Hummingbird

by Tristan Hughes

  Yes, that is what I should have replied to Lamar’s question. I should have told him yes, I had been. I actually stopped at the culvert and turned back for a second as though it might be possible to change my answer. But the moment was gone. He was already picking out boards from the pile of lumber and spreading them on the grass. What was he building? I should have asked him that, I thought. He’d asked me a question. It hadn’t occurred to me I could have asked him one in return.

  Homesteaders

  After over a week Judith Schneider was still next door. Every extra day she’d stayed we’d begun to suspect it could only mean a calamity of some sort or another. Whenever my father saw her out the window he’d involuntarily start cleaning whatever cup or plate was closest to hand.

  One afternoon Mrs Schneider arrived at our door, knocked on it vigorously, and announced that she and Judith were cooking homesteaders that evening. Homesteaders were deep-fried jam sandwiches, which I supposed had had their origins in her early, pioneering days. (She’d first arrived here from Austria as a seventeen-year-old girl, having emigrated in response to an advertisement searching for wives for men who lived in the north. She never once mentioned what her life had been like back there, to make her take such a risk.) Homesteaders were also social events, one of the few that Mrs Schneider allowed to interrupt her daily routine. She didn’t play cards or drink alcohol.

  ‘Of course, Zachary and I would be delighted to join you,’ my father said, having to bow his head slightly to get it below the door frame. Mrs Schneider nodded her own head, which was her version of a smile. She had always approved of my father’s manners.

  I watched as she made her way back along the path with precise and tidy footsteps. There was something truly impressive in her seeming imperviousness to wear and tear and time – the hair that wouldn’t turn grey, the skin that hardly ever appeared to wrinkle, and never tanned. As she reached the edge of her garden I saw her spot a fallen pinecone, adroitly side-step it, stop, turn, and then stoop effortlessly down to pick it up and put it in her pocket. The wilderness held no dominion over Mrs Schneider’s property.

  ‘She studies winter,’ Mrs Schneider announced, as though she were not quite fully assured this was a fitting subject for professional inquiry.

  My father had asked Judith what kind of thing she studied. We knew she worked as a wildlife biologist but not much beyond that.

  ‘I wouldn’t say winter, exactly,’ Judith said. ‘But I do work on winter habitats; specifically, the one under the snow. It actually has a name.’

  Judith seemed to fill one side of the room, my father the other, as though the both of them had eaten the cake that made Alice big in Wonderland. She was constantly trying to reposition herself in a way that made her body appear smaller. She slouched and stooped and squeezed. My father blinked and fidgeted. Between them was a wooden dresser, on top of which sat a plate illustrated with a picture of an Alp, and beside it a framed photograph of Mr Schneider. Both of them were in constant danger from my father’s long, bony hands. Every time he spoke, he flailed them nervously in their direction.

  There was a long pause.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘The name. You mentioned it had a name.’

  ‘Oh that, yes. Of course. The Pukak. They call it the Pukak. It’s an Inuit word.’

  ‘The Pukak,’ my father repeated.

  ‘It’s an entirely different world,’ Judith said. ‘Most people don’t even suspect it’s there.’

  ‘Isn’t that something? The Pukak.’ My father repeated the word in a soft, marvelling voice, while knocking his elbow against the dresser.

  ‘You see,’ Mrs Schneider added, moving our attention towards the table where the homesteaders were sitting, ‘like I said – winter.’ She pushed a plateful towards us. She was at an age when eating was extremely important, much more so than what you did or studied.

  ‘But it’s only one habitat…’ Judith began.

  Mrs Schneider – who’d clearly had enough of winter – interrupted her. ‘Judith’s husband has gone.’

  ‘He’s not gone anywhere, mother,’ Judith protested. ‘We’re separated. We’re getting a divorce.’ She looked at my father and I as though what she was saying was in a foreign language that only we understood.

  ‘Like I said, he’s gone.’

