“Yecchhh!” seemed to be Amelia’s diagnosis when Jack’s puffy red gash was revealed.
“It should probably have been stitched,” Rose said. “But now it looks like it might be infected. And what happened here?” She pointed to the bruise on his arm that had turned yellow.
“I think I broke my arm. At least, I felt something snap,” Jack said, without giving any further details about how it had happened. “It hurt a lot at first, but now only if I put any pressure on it.”
“Well, you won’t be able to use that hand until it heals,” Rose said, looking at the open wound again. “We’ll just put the whole arm in a sling. Amelia, get me that wild honey we’ve been saving.”
“For supper? Is this a party?”
“You’ll see.” Rose had already found some clean cloth to tear into bandage strips.
The honey became a disinfectant dressing for the cut, which was then wrapped to keep it sealed, and the whole arm was then held immobile in a sling.
“There,” Rose said, standing back and looking at her nursing job. “Now we can all sit down to eat.”
Malcolm had already lit the coal oil lamp to take away the dimness of the place. In the silence after Rose had ladled out generous portions of stew, they could hear the rain beat down heavier on the roof.
2
“Why did you go away, Jack?”
Amelia asked it, but Jack knew that Cyril and his mom were looking at him, too.
When the answer didn’t come quickly enough, Amelia jumped to another topic. “There was a flood here one night. It was bigger than spring. And loud!” She waved her arms dramatically for emphasis.
“We were worried about you because you were in the canoes,” Cyril added. He glanced at his dad and then looked directly at Jack. “You said you’d tell us at supper.”
“Mom was worried,” Amelia prompted. Then, more pointedly, “You didn’t tell us goodbye.”
Jack knew that any story would be better and easier to tell, than to try to explain his real reason for leaving. He found his direction when he noticed Cyril looking at his arm in its new sling. “I dumped the canoe in some rapids,” he began. “I tried to hang onto things, but the current was too strong. That’s when I broke my arm. But I can’t explain how it happened, exactly. It all happened very fast. Even some small rapids can be very strong.”
“Is that how the hole got in the canoe?” Cyril asked.
“No. I think that was later. I don’t exactly know how that happened, either.”
“We were worried about you, both of you, because of the flood,” Rose interjected. “We knew that whatever happened here would also affect things downstream. And we didn’t know where you were or how far you’d gotten.” She looked directly at Jack and said, “We didn’t know if you were safe.”
It was all she got out before her eyes and her tears said the rest.
These were not the consequences that Jack had considered. He’d let his arm become a distraction. But his arm was not at the center of things. And neither was he. Not really. He’d begun to realize that his actions were a part of something far greater and far more serious. Something that was happening to his family. Something that had been happening and would continue to happen. Families had no beginning or end.
“I’m safe now,” Jack said quietly. “We’re all safe.” He looked over at his dad and wondered if he should say anything more.
“Yes, we’re all safe,” Malcolm said. “And we’re all tired. And none of us is out on that river, wondering what will happen next.”
They finished the rest of their meal in silence. It felt like it should have been a happier time, but it wasn’t. Like with the rain outside, there seemed to be a cloud hanging over them. There were too many questions that needed to be asked.
Jack thought he was happy to be home again, but he couldn’t explain why he felt that way. Maybe thinking of it as home was part of the answer. He’d also found some answers to questions he’d never known how to ask. He looked over at his dad and wondered if he might have found some, too.
“Maybe we can have some of that honey on pancakes for breakfast tomorrow,” Amelia suggested. “That is, if Jack doesn’t need it all for his cut.”
Amelia was the first to drift off to sleep that night, while the rain muffled the sounds of her gentle breathing.
3
As the heat of summer increased, Jack began to wonder if things had changed. There suddenly seemed to be more work to do. Work he could not do because of his arm. The novelty of being a patient under his mom’s care turned into days of boredom, especially when the cut on his hand, despite the honey poultices, took a long time to heal. Because of that, Cyril had become the second man on the crosscut saw, felling the winter’s firewood, while he himself was demoted to the simple task of dragging the little poplar logs back to the house, where they would be bucked and split later on. He only needed one good arm for that.
Jack considered it a challenge at first to prove himself by doing as much as he could. He liked to think that working with his good arm strengthened the other one as well.
Maybe because of his river experience, he also began to look at his father differently. Malcolm’s way of moving through each day now seemed to be more like peace than oppression. His orders were now more like instructions and guidance. And he had begun to look at his family when he said things.
“What happened on the river when you went for Jack?” Rose tentatively asked Malcolm one evening. They were standing out by the garden. She had noticed changes in both of them that she had not anticipated.
The children were playing hide and seek in the shadows at the edge of their clearing. They had never grown tired of that game, nor too old. There was no one to tell them it was only a children’s game. The game had grown with them.
“I caught up with him because he broke his arm,” Malcolm said. He looked straight ahead, hands in his pockets. He knew what Rose was asking, but he didn’t know how to even begin to put things like that into words. He never had.
