Until he got stuck! Or until one foot got stuck in a muddy hole left over from the flood.
“Pull! Move! Pull!”
The canoe was suspended near the crest of the drop.
Malcolm was straining to keep it from swinging into the rock. He was dangling at the end of a rope being pulled by someone with a broken arm and one foot trapped in a muddy hole.
Jack began wrapping the rope around his arm as fast as he could, but it was doing little to move the canoe up the last critical slope. He had two choices.
It really wasn’t a choice, however. He just hoped that his feet had gotten toughened up enough like they did in previous barefoot summers. With one motion, he stepped out of his shoe-pack and pulled his still-yelling dad forward, up the “V” of the rapids.
Both Jack and Malcolm were sweating when the canoe finally made it to shore. Malcolm looked down at Jack’s bare foot and realized what had happened. He tried not to smile.
He just said, “Thanks. Now, let’s go and find that other shoe. We’ve still got about a hundred miles of tough river to go up.”
Finding the shoe-pack wasn’t all that difficult. Jack had managed to mark the spot by kicking a piece of driftwood to near its location. Pulling it free was another matter.
“Do you think we’ll find that place where the river got plugged?” Jack asked.
“Probably not. At least, I hope not. It might be a difficult obstacle to get past. It probably happened up where there was a really big rainfall in the mountains.”
It had taken them the better part of a day just to get up above the island. They were both hoping for some flat water for a while to put in some real distance.
After a few more hours of hard paddling, they got to a broad, shallow part of the river, and crossed over to where they could catch the early morning sun. Malcolm had noticed a darkened area of bush where he assumed a small river or creek might join the flow of the Athabasca. They knew that creeks on the far shore drained the foothill valleys and would be clear and cold. Jack figured his dad had fishing in mind. Fresh trout would make a good supper.
27
There was a creek. The mouth was almost hidden by a jumble of uprooted trees and other things. But enough clear water oozed through it to indicate that there was a cold mountain stream up beyond it. There was also enough of a small flat area where they could camp near the creek.
“How’s your arm?” Malcolm asked, nodding at Jack’s splinted limb.
“It’s okay.”
“How about the other one? From the looks of things, you might need it tomorrow for poling. The river’s braided and shallow up above here for a ways.”
“I think I’ll manage.” Jack swung his right arm. “I really didn’t do much with it today.”
“Well, you did pull the canoe and me up and around that rock.”
Jack accepted that as an acknowledgment that he had done all right, that his work was acceptable. He mumbled something about firewood and set off to look for some.
There wasn’t much daylight left by the time Malcolm returned with a small string of fish. Jack had the tin of water already boiling, and enough firewood for morning and to last through the night, if his dad should want it.
“I didn’t know if I should boil up some beans. They would be ready for tomorrow, if you want.”
“No. These fish will do. And we’ve got that smoked fish for morning,” Malcolm reminded him.
The trout were big. Four of them. Their markings seemed to prove that each stream had its own variation. The heads on these were big, too.
After a long day of summer daylight and hard work, the smoky flavor of the fish tasted good. Their hunger encouraged them to eat in silence. But afterward, sipping their tea as darkness settled had the opposite effect. At least for Jack.
“Why did we come out here?” he asked. “I mean, we lived in Brûlé, didn’t we?”
Malcolm slowly sipped his tea. “You mean, why did we leave Brûlé?” He blew on his tea and took another sip. “The mine shut down. There was no more good coal for the railway.”
“Couldn’t you dig somewhere else?”
“The railway needed a certain kind, or quality. They simply opened a mine that had what they wanted elsewhere.”
“So, we could have moved there, couldn’t we?” To Jack, work was work. Where it happened didn’t matter.
Malcolm shrugged. “We held on for a while. We thought they might sell the lower-grade coal that was still there. But then there was the Depression, and soon there was nothing to do anywhere.”
Jack was going to ask about Whitecourt, and why his dad had never gone back and stayed there. But some instinct or memory warned him to avoid that kind of question. Whitecourt had not been the place that got talked about by his mom or dad. Not quietly, anyway.
Then, thinking back to the night below the rapids, Jack asked, “Were you trying to get away from what you were back then, or from your memories?” He was wondering if his dad had felt like he did at times—confined, trapped, imprisoned—wanting to see what was beyond the familiar. Wanting to start over. He looked into the fire, not sure that he could look at his dad, not directly, anyway. That might seem like he was challenging him.
“Memories? What do you mean?” Malcolm looked over at his son.
Malcolm was trying to imagine what Jack was thinking. Trying to remember his own life and what that had been like when he was Jack’s age. What Malcolm remembered was being a boy of about ten, and the next day being a man of twenty. All because his father had died and left him to become the man of the house, because he was the oldest, and it seemed to be expected. What he remembered was missing everything in between ten and twenty. He also remembered being jealous of his cousins, who could just walk away from things, it seemed, whenever they wanted to. For them, it was their fathers who were in charge and responsible.