  I’m not sure Mrs Schneider recognised the concept of divorce. Proper husbands were considerate enough to die. The photograph of Mr Schneider looked obligingly down from the dresser. He was tall and quiet-looking; his heart attacks concealed beneath a thin, fragile smile.

  ‘He’s not physically gone anywhere, Mother.’

  My father began gallantly to shovel homesteaders into his mouth. ‘This blueberry jam, Mrs Schneider,’ he spluttered through the crumbs (breaking one of his own cardinal points of eating etiquette) ‘is excellent.’

  ‘Last year was a good year.’

  He nodded in my direction, signalling to me to pick up my pace. I already had one in my mouth so pushed an extra one into my cheek. They were remarkably dense and took longer to chew than you would’ve thought. The homesteaders had been hardy people. My jaws ground to a halt after a few seconds.

  ‘We’ll have to watch Zachary here or he’ll finish them all off.’ My father gave me an oddly contorted look, admonishing me with one side of his face while encouraging me to speed up with the other.

  ‘Ah, but let him Mr Taylor. They have such a sweet tooth at his age. But out here it’s a treat for them.’

  Judith, looking resigned and relieved, reached over and picked up three.

  By the end of the evening I was so full I could barely move. As my father went to leave, he narrowly avoided toppling Mr Schneider. Judith, coming up behind him, knocked her father with her elbow and sent him sprawling to the floor. The plate and the Alp survived.

  Outside it was getting dark. There were fireflies in the bushes along the lakefront and bats flickering above the trees.

  ‘The Pukak,’ my father said as we walked back along the path. ‘Isn’t that something?’

  Despite the gathering darkness I could see he was smiling to himself, which really was something.

  Nature Sleeps

  I went to sleep thinking happily of winter but was lifted abruptly out of it by the whistle of a passing train and deposited into a stifling tangle of sheets and blankets. It had been one of those days when the heat of the sun seems to hide away in the cracks and shadows and come out again in the night. I was drenched in sweat and lay in my bed for a while trying to imagine what it would be like to live under the snow. But it was no use. It was too hot and humid.

  Outside was no better. The sound of frogs and crickets filled the air like hot breath. Whatever moon there’d been had sunk behind the clouds and it was so dark and still it was difficult to distinguish the water of the lake from the sky. The whistle of the train sounded once more, from what seemed an impossible distance. Beneath invisible trees the fireflies flickered in the undergrowth like explosions on a midnight battlefield seen from some great height.

  I shuffled my way to the tracks and began walking along them in search of a breeze. But there was none and I’d not got very far before the dark began to feel just as thick and oppressive as the air. And then I heard a movement of leaves ahead of me, no more than a gentle flickering – the kind a breeze would have made, if there’d been one. I stopped. My mind was suddenly clear and empty and queasily aware. About ten feet in front of me there was a crunch on the chippings. And then another.

  ‘Eva,’ I whispered. I thought she might be out wandering.

  The next crunch was even closer. I could just about make out something in front of me. It was something far more indefinite than a shape: a kind of visible movement, dark slipping through dark.

  ‘It’s me,’ I whispered croakily.

  There wasn’t any reply. I didn’t think it was Eva any more.

  In the fast beating of my blood
I began to think of all the wild things I knew; of the bears and the wolves and the wolverines; and then of the ones I’d only imagined: the sasquatches and the windigos and the little people of the forest. My mother had been right. Nothing in nature was fixed. It was forever half-sculpted. Why shouldn’t it contain spirits and beings and monsters; creatures of older worlds; creatures of worlds that hadn’t yet been or become?

  ‘It’s me,’ I repeated. My voice felt as small and weak and wavering as a candle flame.

  But by now the figure had begun to take on more definite dimensions and forms. They were reassuringly small. It was Oskar. He was almost directly abreast of me. I could just about make out his face. He was looking from side to side but when his eyes passed over me there was no hint of recognition, or even any acknowledgement I was there. We were only a foot apart.

  ‘Sisko,’ he mumbled as he walked past.

