by Howard Engel
“Dalt, it was covered with a tarp. You put it there yourself.”
“Tarp is it? We’ll be lucky to see tarp or cement again. Did you not see the water in the parking lot, woman? They’ve had a dousing here, and we’ve had the same thing over the water. Where is Joan, Lloyd? We’ve got to be getting across.” He had a lined face that turned small worries into big ones. He pulled his nor’wester hat from his head and slapped it against his leg and then over the back of a chair, like it was still his own. At this moment, wearing her yellow boots and carrying a Coleman lantern, Joan came in with two men no taller than she was. The two men slipped along the wall and melted away into the shadows.
“I thought that was you, Dalt. Hi, Peg. Did you see our new lake?”
“We had a flat on Highway 37, Joan, and the tire was brand new.”
“You’ll lose that bit of road if it’s not attended to, girl.”
“I know. That’s what I’ve been talking to Aeneas about. Damned beavers!”
“I’ve seen a twenty-foot section of good road washed away like that. And this is only sand and gravel. You’d better hop to it. You need that husband of yours up here at a time like this, doesn’t she, Peg?”
“Joan does just fine, just fine. And don’t scare her. Aeneas won’t see her stranded.”
“She’ll get more than a scare if it washes out, lass. We can always go home overland by our own road. I’m just talking for her own good.”
“You usually are, Dalt.” That was a voice from the card game—Mrs. McCord, without even looking up. The two men who’d come in with Joan were pouring themselves coffee silently.
“There’s a new country heard from,” said Daft, and sniffed. “Let’s get the things out of the car now so we can get on with loading the boat. It’ll be late enough by the time we get to the point”
“You won’t stop for tea, Dalt? Peg?”
“Well …”
“Lass, you know we’d best be about our business. Thanks all the same, Joan. Another time. Aeneas,” he called to the men at the coffee urn, “will you lend a hand?” Dalt Rimmer fitted his rain hat over his sparse nest of fading red hair. Peg followed him through the door with the dark man in faded jeans at her heels. The big car was parked on the soft grass margin in front of the Annex. When the doors opened, the Cadillac lit up like a Chinese lantern, and Dalt and Aeneas got busy shifting cardboard cartons around. They each carried one into Joan’s cabin, squishing their way through the damp mud and gravel. Peg thanked Aeneas, and Dalt told him that the two of them could manage the rest of the work. He drove the car down to the dock, where Dalt stripped the tarp from the cruiser, while Peg began loading smaller, more compact boxes.
“Hell,” Joan said, looking at the ruts the Cadillac had left in her sodden lawn. I grinned and shrugged, and Joan introduced me to Aeneas, who tried to slip quietly back into the Annex.
“You are the steady fisherman,” Aeneas observed. “I’ve seen you in the tin fish near the senator’s.” I didn’t know what he meant, and I’d certainly not seen him, so I just nodded and asked him a fishing question. “The water is shallow between the islands. The lake trout stay in the shallow water with the island between them and the sun. You have found a good place to fish. But there are other places. Fish the shadows.”
Back inside, the card game continued. Maggie McCord had another stack of tricks in front of her and Cissy looked like she was breathing “Oh dear” to herself. I hovered nearby, partly watching the game, partly watching the fire and just about everything else in the room. Aeneas had gone back to sit out of the light with the fellow he’d come in with. I was about to go over and find out if they’d met the tenant of the Woodward place, when Joan grabbed my arm and dragged me over to the card players.
“I don’t want to break up the party, but I don’t think you have met our new guest, Mr. Cooperman. Benny, I think you know Cissy Pearcy. This is Maggie McCord and her son, George.” George was playing dummy and looked like the casting suited him. “Benny’s becoming an enthusiastic fisherman, isn’t he, David?” Kipp nodded good-humouredly. We’d talked bait on the dock.
“Unfortunately, it’s easier to catch enthusiasm than lake trout,” I said after acknowledging the how-do-you-dos.
“You’re from Toronto, Mr. Cooperman?” asked Mrs. McCord.
“Grantham. Please call me Benny.”