“Was he hurt badly?”
“He’d gone through some rapids the wrong way and got shaken up,” Malcolm said. “He was sitting up on shore when I found him. He’d managed to hang onto most of the gear he’d brought with him.” He sighed deeply, shrugged, and said, “I just helped him. Then the flood hit and took the big canoe. We waited and came back together. We had no other choice.”
Rose sighed, too, then. She knew there was more. There always had been. And, like always, she knew she would not hear those details. She’d once been told she wouldn’t understand.
“Dad?”
Jack appeared beside them. He’d been running, with the other two trailing along behind. Dusk had ended their game.
“Dad? I think my arm’s getting better. I bumped into a tree and it hardly hurt.” Jack pulled his arm out of its sling and waved it to show them.
The three children stood there, smiling. It was a hot evening. Their hair was matted to their foreheads from running around during their game. They’d interrupted their parents’ conversation, but neither of them seemed to mind.
As the five of them walked back to their little log house for their evening tea, Rose mentioned something else. “Jack’s turning into a man, isn’t he?” The signs of changes they had tried to ignore had become more obvious. Rose wondered if that had been a part of what had happened on the river. Had Jack really gone off to find himself? And, in finding Jack, had Malcolm seen a reflection of his former self?
4
The cut on Jack’s hand had almost healed. Rose’s use of honey as a natural disinfectant had possibly made it heal a bit faster—that, and keeping it immobilized because of the break. The use of the honey may also have prompted Amelia to persuade her brothers to search for a bees’ nest nearby. She’d seen bees around the blossoms in the garden. Jack suggested that a cool evening mig
ht be the best, or safest, time to do such a thing.
Malcolm was sitting on the small bench by the back door—a cool place to drink a second cup of tea after supper. Rose came out to sit with him and watch the bee-hunting antics of the children.
“He’ll have to go again sometime in the future, won’t he?” Rose asked.
“Sooner or later,” Malcolm acknowledged.
“We’ve been here seven years,” Rose said. “This will be our eighth winter coming up. Things must have changed out in the world. Things don’t stand still, do they?”
Malcolm looked to where the children were laughing in their hunt for bees, toward the moving sounds of their laughter.
Rose looked over at Malcolm. She knew he was the real reason why Jack had left. Jack’s laughter had disappeared over the last year of their Athabasca isolation.
“Why did Jack come back up the river with you?” Rose asked.
Malcolm was silent. He leaned back against the logs of the house. “He broke his arm,” he said at last. “And there was only one canoe because of the flood.”
The laughter was coming closer. The bee hunters were coming back. Amelia was racing ahead to tell the story of her exploits.
“And so . . . we decided that we needed each other,” Malcolm said to end the conversation.
Amelia had run up to them. “Want to lick?” She held up a sweet, sticky finger to Rose.
Jack and Cyril had slowed down and sauntered up behind Amelia. “Can we smoke them out and get the honey tomorrow?” Cyril was ready for more adventure.
“Maybe in the evening.” Rose smiled at them. “If you get your work done.”
As the house settled into sleep that evening, Rose watched the shadows of the moon rise higher and higher against the wall, until she knew the moon had slipped down behind the mountains somewhere.
She woke when sunlight sparkled off the chimney of the lamp sitting in the middle of the table. Malcolm was already up and outside somewhere. Probably had been for some time. The children would be waiting to hear that the day had started, when their mother attended to the stove.
Rose looked at the calendar on the wall near the stove as the fire began to crackle. It was sometime late in June, or early July. It had to be. The potatoes in the garden had sprouted the week before. It made Rose wonder about other changes yet to come.
5
A tree prompted Malcolm’s decision and the Whyte family’s next direction or path. Actually, it was a stand of trees, the kind that would have been a welcome sight to anyone who might be thinking about a new log building. They were spruce, in a shadowy little valley up behind the house, a valley that might at one time have been the channel for a creek or river that had long ago been diverted. Their location had caused the trees to grow straight and clear, as they reached upward for the sunlight.
Spruce was not what Malcolm and the boys had been harvesting. Their firewood was poplar. It burned fast, but it was light. Its other favorable qualities were that it was abundant and, once split, it dried quickly. Five full cords supplied the house with heat and cooking fuel for the year.
“I brought you some water for your break,” Jack said, offering the bottle to his dad. He’d just returned from dragging a couple of slender poplar logs down to the house. He assumed that his dad and Cyril would be taking a break, before tackling the next tree with the crosscut saw.
“Those are spruce,” Jack said, following his dad’s gaze, wondering.
“They’re nice and straight, though,” Cyril noted. He held out his hand for the bottle.
“Do you think we could drag a spruce log down to the house?” Malcolm asked, not looking at either boy, still gazing up at the trees.
Jack looked at some of the poplar trees nearby. He’d been dragging them with just a rope slung around his good shoulder and a timber hitch around the small end of the poplar. “It’s mostly downhill,” he said. “But it would depend on how long the logs are.” He looked over at Cyril as if he might know something. “What would they be for?”
