After about a minute Judith said, ‘You should have some of these. For your supper,’ and started frantically picking unready leaves of chard and spinach. Some of them were only a few inches high.
My father spent a long time standing exactly where he was, and Judith had destroyed a good portion of her mother’s greens, before he finally said, ‘Why don’t you join us?’ Hastily adding ‘…and your mother too.’
‘Thank you. I’d love to,’ Judith said. She didn’t mention her mother.
After we’d eaten on the porch my father went into the kitchen to make coffee and started worrying about our cups. I knew he was worrying about them because I could hear him banging crockery as he looked for others, which he knew as well as I did we didn’t have. Most of the crockery – like most of the stuff in the cabin – we’d inherited from my grandfather (or rather we’d kept it pretty much as he’d left it). My grandfather had been a keen sportsman and so a great number of our household goods and decorations were themed around fish and game, which delighted me but which my father must have just that second realised he felt slightly embarrassed about (especially considering that Judith was a biologist). There were prints of grouse and pheasants on the walls. An illustrated woodcut of the fisherman’s prayer sat on the wall by the door, beside the empty gun rack. A yellow plaque engraved with ‘Biggest Lake Trout 1937’ took pride of place over the stone fireplace. Every one of our cups was illustrated with a different species of duck.
My father, figuring on safety in numbers, brought a selection in with the coffee pot.
‘Any preference?’ he asked.
‘I’ll have a mallard,’ Judith said. ‘I’m just a simple girl – none of your fancy ducks for me.’
My father broke out into his goofy, lopsided smile and I excused myself, saying I was going out to hunt for toads.
I hadn’t really gone out toad hunting for about five years. As a child it’d been one of my favourite pursuits. As soon as it was dark I’d head out and collect as many as I could in a bucket and then release them outside our cabin. I’d been told they protected us from the bugs.
The day was long gone and there was no moon and outside, beyond the light that spilled out from the porch windows, everything was dark. As I shuffled through it towards the dock I was amazed at how nonchalantly I’d once scoured this shore, alone, with only a flashlight and my bucket. I’d not been afraid of the night back then, though now I often felt unsettled by it, as though it were full of spirits of one sort or another – good and bad both.
A light flared on the end of the dock. For a second my heart began to jump and I stepped quickly back into the illuminated space in front of the cabin. But then the light settled into a small orange disc and I could smell the acrid, and now familiar, scent of a green death.
‘Nothing to see out here,’ Eva said. She must have been watching me since I’d come out the door. I didn’t know how long she’d been standing on our dock.
I watched as the cigarette end bobbed its way to the edge of the spilled light, until I could make out the pale oval of her face. Her black wig merged into the darkness behind, making it look as though it were a vast cowl. Her eyes were shiny, like those of wild animals caught by headlights on the sides of highways.
‘I see you gentlemen have lured a lady into your abode,’ she said quietly in her southern accent.
‘That’s Judith,’ I whispered. ‘She’s Mrs Schneider’s daughter. She’s divorced.’
‘Jesus, Zachary, I know who it is. We’re in Sitting Down Lake; population: seven. She’d be kind of hard to miss, don’t you think.’
Without saying anything more we moved further down the shoreline. Away from the light you could barely see a few inches in front of your nose. I followed the tip of Eva’s cigarette. When we stopped I turned around and the windows of the porch were like a film screen in a dark cinema or one of those guy’s paintings where you’re looking into rooms from the outside. Judith was looking at the other cups. My father’s elbows were propped on the table where they couldn’t do any damage. He was laughing.
It was easier to ask Eva things now I couldn’t see her face. I could hear the low, banjo thrum of green frogs. The air was humming with invisible insects.
‘What happened with Lamar?’ I asked.
‘He never said anything. He went and sat in the cabin of his boat,’ Eva said. ‘Actually, he’s still sitting in the cabin of his boat. If he could, I think he’d sail it the hell out of Dodge. I shouldn’t have said all that stuff.’