“That’s across the lake, near the Falls, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s three exits off the Queen Elizabeth Way, exactly eleven miles from the Falls.”
“Well, I hope they teach you to play bridge in Grantham. We could use an infusion of new blood.”
“That’s transfusion, isn’t it?” asked Cissy.
“Whichever, I’ll try to be a donor when needed.”
Sometimes I sound so phoney to myself I want to bring up. Next time I’ll tell them it’s a pity I didn’t bring my polo pony. George was the only one who caught the hollowness of what I’d said, giving me a dismissing look and rubbing his fleshy nose with the inside of his thumb.
“Joan,” he said, “when are you going to start stocking some beer? I swear I’m dying of thirst, and I’m too lazy to walk the quarter-mile back to my place.”
“I can’t sell it, George. You know that as well as I do. I haven’t got a licence yet. We’re working on it.”
“Haw! That didn’t stop old Wayne Trask, did it, Ma?”
“You hush up, George, and watch your cards.” George curled his lip like Raymond Massey and picked his cards up slowly from the table. Joan moved away from the game, and I followed her.
“Joan, I think I’ve swallowed everybody’s name now except for Aeneas’s friend and the couple by the wall talking to the bearskin.” Joan tilted her head in Silverthorne’s direction, caught my eye, then my nod.
“That’s Des Westmorland and Delia Alexander. He’s from Ottawa, she’s from Hull. They’re a nice quiet couple, just met by chance. I understand he recently lost his wife. Now, Benny, don’t try to turn them into suspects. Can you see either of them blowing up the neighbours?” I wasn’t buying surface appearances tonight or any other night. But Joan didn’t have to see my shopping list. She kept talking. “… And over there talking to Aeneas is his brother, Hector. He’s a teacher in Hatchway. They’re a part of the history of this place. They were here first. Aeneas sort of came with the lodge. He worked for the Rimmers when they owned it and for Wayne Trask after that. Trask was a nasty piece of goods; fought with everybody when he was sober. Aeneas’s ancestor is the Amable DuFond they named the river after. It’s hard to get Aeneas talking, but he has so many wonderful stories about the old logging days.” We sailed over to the abandoned old-fashioned record player where Aeneas and Hector were standing with their hands wrapped around their coffee mugs like it was mid-winter. Joan introduced me to Hector and his brothers, then left us to share the awkward pause that followed by ourselves. We all watched her put more birch logs on the fire and then replace the wire screen.
“I thought that there weren’t any private lodges inside Algonquin Park anymore.” Hector shared a smile with his brother, who hitched his gum to the other side of his mouth. This seemed as useful a way to get a conversation going as any, but for a moment it looked as though I’d made a blunder and they weren’t going to let me in on it. Then Hector decided to include me.
“Here you’ll find just about every sort of thing. There’s campers like Aeneas and there’s dispossessed former landowners like Lloyd and private places like Dalt Rimmer has on the point across the lake. We even have absentee landlords like all the best societies. I mean the Woodward place. Woodward hasn’t been seen in the park since before the Vietnam War. He’s an American senator.”
“But the place is rented?” I thought I wouldn’t chase away unexpected leads.
“Yes, there are lots of rented places. There are two on the other side of the second island and an empty place up near where the lake curves into a little hook.”
“There is a man th
ere,” said Aeneas. “I saw him today.”
“Well, there you are: the lake is full again this year.”
“But you haven’t answered the question. I thought that the park was provincial land and that—”
“The park was created ninety years ago,” said Hector, trying hard not to look like he was giving his set speech on the subject. “In that time the policy has changed every few years. At one time you could build a cabin. Now you can’t. They tried to get rid of the cabins that had been built. They wanted it, you know, a wilderness area. They want it all wilderness by the turn of the century. They keep getting reports made every dozen years, and the objectives change.
That’s how Lloyd lost his place, but Dalt Rimmer didn’t. Dalt’s timing was better, I guess. He wasn’t in with the lumber companies, and he isn’t a big supporter of the powers that be.” Hector smiled, a little embarrassed at catching himself on a soapbox. “The history of the park makes fascinating reading. Every time the policy changes down in Toronto, there are big changes up here. Aeneas is lucky he’s squatting for the summer. That counts as camping and the government can’t really discourage that.” Aeneas hadn’t said anything, but he nodded and watched the effect his brother’s words had on me.