Malcolm tried to remember who had first mentioned the big war back then. He knew that it hadn’t been him. But he’d welcomed the chance to get away, and to have an excuse, a reason or a purpose for doing so. He’d become a man without an adolescence to look back on, and no future to look forward to. The War seemed like a happy invitation to start life again.
Malcolm looked over at his boy, his son, the one who would have become the man of the house if he had drowned in the river, trapped by the rope and the canoe. Would Jack have gone back if that had happened? Would he have dared to confront his mother with news like that? A tragic chain of events that he had started? He’d told Jack to get clear, to climb up and save himself. But would he ever have been able to escape the memory of such a day? Or would it have trapped him in his own memories?
“I guess I was thinking about what you were dreaming about,” Jack said hesitantly. “You know, maybe about the war, or what made you go to it.” He hoped that by saying it like a question, it would give his dad some way of talking about what he might want to say. He wasn’t sure he wanted answers to some of the questions he had been thinking about, though. Sometimes the stories he’d imagined while watching the eagles back up on the bluffs seemed to have answers that were safer and, perhaps, more normal. Watching those majestic birds had been more predictable than watching the pattern of the flickering halo around the fire of their campsite.
“I don’t know that you’d understand,” Malcolm said at last. “You weren’t there.” He stared at the fire. “Even the people who were there didn’t understand.” He threw the dregs of his tea into the fire with a sweep of his arm. It erupted into a hissing cloud of steam that made the flames cower beneath it.
“It’s late,” Malcolm said suddenly. “And we still have a long way to go. The mess in the river isn’t making things easy for us.”
Jack nodded. He didn’t know much about making conversation. But he knew that this one was over. As he crawled under his blanket, he wondered what his dad had really been thin
king about or remembering. And maybe what he still had to say.
He wondered if maybe sometimes the peace at the end of a war was harder and more complicated than the war itself.
For the next two days, the Athabasca River became an endless monotony of hard work. The wide, braided channels, now down to their normal summer flow again, offered no simple route to follow. Often it was easier just to get out and track the canoe up alongside the gravel bars or along either shore. Even when the river was deep enough for paddling, it was usually on the outer edge of a long, sweeping bend, where recently uprooted and overhanging trees forced them back to the shallows of the other side.
There wasn’t much talk. And what there was made Jack think that maybe his dad didn’t like the prospect of going back to their place on the Athabasca any more than he did. It was like both of them were wondering what might be in store for them.
Jack’s real and outward concern was about the flood. He was anxious to know where the obstruction had been, what had caused it, and what it might have done in the flood that followed.
“It looks like the slide you mentioned must have taken place a lot farther up, doesn’t it?” Jack said, when he thought they must be getting close to the house. He was thinking about Cyril and the rest of the family. There were signs in places that the river had crested well above any normal spring break-up and flood.
Malcolm just nodded. Finally he said, “There’s a sharp bend up toward Hinton, with a steep wall of gravel on the outside of that bend. The valley’s narrow there.”
“Are you worried about our place?” Jack asked.
“The house is high enough,” Malcolm said. “And Cyril knows better than to go poking around in the empty riverbed when the river goes down. Your mom knows about rivers.”
But that was the end of their break and their conversation. Jack could see that his dad was as concerned as he was, but in a different way.
That afternoon, they worked their way up to a spot Jack recognized. He figured they were probably within a day or so of being back at the house. It was a hunch that was confirmed by his dad, when he said they were on their last boil of beans that evening.
They were on their second cup of tea when Jack asked, “Did you kill anyone in the war?”
“You seldom saw what you were shooting at,” Malcolm said evasively.
“But soldiers got shot, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, but mortars and cannon fire did most of the damage.”
Jack hadn’t really wanted to ask that. He didn’t want to get back to talking about people like Billy. He just wanted to know if, with people, it was different than killing animals. Especially if you were the one doing the shooting.
“Were you over there for all of the war?”
Malcolm almost laughed. “We thought we’d be too late and miss out. It took more than two months just to get to England.” He looked into the fire. “There were still two years of hard fighting left. A stalemate, they called it. Trenches don’t move very fast, if at all.”
“Did you hear from others that went with you? The English boys?”
More staring into the fire. “One got into the Air Corps. I think I told you that. We could see those planes from time to time as they flew over. We used to envy them.” Then, maybe a memory, maybe a story. “Those pilots used to count the planes they’d shot down. I guess it was easier to see what you’d shot, up there in the sky.”
He paused, looked over at Jack, and wondered if he was saying too much. Over there, they’d all seen the same things. Things they wanted to forget. Over there, what they really talked about was home. Of getting back to what they missed. Getting back to the people they knew must be missing them.
“You had to be there to understand,” Malcolm repeated. “And if you were there, you didn’t talk about it. People had enough to worry about within themselves.”
“Was it like drowning?” Jack asked after a while. That was the real question. Something they had both experienced and could maybe understand. Jack sensed that in those explosive moments of his life, he might have learned more than all the book lessons his mother had taught, back in their little log house, or even the more significant realizations that came from watching the eagles soaring above his bluffs on the Athabasca. He wondered if he had learned something deeper, more like a feeling.
