by Howard Engel
I glanced over Berners’s dusty library: Klondike Fever, by Pierre Berton, North of the Opeongo, by Philip Armstrong Scott, Tombstone, by Walter Noble Burns, and Free Gold: The Story of Canadian Mining, by Arnold Hoffman. Holding up one end of the bed I found some Leacock, Dickens, and Sinclair Lewis. Further underneath and much nibbled, was A Pocket Guide to the Lake District, dated 1938. My first big discovery was a sheaf of letters, held together with a greasy piece of binder twine, from French and French, a law firm in Bancroft, Ontario, about some mining leases in the east half of Lot No. 12 in the 14th concession of Anglesea Township, County of Hastings, Province of Ontario. The letters traced a story beginning with the original claim (October 1959) and, moving through the fine print of date and hour of staking, date of recording, number of licence, I came to the name of the lessee, Richard Berners. It looked like he had done most of the manual work, including drilling, that was listed. In 1964, a new name appears: Wayne Trask, who gained a fifteen per cent interest in the project. A year later, he got another fifteen per cent. A year after that, Trask picked up another thirty per cent in two easy stages placed six months apart. French and French didn’t tell me what they were mining, but I found a clipping from The Globe and Mail about an abandoned ruby mine in the same county and in a neighbouring township. So, that’s what it was all about—rubies. But what did mining in Hastings in the 1960s have to do with what was going on now? I asked that question again when I found a cask of black powder and a dozen drill bits tied together with wire. A bottle marked nitric acid sat on the shelf next to an unmarked one that plainly contained mercury. They looked about as innocent as a pair of brass knuckles at a wedding. Mining is illegal inside the park. No known minerals of commercial value are to be found here. That’s why it’s a park. Find gold and the borders would bend fast enough.
And thinking back to the mid-sixties, who could our miners have been? Berners, of course, and Trask. They’d have still been in their prime. But there were other possibilities as well. Albert McCord didn’t sound like the type, but he knew the bush. George would have been in his twenties, and so would my chess partner at the Woodward place. Patten came back to Canada during the Vietnam War. I couldn’t actually picture him using black powder, but I couldn’t remove him from my list of suspects.
Berners was beginning to irk me. Here he was six months into glory and one of the cutest characters I’d run into in years. He merited close study. And I was enjoying getting to know him by sniffing around his stuff. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much more to go through. There were expected things like the rusty traps hanging on nails, the collection of axes, the beaten up 25-35 Winchester with a broken stock, and there were unexpected things like a copy of Great Expectations in the wood box beside the stove with the cover ripped off and half the pages torn out. Also among the accumulated fur-balls of the wood box I found newspapers with dates much more recent than six months ago. One was less than two weeks old. It had a section torn out of the front page. I made a note of the date of the Globe and the edition.
I found another cache of mouse-nibbled books. The one on top was Celebrated Criminal Cases, edited by C.L. Doran. That was my line of country. I flipped through it, looking at the faces I’d seen in other books, the drab dregs of criminality, lives at the ends of their tethers: John George Haigh, Constance Kent, Henry Jacoby, Heath and Hume, Mancini and Manuel, Madeleine Smith, Evelyn Dick, and Charley Peace. A classified index at the back divided them up into categories: Mass Murderers, Murder by Poisoning, Murder by Stabbing, Murder by Strangulation, Gang Murders, Sex Murders, Train and Trunk Murders. Ah, the English especially love their murderers. But why did Berners carry them around with him? I lost my grip on the mousey pages and when I picked it up again it fell open at a case that Berners had read more than once. The pages were dirty with fingermarks. I skimmed the history.
TAIT Adelaide
Twenty-one-year-old doctor’s daughter, who in 1926 was tried in Cornwall, Ontario, for the murder of her lover, twenty-eight-year-old printer Georges Ravoux.