Then his eye was on George, stretching to accommodate an enormous yawn. He’d left his chair at the card table and had just returned from outside. I could detect the outline of a flat bottle of whiskey in his shirt. His face was red with it. When he was like this, I automatically began to measure his reach and to keep well outside it when I could. He grabbed Joan from behind, and I started to feel like a Boy Scout. Luckily she could handle his bear-hug without making him angry. She peeled his big hand off her shoulder and unwound the unwanted arm, handing it back to him like she’d found a mislaid item belonging to George on her porch.
“Ah, Joan, don’t be cross with me. I was just being friendly. Hell, I ain’t no trouble.”
“That’s right, George, you’re a dream. Where were you when I needed my firewood cut?”
“I forgot about the firewood, Joan, I just forgot. I’ll help you with the beaver. I will.”
“All right, George, but Aeneas promised to do it in the morning. There’s still the wood. You know lots of ways to be helpful.” At the mention of Aeneas’s name, George began to turn about looking for him. He hitched up his trousers and headed in our direction. I decided that I needed more coffee and left just ahead of George’s strong breath. When I looked back, Hector was talking to David Kipp and George was standing closer to Aeneas than necessary. He was looking for a fight, but I couldn’t imagine him finding it talking to Aeneas, who held his ground and listened, with his head tilted gravely. Lloyd was still at the Victrola.
I’d lay right down and die …
Now Aeneas was talking and George’s big paw was on Aeneas’s arm. Hector was watching too, but before anything happened, Aeneas pulled away, saying just loudly enough for me to hear, “I do not like the man, but I will see him. What you do is wrong.”
“I’ll get you if you do!” Aeneas had a good moment then. He looked at George, from his messy engineer’s cap to the tangle of his shoelaces, and said:
“I don’t think so, George. You will not hurt me.”
The card game had now completely broken up. David Kipp went to the coffee urn. Cissy rejoined her husband, and Maggie McCord lifted her ample body out of her chair and moved it to the piano bench.
Maggie McCord must have been a very handsome woman in her day, but that was a long time ago. She glided about with that slowness of movement which to younger people looks like stateliness, but which is probably a question of joints. She was wearing a flowing, gauzy dress that flattered her figure by not adhering to it too specifically. It reminded me of the failing fire with oranges, reds, and yellows mixed in with darker hues. As she sat at the piano, looking down at the keys, her cascade of chins shivered. She brought the room to attention with a loud two-handed chord. The first was followed by a second with each note answering some message in the first. She made the old piano boom like a church organ. It sounded like an old hymn tune. The other guests put down their magazines and books as though Maggie McCord’s playing was itself a fearful summons. She played the verse through once, then started in again with everybody but me singing as if his life depended on it.
From Greenland’s icy mountains …
It made me feel peculiar. This wasn’t the north woods. This wasn’t keeping an eye on Norbert Patten. In fact, it sounded like the competition. Maybe if we sang loudly enough we could shake him up at the Woodward place. Then something funny started to happen. They were well into the hymn, and somehow it was reaching me. All those years at Grantham Collegiate hadn’t abandoned me. From some hidden depths inside, I could feel the words of the next verse bubbling up to the surface and coming out in an unsteady but loud baritone.
What though the spicy breezes
Blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle,
Though every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile
Mrs. McCord looked up from her many-ringed fingers to carry me forward into the next verse with an encouraging nod. Cissy Pearcy, at my elbow, shot me a conspiratorial smile. I felt I was there under false colours, but I didn’t know how to stop and the words kept coming to my lips just as I needed them. It was strange and a little frightening, as though the dark side of my brain had been salting these old words away without breathing a word. Now the game was up.
In vain with lavish kindness
The gifts of God are strown;
The heathen in his blindness
Bows down to wood and stone.