‘You can stay here with us,’ I said. ‘If you don’t want to go back.’
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘He’s okay, you know. He’s weird but he’s not dangerous weird or anything. He was being weird in a kind sort of way, if that makes sense. All that lighthouse and car and boat shit, he did it for me. I think he honestly thought it’d be good for me – for the both of us. That it’d take us back to happier times. And you know what? Whatever Lamar is, he’s all I’ve really got.’
And then we stood there for a while, silently, as though our voices had been gulped down by the frogs and toads.
‘I watched you guys eating,’ Eva finally said.
‘It was nice,’ she said. I thought she might be joking or being sarcastic but she wasn’t. Her voice was sad, like I’d never heard it be before.
‘It was really nice,’ she said.
The New Burn
I woke up late in the morning to the smell of smoke. At first I thought my father must have lit a fire but the night had been a warm one, so warm I’d kicked off my blankets and drenched my pillow with sweat. And then I thought of forest fires and Mrs Molson’s house and the cruel, cinder-black finger of the burn and found that my limbs were momentarily useless, as if I’d not woken properly at all and was still half-caught in the paralysis of a dream.
‘Zachary,’ a voice called from outside my window. ‘Zachary, you better get up.’ It was my father’s voice.
When I did manage to get up I found him outside the porch in his old-fashioned night gown (he was the only man I can ever remember wearing one), pacing up and down the shore and sniffing the air. He looked like an illustration of Scrooge arguing with his ghosts. Every few yards he’d stop and stamp the ground angrily with his foot, as though the smoke were his fault. I think by then he’d come to see calamity as directly correlated to his own happiness; that the moment he actually felt some it would strike. I think he thought he had brought a forest fire down upon us.
Before going to bed I’d read his book of quotations and found an excerpt from Thomson newly written there. It was different from the others. It was about winter (and not about how it froze your supplies or killed your sled dogs or gave you frostbite).
‘A curious formation now takes place called Rime, of extreme thinness, adhering to the trees, willows and everything it can fasten on, it’s beautiful, clear, spangles forming flowers of every shape, of a most brilliant appearance, and the sun shining on them makes them too dazzling to the sight. The lower the ground, the larger is the leaf, and the flower; this brilliant Rime can only be formed in calm clear weather and a gale of wind sweeps away all this magic scenery, to be reformed on calm days; it appears to be formed of frozen dew.’
My father made me stand on the end of the dock as he sniffed and stomped. As it turned out, I had a much clearer view of what was happening. There was no tell-tale haze on the horizon, or any other sign of a forest fire. The smoke was spiralling up in single columns and had only one origin.
‘It’s Butterfly Creek,’ I shouted.
At first my father didn’t want me to go but there was no stopping me and so he relented and we approached Butterfly Creek together by way of the tracks.
Mrs Schneider and Judith were already standing by the culvert.
‘All of it,’ Mrs Schneider exclaimed, gesturing towards Lamar’s place with a single upturned palm.
‘It doesn’t look good, John,’ Judith said to my father.
It didn’t. Fr
om the culvert, through the cattails, you could see the deck of the boat had become a floating cradle of flames, like a ship in a Viking funeral. Its double shimmered beneath it, gently rocking in the serene, almost un-rippled, water of the creek.
The fire had worked quickly. The unfinished lighthouse tower was already a circle of smouldering ash; while beyond it the flames were rising up out of the collapsing roof of the main cabin. The still, morning air was heavy with the scent of burning pine and another, more acrid smell, that even from a distance stung the back of my throat. Almost as an afterthought I glanced over towards where the Oldsmobile had been parked: a thick, black smoke was billowing out from its broken windows.
‘Did you see them?’ my father asked.
‘All of it,’ Mrs Schneider repeated.
‘I don’t know,’ Judith said, flustered. ‘We just got here. We haven’t seen anyone. I don’t think we saw anyone.’
‘Nobody?’
‘No, nobody.’