The story told of how the daughter of a respected doctor fell in love with, wrote a ton of letters to, and eventually poisoned a young man who had a fine moustache and few prospects. The crunch came when the boy threatened to show the letters to the girl’s father. He claimed that they were already married in the eyes of God and he hoped to be able to win over Adelaide’s father, who, the letters claimed, was set against the match. It was a pathetic story. As soon as the young man returned to his lodgings after drinking hot milk with Adelaide, he began to feel the pains which in a few hours put him on a dissecting table. A fifth of an ounce of arsenic was found in his stomach, and Adelaide went on trial for her life at the assizes in Cornwall on January 30th, 1926. The account ended up with the following:
Because of contradictions in the toxicology evidence, and a witness’s statement that Ravoux was a known arsenic eater, the jury brought in a verdict of “Not Guilty” and the defendant was freed.
It was said at the time that it was her beauty that saved her from the gallows. Little is known of her later life. So on after the trial, she left Canada. It is believed that she went to live in Great Britain.
In the margin, Berners or somebody had written in pencil: Algonquin Park, Ontario, Canada.
My head needed clearing. I was dizzy with new information that I didn’t know how to evaluate. I thought I’d better take a walk. It was never too far from the cabin, and the path is usually well marked. From inside the cabin I brought the big flashlight and one of the axes as well. I wasn’t afraid of the dark. I didn’t need to prove my bravery to anybody. I found the path and worked my way up to it for about two hundred yards. From the black wall of the bush, I heard the crack of a snapping branch. Then, farther off, a twice-repeated four-note cry of a night bird. It was echoed about a quarter of a mile away. Crickets were singing like loose change in my pocket. The path went on and up.
There’s something monumental about an outhouse. It is unmistakable. I’ve heard that there have been octagonal outhouses; I’ve heard that there is a book devoted to outhouses down through the pages of history. Where on earth is there a building whose function is so perfectly suited to its form? The door opened outward. It was a one-holer. Just right for a hermit. The brown, unpainted two-by-fours that made up the door-frame on the inside were held up by spiderwebs. An ancient Eaton’s catalogue for the fall of 1956 afforded the only distraction. My light was powerful, and its beam pushed the darkness back wherever I shone it, the shadows moving out of the way like cockroaches running for cover.
I thought about old Dick again. All right: he was mining illegally here in the park. But where? Probably not far from here. I promised myself a good look-round in the morning. The old coot must have been laughing at everybody. He was sitting on a gold mine; if not literally gold, it amounted to the same thing. Okay, he mined the stuff: what did he do with it then? A new avenue to look down, when all I was being paid to look down was the view from my boat to the Woodward place. Something to check out on a long winter evening. Something else made a whooping noise and darted into and out of my flashlight beam with the rustling of wings that sounded like the expert shuffling cards.
From where I was, I could see, through the doorway, another of Berners’s odd pleasures. He’d built a rock garden to one side of the path. It was a built-up mound of rock and earth with tangles of roses grown wild. By moving the light, I could almost change my perspective, by forcing the shadows to move in ways that further described their relationship to the rocks behind. It was the first attempt at taming the natural beauty of the park I’d seen since leaving Joan Harbison’s half-drowned beds of petunias. Why up here, I wondered. Why not by the cabin? I was beginning to get a funny feeling behind my knees. I couldn’t define it at first, and then things started adding up. The rock garden was in the wrong place, there was something phoney about it. I left the outhouse to take a closer look. It wasn’t made of plastic; the flowers were real, and so were the dirt an
d the rocks. I looked at a few of these rocks—not your average everyday rounded stone from a creek bed or from the lake. No, these were rough, irregular, sharp fragments of hard stone, light-coloured on some faces, blackened on others. Blackened? Why blackened? I thought of the black powder in the house. Damn it! It came to me at last; this was the slag heap of Berners’s mine!
