I imagine. Anyway, suit yourself.’

  She turned and began walking up towards the tracks. For a while I remained standing where I was. I could hear the lake slopping quietly onto the sand. The truth was it wasn’t the time or the temperature of the water that bothered me; it wasn’t even the question of bathing suits. What bothered me was the darkness of the water. It was what had come to frighten me about the drop-off; only at night it was as though the drop-off had spread its dominion everywhere. Up at the tracks I saw the flare of a match and then the glowing tip of a cigarette.

  By the time I’d caught up with her, Eva had reached the culvert. She told me to wait there for a minute and slipped off towards Lamar’s place. From beneath my feet came the sound of the creek slowly sluicing into the lake. Somewhere a muskrat slipped out of the reeds and into the water. A hang-nail moon had risen over the horizon.

  ‘Let’s go to the place with the old boats,’ Eva said when she got back. I could just about make out a small bag or bundle in her hand.

  ‘You mean the wannigans?’

  ‘The whatever-i-gans.’

  When we reached them, she disappeared into the remains of one of their cabins. After a few minutes she re-emerged slowly, snaking out a pale leg followed by a pale arm; and then a weirdly frilled and sack-shaped body; and, finally, an unnaturally white head, as smooth and hairless as a salamander. Under the frail light of the half-nail moon it looked as though some underground creature, which had evolved pink-eyed and beyond the reach of the sun, were groping its way out of a cave.

  ‘Ta-da!’ she said, jumping down onto the sand and holding up her arms like a chorus girl. ‘What do you think?’

  She was wearing a white swimming cap and a swimsuit that must have come from several eras before. The top half was made up of the elaborate folds and bunches of an ancient blouse, while the bottom half became a shapeless knee-length skirt that might have appeared racy to my grandmother and which I assumed had probably once belonged to hers.

  ‘At least you won’t get cold,’ I said.

  We walked along the beach until we’d reached the rocky edge of the bay. Beside us the cliff loomed above the water, its inky mass blocking off a portion of the night sky, its shape stencilled in an absence of stars.

  Abruptly, without saying anything, Eva turned, took a handful of splashing steps, and plunged into the lake. It took a second or two for my eyes to find her in it. She was turning in somersaults, parts of her becoming briefly, flickeringly visible above the dark surface of the water – a pale leg, an arm, the smooth white dome of her head.

  I stripped down to my boxer shorts and waded in. Or rather I took one step in, enough to wet my ankles. I couldn’t take another. I felt dizzy and breathlessness, gripped by a kind of vertigo, as though I was on the edge of some incredibly high precipice. For a while Eva continued to turn in somersaults. Then her head popped out of the water a few feet out in front of me, like an albino seal, or a talking egg.

  ‘Can you swim?’ it said.

  ‘Of course I can!’

  ‘Are you afraid of water?’

  ‘No. Well, not like that.’

  ‘Like how then?’

  It was very complicated, I told her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She was close enough now that I could see she was stroking her head. ‘It sounds very complicated.’

  Frustrated and exasperated I tried to explain.

  ‘It’s more like the dark water. When I think about it, it’s like I’m standing on the edge of somewhere really high. And I’m about to fall. And it’s like there’ll be no bottom and I’ll end up like an astronaut adrift out in space.’

  ‘So complicated. And so poetic.’

  I wished I hadn’t said anything then and the things I wanted to say I couldn’t; my mouth felt like it was stuffed full of dry crackers. I wished I could take another step into the water, close enough to kick her.

  ‘Hold on. Wait here a second,’ she said as she stood up suddenly and began sloshing her way over towards the edge of the beach. I watched her pale limbs and head disappear into the dark. After a few seconds the sounds of sloshing were gone and I could hear the rustle of branches and the snapping of twigs. And then for a while I couldn’t hear anything.

  ‘You mean like this?’ she called out eventually.

  Her voice was coming from above me. She was standing on the top of the cliff. You could just about make out her outline.

  ‘Hey, be careful,’ I said.

  I wasn’t sure how deep the water was beneath the cliff. And I knew she didn’t know.

  ‘Point made,’ I called up to her.

  ‘Like an astronaut, you say.’

  For an instant, her outline seemed to become more defined, to almost glimmer, as though the sliver of moon had got brighter. And then it was gone. It was a long way down.

  When it came, it was more a wet thunk than a splash.