Nobody was going to take me for a heathen, not that night. They weren’t even going to take me for Jewish. What was a nice Jewish boy like me doing singing hymns? Was I just trying to fit in or what? Was it for this that my father had sent me to learn to read Hebrew? In school you have to make compromises, you either stand in the hall looking at sepia engravings of Queen Victoria or you join in with the singing. I had always hated the hall, and I liked singing. I didn’t see that I’d necessarily sold my birthright.
When Maggie got to the end of the first hymn, she launched into another, and here too I was able to join in. Join in? Hell, I led the band.
Brighten the corner where you are,
Brighten the corner where you are;
Someone far from harbour
You may guide across the bar,
Brighten the corner where you are.
That one I owed to Miss McDougall in grade five. Ray Thornton would remember her. She used to lead a fortyminute hymn-sing every morning, and we all joined in, Jew and Gentile alike, because we knew that oral arithmetic followed inevitably. I was glad I thought of Ray. It was Ray Thornton who’d sent me up here in the first place.
When the last great chords died out, we were standing there elbow to elbow, listening to the sound come back at us from the lake. And there, unmistakable, in the middle of all the other voices, I was singing my fool head off and enjoying every minute of it.
“Well, now; well now, Mr. Cooperman, you have a rare voice, indeed,” said Mrs. McCord when she surrendered her place at the piano to David Kipp. “Have you studied?”
“I’m afraid I’m just another shower baritone.”
“You’re too modest, Mr. Cooperman,” said Cissy Pearcy, handing me a mug of coffee I hadn’t asked for. “It’s a very true, pure sound, isn’t it, Maggie?”
“You’re turning the poor man beet red, Cissy. We both are. Come sit down by me, Mr. Cooperman, and enjoy the last of the fire. We all enjoy a little sing-song of an evening. It’s become quite the institution. Lloyd Pearcy doesn’t often join in. He thinks it’s sentimental. But we all like it. Good exercise for the lungs. We don’t have to talk about the spirit, do we?”
I sat down, and the coven hung about on both sides. It was my night to be a novelty. Tomorrow I’d be old hat, like the grinning bearskins hanging on the wall. Chris, the younger Kipp boy, an
nounced to the room that he and his father had sighted an Olive-sided Flycatcher. But they didn’t score any points for that. Music was still in the room, but now it sounded secular and rather French. You couldn’t sing along with David. But you could talk through it.
“David’s so competitive. He’s always trying to show me up. I always tell him that I can play loudly, and that’s my only virtue at the keyboard.”
“That’s Debussy, I think,” said Cissy, half turning it into a question. It was the way she had with most things. Do you play Mr. Cooperman?” I shook my head trying to show my profound regret.
“I like this bit,” said Maggie McCord, hooking the air with a finger, and we all listened. Maggie’s smile lasted into the next phrase and faded only when a loon far out in the lake added his own inane counter-tenor.
The rest of the evening consisted of more of the same, although we had done with the singing. George had disappeared after his argument with Aeneas; the Pearcys sat close to the fire; Roger and Chris, the Kipp kids, read National Geographic; their father held on to the piano bench, playing introspectively with his head hunched over the keys. The shifty couple, Des Westmorland and Delia Alexander, watched the rest of us with their backs to the log wall. Hector said good night at about ten-thirty and we listened to his car drive off in the direction of Hatchway. Aeneas was studying a map of the park which told the whole story, township by township. Without saying anything much he showed me where we were and then pointed to several spots not too far away. “Good lake trout,” he said. “Over here, splake. Up here in the west—walleye and pike.” I’d never heard of splake, but I thanked him for the tips.
At eleven o’clock it seemed that the generator suddenly got louder and then began to die away to nothing. At the same time the electric light slowly faded to black. Having stumbled home on the first night at the lodge, this time I had come prepared with a flashlight.
A small knot of us had moved outside the darkened Annex, where we were about to pronounce our good nights, when the trim figure of a strange brunette walked up the slope from the dock with a blanket over her arm and carrying a paddle. I could make out the shape of a canoe drawn up on the shore and rolled bottom up. The woman smiled as she passed us but made no attempt to join in.