Using the axe, I began rearranging the landscaping. There were plenty of blackened rocks. Under one section, near the tapering off of the slope, I found a sheet of plywood covered with earth. I shifted it and found a tidy compressor and a drum of fuel nestling underneath. Hoses from the compressor went underground in the direction of the one-holer. I put the flashlight down so that I could follow where the tubes led with both hands. I could feel the old pump beating as I was clearly on the brink of a breakthrough. I heard a stick crack behind me, but I was too far gone to pay any attention. I should have taken a firm grip on that axe and turned around quick. But I didn’t, and in another second it didn’t matter. The last thing I noticed was that the light had shifted. It was coming from above me. Then the light was coming from in front of me and below me and inside of me. Light exploded. Then a dark hole opened up in the light, got bigger, and swallowed me whole. I didn’t feel the pain; I just heard it chirp behind my ear, and then I didn’t hear anything for a couple of years.
FIFTEEN
My next sensations were twisted and distorted colours at the edge of blackness, garish slashes of red and yellow like comic book illustrations, words like “Wow” and “Bang” inked in cartoon print, with letters shaded to show thickness, as though they were each carved out of stone. My cheek was resting on something gritty. I felt dirt in my mouth. Now the pain in my head was real. Somewhere I could hear the hollow thump-thump-thump of oars. No daylight penetrated my eyelids, but I kept them shut anyway. Water was lapping under my cheek. I could smell tar and rope.
When the sound of the thumping stopped, I felt a hand on my ankle. A rope was being passed around one leg. I was too far gone to figure out which one. Before I could take in the meaning—the possible purpose of taking a semi-conscious man for a boat-ride—I’d been lifted by smelly arms and dumped over the gunwales into the lake.
The chill of the water took away the headache, as the weighted rope pulled me down. Automatically, I began treading water with my hands. A new pain in my ears told me it wasn’t doing any good. That pain moved all the others off stage and jumped me from behind. There was a knife somewhere. I remembered it like remembering a birthday present from long ago. I had difficulty getting my hand into the wet pocket, but it was there. My eyes were open now, but they might as well have been closed for all the good they were to me. In my mind I could see the red penknife with its little white cross on it. I tried to open the blade with my teeth. I nearly dropped it. But I got it open. My first attempt at cutting the rope sent a spike of pain up my leg. I tried again, reaching for the rope at the weighted end. I could feel the pressure on my eyes now; my ears were screaming. Suddenly, the pull of the rope was gone, and I began to kick my way to the surface. My lungs were exploding inside me; my chest was yelling bloody murder.
I shot up out of the water, but without much splashing. The loudest noise was the one I made sucking in the friendly air. I’m sure that all the trees on the shore tipped in my direction. When I’d caught my breath, I listened. I could hear the thump-thump-thump of the oarlocks getting farther away. I couldn’t see the boat, and then I could. The rowing stopped and a beam of light sliced in my direction. I ducked under the surface again, until I saw the beam move away. When I came up, I’d swum about ten yards away from the spot I’d been in. The stern of the boat was about fifty feet away from me. The noise of the oars started again. The figure rowing was obscure. I kept treading water as I watched the boat get smaller. I closed the knife and put it back in my pocket before I lost it. The shore was a dark band between the comparative brightness of the water and the sky. There was no moon, and the stars had business on the other side of the clouds. The oars were echoing now, as the boat approached shore. I couldn’t make out what shore. From where I was floating, the lake looked round, and all the shores far off.
I started breast-stroking just to the right of where the boat sounds were coming from. The shore seemed miles away, but I tried not to panic, and the miles melted into something closer to reality. Swimming with your clothes on is a strange sensation. You feel the drag of the extra weight, but there is more to it than that. The clothing hits you in new ways and when you don’t expect it, a bit like being jostled in a crowd. I thought of getting rid of my shoes, but then I remembered how far I was from another pair. After the first shock of the water had subsided, it felt almost warm, as though it had been sucking up the heat of the day for me to use now. I couldn’t hear the boat any more. I paused and rested on my back for a minute, letting the sky drift in a circle overhead. I couldn’t hear a thing. I continued on my back, kicking out like a frog in loafers. Soon I saw a light. It looked to be coming from the cabin. I started off again aiming at a spot off to the right of the light. As I swam, my head began playing tricks with me: I got into rhyming games with words like right and light. My arms and feet were getting tired. I tried to talk sense to myself. I tried to stay calm. Soon I came under the shadow of the shore. The water was chillier, as though fed by underground springs. My head was light and my stroke became weaker, more pro forma. I kept up the act for another few minutes. The water looked dark and murky. I tried to feel for the bottom with my feet and on the third try, like Noah and the raven (or was it a dove?) I found my footing. Cotton-headed and looselimbed, I struggled ashore. The rocks were round and slimy, but I could see bushes and trees and beyond them I knew there were birds and bears and all manner of creeping things. Then, for the second time that day, the lights went out.
