It wasn’t until I’d taken my initial steps into the water that it even occurred to me to be frightened or disturbed. But once I had taken them it was awful. The bottom of the swamp wasn’t solid; my feet plunged through rotting twigs and branches and the sludge of shed leaves and every slippery dead thing I could imagine. Putting my hand down into it was even worse.
The first thing I found was the blanket. The cribbage board was further out. The water was almost up to my thighs and I had to reach my arm in right up to my shoulder to seek it out with my fingers. It was while I was searching for the pancake griddle that I discovered the first of my mother’s sculptures.
To begin with I didn’t know what it was and it says something about what was down there on the bottom of the swamp that it was a sort of relief when I realised my fingers were brushing against bone. The first thing I recognised were the whittling marks: the moment I felt them I knew exactly what they were and who had made them. I carried the sculpture back to the shore, placed it on the blanket, and immediately waded out in search of another one.
How long I waded through that swamp I couldn’t say for sure, but in the end I must have looked like Eva had looked at Hummingbird Lake – and smelt far worse. What my fingers touched that night I don’t fully know and wouldn’t want to say. All I do know is that once I’d tired myself out there were four of my mother’s sculptures sitting on the wet blanket and I was slumped next to them like an exhausted head-hunter beside his trophies. I never recovered the pancake griddle.
It had been many years since I’d seen one of these sculptures, or even consciously thought of them, though in other ways they had always been there; staring at me from the edges of my thoughts – a pair of luminous and enigmatic eyes. Perhaps this accounted for the strange mixture of familiarity and bewilderment they inspired in me. As I said, I recognised each indentation, each chiselled curve, but at the same time I couldn’t tell which one was which; for instance, I had no clear memory of what wall they’d hung on, or what table they’d sat on, let alone of what they’d been meant to be.
For a long time I just sat there, picking them up one by one and running my hands over them. It was as though I’d forgotten where I was and what time it was and how I’d got there – all that had become suspended somewhere at the very back of my mind. And then it all began to come rushing back and it was intensified somehow, as though an invisible dial had been turned up. I was cold and shivery. The smell of the lilacs was so thick and heavy it was choking me. The sound of the frogs was loud, much too loud, until it was taut and bulged like the skin of their throats.
The whole night was swelling with it as I wrapped the sculptures in the blanket
I don’t really remember driving back. I only remember being aware the whole time of the bulging presence of the blanket on the seat beside me. It felt as though I was sitting next to a wriggling sack – precariously fastened and filled with some unknown animal or animals. When I got back to my room I put the cribbage board and the blanket and the sculptures in the dresser at the end of my bed. After a few sleepless hours I draped my spare blankets over the dresser. An hour later I wrapped the sleeping bag I used for camping around it. Then the blankets and sheets I was lying under. Then my winter coat and clothes.
And still I couldn’t sleep.
Lighthouses
‘Hello, ground control to Zachary Taylor,’ Eva said.
She was sitting on her bed, beside the window. I was staring at the photographs on her wall. I couldn’t stop staring. It was the type of hot, humid, fly-papery afternoon when your attention seems to catch and stick on the surface of things. It had been a long night and half the day had already been gone when I’d woken.
On the walk over to Butterfly Creek the air – rising up from the sun-baked cinders and chippings, from the long ribbons of rail – had wobbled and appeared (if air can do such a thing) to sweat. Even the sounds of the cicadas and crickets had been slurry and indefinite, sliding on notes that seemed to extend further and longer than they should, like somebody slowly rubbing the strings of a guitar with their finger. Along the verges the orange and yellow hawkweed had glowed like a thousand tiny heating lamps.
There was one photograph in particular my attention kept catching on. It was of an abandoned summer camp somewhere in the south of the province. At first glance you might not have noticed it was abandoned at all; it showed a clearing at the edge of a lake surrounded by maples, amongst which nestled six neat, square cabins. A wooden dock protruded out into the water and behind it on the shore was a small field that had probably been used for sports of one type or another. If you looked very closely you could just about make out a baseball bat, flung carelessly into the grass beyond a possible first base. There were still clotheslines hanging between the trees outside the cabins, waiting for towels and bathing suits. It would have been easy to imagine the whole place was simply awaiting the arrival of the children and counsellors for the summer, or for them to return from some group excursion. But that closer look also revealed several unmistakable signs of dereliction. The grass had grown high above the dry earth, once pounded smooth and bare by running shoes and heels. Saplings had taken root. The dock had been twisted and splintered by the winter ice; while beside it, on a narrow strip of sand, were the ribs of a mouldering canoe. The cheery red paint on the door and window frames had faded to a dull orange and was flaking like rust.
‘Jesus,’ Eva said, getting up and standing between me and the wall, ‘where have you been?’
‘I was just looking at them,’ I said.
‘You’re always just looking at stuff,’ she said impatiently. ‘And you don’t see anything.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘Like what?’
‘Like that,’ she said, turning and pointing out the window.
Outside, Lamar was hammering some boards onto the frame he’d been building earlier, the one I’d thought had been a new no trespassing sign. I’d walked past him on my way in. We’d nodded at each other and then I’d carefully examined the ground and he’d started looking for some suddenly crucial thing in his nail bucket.