  ‘Eva,’ I called out.

  The air was cooler than I’d realised and my bare skin had begun to break out in goose-bumps. The soft hair on my arms and legs was sticking up. I took a step. Somewhere ahead of me I knew there was a drop-off. Closing my eyes I took a second step.

  ‘Eva?’

  An image came to me, one that had often been part of my dreams when I was younger but which hadn’t returned to me for a long time. I was standing on the bottom of the lake, surrounded by drowned lumberjacks. They seemed to be importuning me but I couldn’t work out what it was they were trying to say or what they wanted. Their features were blurred and exaggerated by the water; their noses too long, their lips fat and swollen, their eyes unnaturally large, as though swelled and bloated. Above me, in a pale blue circle of light – which could have been the sky – I could see the faces of the men in the wannigans. They were reaching down towards me with long hooks.

  ‘Eva?’ I called out, more frantically this time, dreading the third step.

  Opening my eyes, I found the white oval of her head bobbing in front of me. She was smiling.

  ‘You could have hit the rocks at the bottom.’

  ‘I could have,’ she said. ‘And I didn’t.’

  ‘You could easily have hit them,’ I said, feeling suddenly exhausted.

  ‘And I didn’t.’

  She’d stood up and started walking out of the water. When she got to the shore she walked right past me, heading quickly up the beach towards the tracks.

  ‘Be seeing you,’ she called back.

  I’d been about to follow her but instead I stood where I was, shivering, up to my shins in the water, wearing my underwear, thinking about drowned lumberjacks and drop-offs and phantom boat crews, my heart beating too fast for all the wrong reasons.

  Highway Kids

  There was still a week of school left. The next day was a Monday and I was surprised to find Eva waiting for the school bus at the end of the logging road, where it joined the highway. My father dropped me off beside the stop sign. Even though he taught at the school he insisted on me catching the bus there instead of driving in with him. I guess he thought it’d help me make friends with people my own age which, now that we were living out at the lake, he must have considered important (although in this regard it was hardly different from the swamp house).

  ‘Good Morning, Zachary Taylor,’ Eva said, stubbing one of her green deaths out on the tarmac. Her hair was definitely blonde. It was in a different style too, pulled back into a long ponytail. She was wearing a red and green plaid dress, like a girl in some kind of private school brochure.


  ‘Most people say Zack,’ I said.

  ‘Really. Most people.’ She looked around theatrically in several different directions.

  ‘Hello,’ she shouted. ‘Hello there, most people.’ Her voice echoed off the rock-cut that ran along the other side of the highway. ‘I prefer Zachary,’ she said.

  Down in the ditches at the sides of the road the cotton grass was showing white against the new reeds and shoots of grass. Here and there on the verges you could make out the orange and yellow dots of early hawkweed flowers. The summer had already arrived. Around here there was barely time for spring.

  ‘Why are you going to school?’ I asked.

  ‘What the fuck else is my uncle going to do with me?’ she said, smiling. ‘How’s the leech business?’

  But before I had a chance to answer the bus came wheezing around the bend. Our stop was as far it went. Beyond Sitting Down Lake you had to figure out your own education.

  My father might well have reconsidered the bus as a way of me making friends if he’d actually ridden on it. I’d once overheard one of my teachers telling a newly arrived colleague about us. She called us highway kids. ‘They can be difficult sometimes,’ she’d warned. ‘They tend to be … a little less socialised,’ she’d said, searching for the right way to put it. And, in all honestly, we were a motley crew; a curious ragtag of schisms and sects and me. There were two Mennonite boys, with pale hair and pale eyes, who wore matching white shirts and black pants. There was a boy called Freddie, who was a few years younger than me and lived at the end of a dirt track in a maze of old boats and chicken houses. His parents were Seventh Day Adventists. Then there were three blonde sisters, the Betchermans, who lived a long ways out in the woods and belonged to a family who were so religious people said it wasn’t even a regular religion they followed – that their parents had kind of made their own up. In which case, they’d done a fine job. Amongst themselves, the sisters were perpetually cheerful and laughing and as sleekly fit and active as seals. As opposed to Freddie, who was taciturn and blotchy and every morning looked as though he’d just discovered a stone in his shoe. The two Mennonite boys never spoke at all. The Betcherman sisters aside, our pilgrimage to school was usually a study in silent contemplation.