  And I knew to keep quiet.

  Oskar was looking for his sister. It happened sometimes – always at night – and had done ever since I’d been coming to the lake. The first time I’d encountered him like this I’d been with my parents. There’d been a full moon and the three of us had walked up to tracks so we could get a better view of it reflected in the lake.

  ‘Doesn’t everything look different,’ my mother (who loved such nights) had said.

  It did. The silvery light had altered the most familiar shapes and features. The islands in the bay seemed, un-anchored from the day, to float back and forth across the mouth of the bay. Trees and branches had been spread and twisted into new canopies. Even the season seemed confused and uncertain, as if a covering of frost had slipped out of winter and found its way into the warm summer’s night.

  We were close to Mrs Molson’s house – which was still standing back then, its white paint glimmering coldly and solidly like marble – when we saw a small figure emerge from the shadows at its side like some elf or dwarf sneaking out of a midnight kitchen.

  ‘It’s Oskar,’ I’d said.

  ‘Good evening,’ my father called out to him. ‘What a beautiful night!’

  My mother had instantly shushed both me and my bemused father.

  ‘Leave him be,’ she’d whispered. ‘He’s looking.’

  ‘For what?’ my father had asked.

  She’d put her finger to her lips.

  Later, when we were back in the cabin, she told us that when Oskar had been a child he’d had a sister. They’d lived with their parents – who’d emigrated from Finland – in the section house (this was before Mrs Molson had lived in it). Oskar’s father had been the section man. A section man was somebody who was allocated a certain section of the railway to watch over and maintain. For many years, Oskar’s father had assiduously tended to the stretch that looped around Sitting Down Lake – a fact which somehow made what happened worse. How exactly it had happened nobody knew, even my grandfather hadn’t been certain, but the sister had been hit and killed by a train. What was known was that it was Oskar who’d found her. Afterwards, the parents moved away to another section of the railroad, taking him with them. But later, in fact almost as soon as he was old enough and able to, he’d returned.

  Whether he was sleepwalking, or in some kind of reverie, or just very drunk, I don’t know, but after these episodes you’d often find him lying unconscious in random places around the lake, though never more than a few hundred yards from the tracks. At various times I’d found him in one of the wannigans, behind the Toad, and in Mrs Schneider’s garden. My mother had referred to these as his ‘nature sleeps’. She’d told us not to wake him. And if he happened to wake as we were passing we were not to ask any questions. How far he walked during these nights, I never knew.

  Once the sound of his footsteps on the chippings had receded I knelt down and pressed my ear against one of the tracks. It gave no relief to my skin. Not even this steel was cool. The train had passed some time ago but I still kept listening, hoping to catch some faint after-hum or tremor in the metal, some phantom reverberation.

  It was my mother who’d taught me to do this. Her one great fear while we were at the lake had been that I’d be hit by a train. Perhaps it had been inspired by the story of Oskar’s unfortunate sister. It wasn’t an entirely unfounded or irrational fear – the bends and rock cuts around the lake could conceal a train until the last second; the wind could easily carry away the sound of its engine and whistle – but it was, unusually for her, an exaggerated or disproportionate one. From early on, she’d impressed on me a sense of the tracks (a sense it took many years for me to dispel) as a dangerous and unpredictable place, a kind of grim conduit along which destruction and accident might abruptly intrude into the safety of our summers. As a precaution, she’d shown me how you could pick up the signs of an approaching train from miles away if you pressed your ear against the smoothed metal of the track and waited for the faint, tell-tale vibrations.

  How clearly I remember her first showing me this: the way she knelt on the chippings; the faded blue of her jeans; the tiny scar on the back of her neck, almost invisible against the white of her skin; the cascade of her hair falling over the silver of the track and the black of the cinders and seeming to give its colour to the iron ore pellets that had spilt from the rail trucks; the brows knotted in concentration; the way her lip lifted slightly to the right when she smiled at me; the long, soothing fingers; the freckles on the skin on the back of her hands. How clear it all is. And how opaque and inexplicable: this fear that the great disaster of our lives would come from far away, stalking unheard through the bush on ribbons of steel, when all along it must have been lurking there right beside me; something taking form unseen, even as we listened, in a crooked maze of synapses; the warmth of their small and myriad explosions something I could have reached out and almost touched and perhaps even felt.