‘You know what he’s building, don’t you?’
I didn’t know. I was used to minding my own business where Lamar was concerned. It was the polite thing to do for people who preferred to be left alone.
‘A new outhouse?’
Eva looked at me as though I’d just announced the world was triangular.
‘It’s a lighthouse.’
I looked at her the same way.
‘A lighthouse,’ I said, and then couldn’t think of anything else to add. ‘It’s a bit small for a lighthouse.’
‘Jesus H Christ, Zachary. He can hardly build one the exact same size, can he?’
I glanced back out the open window. Waves of heat were wobbling up and down along the banks of the creek, creating a shimmery illusion of movement. The bow of Lamar’s boat seemed to rise and fall on the water, as though it were bobbing in a sea swell. From the surrounding reeds and rushes came the darkly wet, slightly fishy, smell of a swamp. Lamar continued to hammer away, apparently oblivious to the swarm of deerflies that was orbiting madly around his head like a solar system whose physics had gone kaput.
‘The same size as what?’ I finally asked.
‘As the one in his pictures, dummy.’
We walked out into the main room. Once I knew what I was looking for I saw it pretty quickly. The boat I recognised instantly. It was moored on a small quay beside some grey timbered fish sheds. You could see it to the left of the shark. Of course, it couldn’t have been the exact same boat, but it was the exact same kind of boat. Even the colours were the same.
‘And the car,’ Eva prompted.
I looked at another of the photographs, the one with the family standing beside their car. Yes, I could see that too now: the car was a blue Oldsmobile. On the opposite wall the animals stared blankly ahead with their shiny eyes, as though caught in its headlights.
‘
And the lighthouse.’
That was more difficult. In the photographs a tall, white tower sat on a slab of bare rock, topped by a red lantern room and roof. Whatever Lamar was building he had a long way to go, even to create it in miniature. But the basic shape was there. There was no mistaking it.
‘Can you see now?’ Eva said.
When we were back in her room, Eva told me all of the photographs were from the holiday they’d gone on the year before her parents had died. They’d spent a week at Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia.
‘Ever since I came to stay here it’s all he talks about,’ she said. ‘And the way he talks about it you’d think it was last year we went, or last week, and we were all planning on going back.’
She told me it was the same as any holiday you went on as a kid: some things stood out, others weren’t that clear; big chunks were just forgotten. She remembered the shark and the lighthouse and the boat trip and the sea. But her uncle remembered everything.
‘One day he started going on about a hat my mom had worn on a beach down the coast, and how a breeze had blown it off. It was twenty-one degrees out and the breeze was a gentle easterly, he says. I mean, who remembers shit like that!’
As she spoke, Eva moved over to her bed and sat on it. She drew her knees up in front of her and started rubbing the bare patch beneath her ear so hard I was worried the skin might break and bleed again. Through the window I could hear the thunk thunk thunk of Lamar’s hammer.
‘I don’t know. To him it was like this perfect trip and everything needed to be witnessed and noted like it was important, like he might be putting it into a book in the bible. So that day on the boat: I remember him and my dad catching some cod and mackerel and that in the evening we ate lobsters in a restaurant. But my uncle remembers exactly how many fish were caught. He remembers which frigging table we sat at. He remembers the waitress was wearing a blue and white check apron.’
‘And then all those photos on the wall,’ Eva said. ‘And the boat, and the car. And now that fucking lighthouse. It’s weird.’
It was, I thought. But a lot of stuff could seem that way. Eva’s hair and clothes could seem weird. My father’s explorer quotes could seem weird. Oskar’s skulls could. It could all seem weird if you only saw the shapes and pieces. A deer could look like a unicorn if you only saw the tip of its antler. I was feeling quite philosophical after my day with Oskar and sitting under the Toad.
‘Maybe he wants to remember it because of what happened afterwards,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘And those things are just a way to help him.’
Eva had got up from the bed.
‘Oh, and who’s the big thinker now.’
‘I’m just saying…’
‘You’re just saying shit…’
Her ‘s’s had begun to slur as though she were suddenly drunk. She’d started pacing back and forth in front of the window and her eyes had that same glazed and quizzical expression they’d had at the un-named water body. It was like the way you could sometimes sense the weather was about to shift from looking at the surface of the lake.
‘Jesus H frigging fucking Christ!’ she spat out. ‘Oh, it was so perfect and the waitress was wearing a blue and white check apron and your mother said the lobster’s eyes were scary and everyone was making a joke about what you could see see see …’
I knew she wasn’t speaking to me anymore. I doubted I was even really there. Instinctively, I tried to get myself between her and the window.
‘But it wasn’t all happy like that. He remembers nothing. He remembers jack shit.’
I managed to slide myself onto the sill. Outside, beyond the thunk thunking of the hammer, I could hear the slow chirrup of crickets in the humid air. They had the same wet, slurry edges as Eva’s ‘s’s.