“We don’t have the big canoe anymore,” Malcolm said. “And the little canoe can only carry two people and not much more.”
“How would we build a canoe?” Cyril asked. “And aren’t they made mostly of cedar?”
“Canoes are made of cedar,” Malcolm acknowledged, looking over at his boys. “But not boats or scows.”
Jack and Cyril looked at each other. In all of their seven years out here on the Athabasca, the routines had not changed. Fur provided whatever income they had; the garden provided food they could grow; and the river and forests provided the rest. The change in seasons determined which activity had priority.
“Don’t say anything about this,” Malcolm said, looking over at them. “I still have some thinking to do.” Then he added, maybe as a warning, “Logs and timber could also be used for a bigger house.”
It suggested that he was in charge and that he could change things.
The spruce trees reminded Jack of a conversation his dad had had with Harley. They had talked about the old days, before the railways. Harley had talked about the boats on the western rivers. Steamboats where the water was flat enough and deep enough, but there had also been other boats before that. He said they were flat-bottomed and could be rowed, or towed upstream, and floated downstream on the currents. They could also hold a lot of cargo and get dragged over gravel bars and rocks without getting damaged.
“But all of that changed when the railways came,” Harley had muttered. “Those railways, they move things too fast. They change everything.”
Around the campfires at the meeting place on the way up to Hinton, Malcolm had grunted and agreed. He’d nodded along with Harley to acknowledge that the railway had driven them into the bush. At least, that was one of the reasons.
Jack knew of other reasons now. And why those were never talked about. His dad had come out here to forget them. And he’d dragged his family along with him, floating them down in a scow from Brûlé.
6
Jack and Cyril knew their break and their talking were over when their dad stood up, scooped up the crosscut saw, and headed back to the poplars.
“What’s a scow?” Cyril asked Jack later that evening, when they went down to do some fishing.
“I don’t know exactly. We’ll find out, I guess. I think it’s like the boat we came here in.”
“But do you know what Dad’s talking about?” Cyril persisted. “Did he mention anything when he got you?”
Jack shook his head, threw out his line, and watched the float and the worm beneath it drift by in the current. “I think he knows that I’m a man now, though.”
Cyril was almost fourteen, but still young enough to giggle at certain things. “You mean?” and he pointed to his crotch. “I think it’s happening to me, too.” He was still giggling, while Jack continued to cast his line in the endless cycles of casting and retrieving, as they fished in the tireless current of the Athabasca.
“No,” Jack snarled. “I mean, I think he trusts me. Like a man.”
“But you ran away.”
Jack thought for a bit. “No, I left. I guess I had to prove something. Pay attention! You’ve got a bite!”
Cyril’s float, a piece of dry wood, was bobbing erratically as it drifted by. It was a big goldeye. He coaxed it into the shallow waters and then scooped it up by the gills. That started them both fishing in earnest for a couple more to make a meal for the family. It also served to end any more questions or speculation.
Jack didn’t mind. He knew why Cyril’s thinking had recently begun to veer into areas of adolescent curiosity that they were both now floundering through. As with scows, there was a lot of speculation about shape and size.
Later that evening, Jack followed the light of their lamp upward to the ceiling and roof of their log house. He looked up at the boards from thei
r first summer and tried to remember what that boat had looked like. It was long ago. At the time, it had seemed very big, and the boards very heavy.
Fear of the unknown and unknowable had caused Malcolm to think of the future. Watching his boys change as they grew also brought him back to his own adolescence in Whitecourt. He’d cursed his father’s death many times. It had left him to be the “man of the house” without having been shown, or told, just how those things were done. What had they expected of him?
Now, had turning fifty suddenly made him mortal? There’d been no celebration of that occasion, but Malcolm could feel changes in his bones, in his waning strength, and in his agility. Age was happening but, like his adolescent boys, there was no one with whom he could compare those changes in life. All he knew was that one day, he would disappear back into wherever he had come from. And if it happened soon, and if it happened here, then his boys, Jack especially, would curse him for it like he had cursed his own father’s death.
Amelia coaxed her brothers into helping make a couple of scarecrows for the garden one evening. Some flocking predators had already come to rob the Whytes of their labor and sustenance. And since Amelia had the task of doing many of the garden chores, she was in no mood to let pesky birds get any of the benefit of her work.
Malcolm and Rose were sitting out on the bench, watching all the antics of their children. Malcolm asked Rose, “Do you remember why we came out here?”
“You had no work, the mines were closed, and there was a Depression.”
“But you knew this wouldn’t be an easy life,” Malcolm prompted.
“We all knew that. But being poor in a city wouldn’t have been easy, either.”
One scarecrow was up. It flapped lazily in what was left of the summer’s evening breeze.
“We could have gone back to Whitecourt,” Malcolm suggested.
“But we left there to move to Brûlé and steady work in the mine. You said you were tired of farming, remember? You wanted to start a new life, with real work, and a real salary.”
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