  Prisoners

  ‘What did they do there?’ I asked.

  They were meant to be working lumber, Oskar told me. But they spent a lot of the time just playing cards, especially when it got cold. ‘Regular cards too – you know, rummy and crib, that sort of thing,’ he added, as though still surprised that Germans would be able to play them. He told me they sometimes asked him to join them in a game when he happened to be passing by. They must have craved new faces. And except for him nobody passed by.

  ‘There were two guards meant to be looking out for them but sometimes there was just the one,’ he said. ‘The other would go into town on a spree. Or sometimes both of them would. This was guard enough.’ He nodded, indicating everything around us.

  A gust of wind shuffled and bent the new reeds at the edges of the beaver pond. Their greenness, so feverishly bright when the sun was shining, had been dulled by the thunderheads above. The sky was big and wide enough to watch the storm circling around the horizon just a mile or two to the west of us. Most people would have landed and started looking for shelter but Oskar didn’t appear overly concerned. He was unusually garrulous. Maybe it was the storm. More likely it was the leeches. We’d done well so far. The amount we had in the totes must have been making him giddy. He’d already been drunk when we started out. I’d discovered him beside his woodpile and waited an hour for him to wake from his nature sleep.

  The place I’d found before had been a prisoner of war camp. Oskar told me there’d been about thirty German prisoners there. It’d been in operation for about two years.

  ‘It didn’t look like a prison to me,’ I said, gesturing towards the bush. The truth is I didn’t want it to have been a prison. I pictured barbed wire and watchtowers and searchlights; men with gaunt faces walking slowly around a perimeter; trees with no leaves; somewhere a dog snarling and barking. I didn’t want this forest, which I was slowly learning to love, to have been a prison. Couldn’t anything be just what it was?

  ‘It looked like a regular lumber camp,’ Oskar said. ‘That’s what it was before. That’s what it was after. And that’s what it was mostly like when they were in it too.’

&n
bsp; ‘But it was still a prison,’ I said despondently.

  ‘I guess so,’ Oskar said.

  ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘I’ll tell you, they didn’t all look like the supermen the papers made them out to be like back then. They looked like regular guys.’

  I was glad to hear it. I wanted them to look regular. The more regular they looked the less they would have been like prisoners.

  ‘Except they had these big red circles sewn onto the backs of their jackets and shirts,’ Oskar continued. ‘They used to joke about it. “How can we escape with these targets on our backs?” they’d say.’

  A flash of lightning lit up the lopsided tops of the white pines on the horizon. The far side of the pond burst into noisy droplets. A squall had sheared off from the main body of the storm and been flung carelessly in our direction, like the arm of a man turning over in troubled sleep. I wished we could land. I was beginning to feel like I had a target on my back. Oskar carried on checking and repositioning the traps. The leeches in the totes undulated like sunken black flags on miniature pirate ships, merging together now and then into thick, dark, sinuous tangles which were almost the size of my fist. The leeches were a great mystery to me.

  ‘Why change spots when we got so many in these?’ I asked anxiously. It was difficult to throw my voice over the seething din of rain. It was falling all around us now.

  ‘They move,’ Oskar shouted. ‘They change places when the water changes.’

  It had been raining when I’d first got up that morning. It’d drummed on the roof and dripped from the gutters. After offering me Red River Cereal and suggesting an extra sweater my father had quoted another line he’d remembered from the poem. ‘And all the air is filled with the pleasant noise of waters.’ Once again, he’d appeared extremely pleased with himself for remembering it. I’d hoped he’d stay that way all day. Being pleased or happy had for many years been a precarious condition for him; it often presaged him toppling into an opposite one.