‘I remember exactly how I felt in that restaurant,’ she said. ‘I was bored and I was as pissed as vinegar. My parents had been fighting the whole time we’d been getting ready to go to the place. My mom had been saying why do we have to go everywhere with Lamar? Why can’t we have a family holiday on our own just once? And my dad was saying what was the big deal, we always went with Lamar. He was our family too. And my mom was saying that wasn’t the point, not at all, and that next year we changed things. And dad was saying but next year was already arranged. And mom was saying the year after that then. Just one frigging holiday, she said. It’d be good for us and it wasn’t going to kill him. And then we were in the restaurant putting on our smiles for Lamar and the waitress and everybody else and his lobster, and making fucking jokes about the see see SEE …’
The first two sees were slurred right into my face. The final one was shouted out of the window. It seemed to combine with the cricket song, as though it were an amplification of it. Lamar put down his hammer. Eva shoved past me and leant out the window.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ she shouted.
We were just close enough to see Lamar’s eyebrows begin to twitch.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ she repeated. ‘It wasn’t. Just like that fucking boat isn’t the fucking boat and that lighthouse isn’t a fucking lighthouse and those fish and animals on your walls aren’t fish and fucking animals!’
By now Eva was leaning halfway out of the window and Lamar’s eyebrows were writhing on his forehead.
‘You know what,’ she shouted. ‘They didn’t even want you there. Did you know that? They didn’t even want you there!’ Then she paused, as if gathering extra breath.
‘If it wasn’t for you and your perfect fucking holidays they’d be alive,’ she shouted. ‘Have you ever thought about that, Lamar? Have you ever thought about THAT!’
Lamar didn’t say anything. He just bowed his head and stared at the ground.
I don’t remember leaving Butterfly Creek that day. What I do remember is that I didn’t go straight home. Instead, I followed the tracks out towards Wannigan Bay. I guess I’d wanted to try to lose myself in the still quiet of the underwater; to watch the pike hover at the edge of the weeds and forget everything else. But I never arrived there. All I could think about as I walked was the photograph of the summer camp and that brief moment when I’d first looked at it and thought maybe I’d been wrong about it being another of Eva’s ruins; that maybe a bunch of canoes laden with singing children was about to pull up to the dock and the field fill with bare feet and the bat to knock a ball out into centre field. But it was only the photograph’s trick – to create that moment, that merest second of suspension; a poised fraction of time and space where everything was possible and nothing had happened yet; where portents and signs and omens could mean anything, even their opposite; where a door could be closed if you wanted it to be closed; or if it was ajar and you’d slipped away from the police officer’s grasp to look through it, then what you saw could mean something else entirely: there it would all be – a cigarette butt in the ashtray, the mirror fogged with steam, the scent of soap and perfume in the air – and the person who left them, the person who was staring at you with the too still and too big eyes, would be able to see you and would be able to hear what you shouted out to them and would be always and forever about to lift themselves out from the water.
And then I sat down beside the tracks and wept.
Gardens
When I finally did get back home I found my father helping Judith in her mother’s vegetable garden. It wasn’t something I was expecting to find and so I paused for a while, out of sight behind a red pine. I wasn’t sure what I thought about this. Mrs Schneider was nowhere to be seen.
My father was tying lines of string onto bamboo poles for the snap peas to grow onto. They’d already grown almost unfeasibly high and he needed his full reach to get above them.
It was the same with the rest of Mrs Schneider’s garden. Everything bulged and sprouted and swelled in remarkable proportions and abundance. Here, on the thin, meagre soil of the shield, there was a hint of the miraculous about it; and for me, the scion of failed farmers, this garden had always been something o
f a marvel. Mrs Schneider had the greenest thumb I knew and seeing her daughter in her garden I couldn’t help imagining her as the product of this same fructifying touch. I began looking at her in the same way you might an unusually large squash or carrot.
My father, after his first efforts at the swamp house, hadn’t been near a seed, let alone a garden. But he appeared comfortable enough in this one. He was wearing a green bug hat and his face was half hidden behind its mesh. As he fumbled with the strings for the snap peas he looked like a huge stick insect standing on its back legs and trying to roll a cigarette. His voice, coming through the mesh, was just audible from where I stood.
He was telling Judith about the 1858 Cayley-Galt tariff act. Somewhat to my astonishment, she asked a question about it.
I loitered a few more minutes and realised that what I was thinking was that it was okay. It was fine. When I stepped out from behind the red pine they both greeted me with loud, overly effusive voices.
We all stood awkwardly in the shadow of the snap peas for a second or two before my father started tying and retying their strings and Judith began showing me everything in the garden as though it were a species of exotic flora. Look, she’d say, see how the chard’s coming up nicely here. Isn’t the spinach doing great? See, the tomatoes should be good this year. After she’d finished showing me everything she stood up straight and pushed back her shoulders.
The sun was dipping down towards the edge of the second island and as the light faded the noise of mosquitoes began swelling. At this time of the year my father and I didn’t eat supper at any set hour; we’d usually just wait until both of us were hungry. (My father didn’t see the need for routines if they weren’t connected to anything. Outside of the school year we lived pretty much like college students.) So I was surprised when he suddenly announced it was our supper time. He announced it … and then stood exactly where he was, as if his feet were set in cement. The stalks of several snap peas fell away from the string.
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