Before I knew it my father was up to his thighs in the cattails and goose shit, wading down the creek towards the cabin. And I was following him.
We’d gone no more than a few feet before he noticed me.
‘Go back,’ he said, wheeling around and almost losing his balance and falling.
I stood exactly where I was, like a dog pretending not to hear a command. My father took several deep breaths and tried to sound calm and reasonable.
‘You can’t come, Zack, it’s not safe. Go back to the tracks.’
I didn’t move an inch. I wasn’t going to leave him.
He looked over at the cabin and then at me several times in quick succession. ‘Go back,’ he said, all his forced composure gone. ‘Go back,’ he kept saying, flapping his arms awkwardly from side to side. He looked like an outraged heron.
How long we might have stayed fixed in these positions, I don’t know. We’d been in them for at least a minute or two when we realised Judith was shouting at us. ‘There’s somebody coming,’ she was shouting, pointing down the tracks.
They’d already rounded the bend and passed the burn by the time we’d got back up onto the tracks. My father and Judith squinted to see who it was. Mrs Schneider was still transfixed by the fire and hardly turned her head. I only needed to see the shuffling, slightly sideways footsteps to know.
‘It’s Oskar,’ I told them.
‘There’s nobody in there,’ he said as soon as he reached us, as though he’d known what our first question would be.
‘Are you sure?’ my father asked.
‘As sure as I’m standing here I’m sure.’
My father and Judith looked less reassured than they might have been. Oskar didn’t appear one hundred per cent sure of where he was standing. His eyes were badly bloodshot and his hands and legs were shaking. You could smell the whiskey over the smoke.
‘Where are they, Oskar?’ Judith asked.
‘Now that I can’t be sure of. But I can tell you for certain they’re not in those buildings or on that boat.’
‘But…’ my father began. He’d obviously been about to ask Oskar how he was certain but had stopped himself. He must have been thinking what I was thinking: that Oskar had seen something happen; that he’d been somewhere close by after one of his nature sleeps; that it would be rude and unkind to make him explain this.
Oskar shuffled over to stand beside Mrs Schneider and together they stared at the fire. As he’d got closer I’d seen Mrs Schneider subtly stiffen and straighten her back. It was her usual reaction to him and what she referred to – if she referred to them at all – as ‘his difficulties.’ She’d had many decades to master the polite and tolerant disapproval that allows small places to function. I’m not sure if Oskar had ever noticed it, or if he secretly enjoyed provoking it. They stood there together for some time before we left. Mrs Schneider looking like she was watching the cities of the plain burn; Oskar looking like he’d just come from them.
There was a phone nailed to one of the electricity poles near where the station house had been. You could, in theory, use it to make emergency calls. Nobody had tried using it in several years. When my father picked up the receiver to phone the fire station and police the cord broke.
‘I guess I better drive in,’ he said, still holding the receiver in his hand, the snapped cord dangling beneath it. ‘You should come with me,’ he said, waving the receiver and its cord in front of us.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Mrs Schneider said, backing away from the cord.
‘It’s fine, John,’ Judith said. ‘It’s not spreading. We’ll be fine here.’
He told me to keep away from the fire. He told everybody to stay away from the fire and then got into his truck and drove off. Judith and Mrs Schneider walked back to their cabin. Two minutes later I heard the truck on the road and my father reappeared.
‘You should come,’ he said.
‘I’m safe,’ I said. ‘I’ll be safe.’
‘Stay away from the fire,’ he said.
As soon as he was out of sight I turned around and walked straight back down the tracks. Oskar was still there, sitting on a fallen tree near the culvert. I sat down beside him and together we watched Lamar’s place burn.
Tablecloths
‘It was him that burnt it,’ Oskar said. One of the walls of the cabin had just fallen inwards and a cloud of sparks was rushing up into the sky. On the creek the boat continued to burn, but the flames had become patchy and intermittent. Despite everything it was still afloat.
As it turned out, my father and I had been right: Oskar had seen what’d happened. He’d woken up a few yards from where we were now sitting, he told me.