“I was just wondering,” Jack asked again, trying to explain, “if maybe the War was like me with my arm, getting dragged by the river, and you coming for me. I remember yelling, and I know that you did, too.”
Malcolm poked at the fire and sent sparks up into the blackening sky. He sipped at what was left of his tea, swished it in his mouth, and spat out the leaves. “Maybe,” Malcolm said at last. He said it slowly. “Maybe that stuff with me and you and the river was like one day of war. And it gets to a point where you give in to it. You just want it all to be gone.”
He looked over at his boy. Tears were starting to glisten in his eyes. “Sometimes you just want the pain to be gone. And however that is done is suddenly insignificant. You just want peace.”
They both sat in silence for a while. Finally Jack said, “You wanted to be free of your memories, didn’t you? Was that why we moved out here?” They were as much statements as they were questions.
Malcolm poured the rest of the tea into their cups and turned over the big tin to let it drain, and for the leaves to fall out onto the ground beside the fire. It was the signal that the evening was about over.
Jack had one final question, even though he knew the answer to it. “You’ve never told Mom anything about the war, have you?”
Malcolm answered with a question of his own. “Are you going to tell Cyril exactly what happened downriver?” Then he added something that Jack would remember—the real lesson. “Sometimes you have to be a part of something to believe it. But even then, you might not understand it.”
They both slept by the fire that night. Each in turn added something to the fire to keep it burning, until the first light of dawn allowed them to get up and begin the day. There was an east wind blowing. It would help to push them upriver, and probably bring rain with it. But the thought of getting wet didn’t bother them. It would water the garden. They were going home.
PART 2
1
The rain started in the afternoon, as Jack and his father came within sight of their own little river. It was the one that Malcolm used to get supplies up to his trap lines, and along which they ranged on some of their hunts for meat. The Athabasca River’s gravel shore of home was a few miles and two bends up beyond that. That was where Cyril was sitting, waiting. Then he finally waded downstream toward them as far as he could.
“I knew it was you!” he shouted by way of greeting. “I could see you from Jack’s lookout! We had a flood!”
Jack and his dad paddled and poled the rest of the way, until they were even with Cyril. The last mile had been no more difficult than any of the rest, but the river felt like it had become as sluggish as heavy oil.
Cyril noticed Jack’s left arm. “What happened?”
Cyril had expected Jack to answer but, instead, the answer came from different quarters.
“Your brother went off to become a man,” Malcolm said with an unfamiliar tone of familial pride. “He didn’t have to go as far as he thought he would.”
“It just happened,” Jack added. “I flipped over in some rapids. You know.” And, maybe to change the subject, he looked up along the shore and asked, “You alone?”
“I’ve been looking most afternoons from your lookout when I could,” Cyril explained. “I didn’t run to tell Mom and Amelia because I wanted to be sure it was you.”
Malcolm had picked up the canoe and carried it up into the edge of the bush. Cyril noticed the big patch but didn’t say anything. He did ask Jack about the big canoe, though. “Did you leave it somewhere to pick up later? You co
uldn’t move both with your arm like that, could you?”
“We’ll tell everybody at the same time over supper,” Malcolm said. “Let’s get up to the house and out of this rain.”
“The river flooded one night,” Cyril said, as the three of them walked up the trail past the obvious high-water mark. Then he mimicked his father. “We’ll tell you later over supper,” and kind of laughed at having made a joke.
Despite the tears when Jack and Cyril stepped into the house, it was a happy reunion. Amelia made some comment about finally getting some help with the garden. Rose looked down at Jack’s arm, but Cyril brushed aside any questions and said, “He’ll explain over supper. They’re hungry.”
Rose had expected that. She had heard Cyril say “they” and assumed that Malcolm was looking after things in the shed. “So, you didn’t get washed downriver in the flood, or whatever it was?” She sounded relieved to say it, and quickly added some more things to what smelled like stew cooking on the stove.
When Malcolm finally came in, he looked at Rose, nodded toward Jack, and asked, “Is he what you wanted me to get?” But even his growing beard and moustache couldn’t entirely hide his smile, nor a tone that suggested satisfaction.
Rose looked like she wanted to give them a hug, but she held back. She brushed some things off her apron and said, “We could have used you when the river flooded one night. But from the looks of things, you had your own battles.” She nodded toward Jack’s arm and quickly added, “Should that be looked at?”
“It’s starting to feel better,” Jack answered. His shrug indicated he wasn’t looking for any sympathy. He figured there wouldn’t be much to see. Although he did add, “Maybe the cut on my hand should be looked at.”
“What did you do?” Amelia asked, wide-eyed, as Jack started to unravel the birch-bark splint. She was looking at the blood-soaked cloth on his hand.
“Dad’s knife was pretty sharp, I guess,” Jack said cryptically, although he was as curious as anyone about the cut on his hand. The bandage had not been off for several days.
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