SIXTEEN
This time I heard flies. There were the little ones with a busy, somewhat shrill buzz, and the fat insistent whine of big flies with blue bodies. I felt the sun on the back of my neck and a pain in my foot. My head hurt top and bottom. From the air, I guess I must have looked like a casualty in a partisan landing operation. My head could move. It was on a boulder with a smear of blood on top. My blood. My extremities were still half in Little Crummock Lake, my right leg stretched tightly out behind me. I tried to pull it. It wouldn’t budge. Broken, damn it, I thought. Just what I needed.
The rest of me seemed fit enough. I wasn’t counting the noises and pains in my head; they were old news, except for the ones from the front. I tried the broken leg again, after rolling over. As I pulled, a line of splashing rope came out of the water at a tangent. The rope! I edged my way back to the water on my rump and tugged. The end of the rope was lodged between boulders. I tugged again and it came free. I played with the knot around the ankle while pins and needles attacked with a vengeance. I finally got it off and tried to stand up. My left leg was fine, ready for anything, but the other was wearing a beehive where my foot should have been.
I managed to crawl back from the shore and found a hiding place just behind the front rank of trees. All you had to do to disappear in the north was to stand two steps back from the shore. And there I sat, rubbing my foot, and trying to collect my wits. I had been followed from the lodge or I had been surprised by whomever had been working the mine since Berners’s death. I drew up a list of candidates. Judging from the lump at the back of my skull I was looking for a right-handed batter who knew how to hit just short of cracking my head open. I cursed myself for walking into that sort of trouble. I should always stop, look, and listen before I step out into traffic, even up here. I stripped off some of my clothes and tried to dry them off on a flat rock. My shoes were beyond hope, but that’s the way they’d been since I stepped out of the Olds into this mess.
Half an hour later my right leg was beginning to feel normal again. When I got up, it didn’t buckle and send me nose-first into the peppermint leaves of the forest. I tried on my semi-dry clothes. They were stiff with the
natural starch of lake water with a lot of sweat mixed into the mineral content. I kept to the shoreline, or as close as I could to it without giving myself away. The cabin lay around the curve of the bay, and I could see it when I was still half a mile off. I watched it from under some shady ferns for ten minutes without seeing anything. Nothing was stirring. I moved in closer. I felt like a character in a cowboy picture sneaking up on the cabin. It looked like a cabin in a movie, the sort of place the rustlers hide out in until they hear word that the coast is clear. I tried not to snap any twigs underfoot and was getting a good C average in soundless woodland pursuit. I should talk to the professors up at Secord University in Grantham about giving a course in SWP. I’d have to do better than passing though, first.
As I moved from one cover to the next, I found myself in a particularly good spot. The trouble was, it was too good. The ferns had been bent down, and the cedar sheltering the place had recently had a low-lying branch pulled off so that the cabin could be observed all the better. In the dead leaves and pine needles I found a wad of gum wrapped in a familiar wrapper. Another wad, not wrapped well enough this time, stuck on my shoe. Someone had spent half an hour or more watching the cabin from this shelter. I pocketed the well-wrapped wad and moved out.
I came at the cabin from an angle favouring the lakefront. The windows missed me from that direction. I came up under one of the saw-blade-guarded windows, found something to stand on, and carefully lifted my nose above the cracked panes. The place was empty. I felt my breathing begin normally again.