‘I knew something was odd the moment I opened my eyes,’ he said.
He said someone had put a table out on the grass in front of the cabin. Except it wasn’t just a table. He’d rubbed his eyes and sat up and made sure he really was awake before he’d taken a second look. The table was perfectly set. There were knives and forks and plates and glasses and a tablecloth. There was a candle holder. It looked like something from a restaurant, Oskar told me. It was six o’ clock in morning. The sun had only just come up.
It was Eva he’d seen first. She’d come out the front door holding a jug and put it on the table. Then she’d poured water into the glasses from the jug. Then she’d gone back to the cabin and started throwing pebbles up at Lamar’s bedroom window.
He was going to leave then, Oskar said. He didn’t want to be a snoop. But there were too many odd things happening. And he didn’t want to go until he knew all this was an okay kind of odd and not a dangerous kind. He didn’t want to go until he knew she was going to be okay; her and Lamar both.
For instance, he told me, she’d been dressed funny; in one of those tee-shirts kids wear – with a superhero on it. Spiderman or one of those, he hadn’t been sure. And it was way too small for her. The sleeves had barely come past her elbows.
After she’d thrown the pebbles Eva had walked over to the table and sat down on one of the two chairs, the one facing the cabin. She was smiling the whole time. Oskar said that when Lamar opened that front door and saw what was waiting for him it looked like his forehead was going to escape from his face and run off into the bush.
‘What colour was it?’ I asked.
Oskar looked at me, confused. ‘What colour was what?’
‘What colour was the tablecloth?’
‘The tablecloth?’
‘The tablecloth.’
‘I don’t know. It was blue maybe. I think it was blue.’
Lamar had stood there in the doorway for a good minute or two. And all the while Eva had continued smiling. ‘Like a simple person’s smile,’ Oskar said. She’d gestured to Lamar to come over and sit at the table. Eventually, he’d walked over – slowly, very slowly. Before sitting down he’d held the chair tightly and pressed it against the ground as though he suspected it might be a trick one.
And then they’d sat there, facing each other a
cross the table, as though they were having dinner in a restaurant, while the mist from the creek drifted over them and the beams of the newly risen sun split through it and glinted orange and golden on the water and lit up the trees. A couple of ducks flew right over their heads. Squirrels chided them from the edge of the woods. Silently, a raven settled in the topmost boughs of a pine.
After a few minutes they started speaking. Or rather, as far as Oskar could tell, it was mostly Eva speaking and Lamar nodding his head up and down, looking at her and not looking at her at the same time, as though he’d injured some part of himself and was afraid to examine it too closely. But despite the stillness of the morning Oskar couldn’t hear what she was saying. Not while she was speaking in normal tones.
And then her smile had finally broken and her voice had escaped out through the debris. It got louder and louder, until Oskar could hear it. ‘But it’s okay,’ Eva was saying. ‘We can do this. We can eat together. We can pretend like we’re there, Lamar. It can be like it was if you want it to be. I don’t mind. It can be like it was. It’s okay.’
Lamar’s head was nodding and his mouth was open. His lips seemed to be moving but Oskar couldn’t hear what he saying, if he was actually saying anything at all. His face was making it pretty clear that this wasn’t okay though. None of it was okay.
Lamar’s head nodded so low it fell right down onto the table. And when he lifted it back up it was as though he’d just woken. Oh shit, oh shit, he was saying. ‘I never could read lips,’ Oskar said. ‘But I could read those ones.’
By now Eva’s voice had risen to a shout.
‘This was your idea, Lamar. That boat, that car, that fucking lighthouse – it was yours.’
‘Oh shit, oh shit,’ said Lamar.
And then Eva’s voice had gone somewhere that was beyond even shouting.
‘I went there and I couldn’t find them, Lamar. I went there and I couldn’t fucking find them. I went there and I couldn’t…’
And then she was running away, along the road at first and then onto the tracks.
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