Crow Lake (17 page)

I pointed out that (a) as he was an only child and had no nieces or nephews he didn’t know what he was talking about, and (b) anyone who thought shopping for important presents under a time constraint was
fun
needed his head read.

“Look,” he said, irritation starting to creep in around the edges, “over there is a phone. Why don’t you phone your brother and ask him if he can think of anything this kid would like?”

“Daniel, I want to do this myself. Please go home.”

He went, looking peeved. But he’d been in such good spirits since I’d invited him to the party that I knew even my neurotic behaviour wouldn’t bring him down for long.

Finally I decided to open an account for Simon at the university bookstore and pay into it enough to cover the cost of textbooks in the first year of his degree. In addition, so that he would have something to unwrap on the day, I bought him a small gyroscope—just a toy, really, but well made and nicely symbolic of the beauty and intricacy of the subject he had chosen to study.

Daniel redeemed himself, when I told him what I had decided, by saying that he thought they were great presents. Then he spoiled it, as only Daniel can, by saying that they were also very “me.”

“What do you mean?” I said suspiciously.

“Well, textbooks. Does he have any other aunt who would give him textbooks for his eighteenth birthday?”

“When I think of the hours I spent in the library trying to get hold of textbooks that were out on loan, because I couldn’t afford to buy my own …”

He grinned and said he was only teasing.

I don’t know if it was because Matt was on my mind, but on the Tuesday of the week before Simon’s party I had a bit of a crisis at work. Nothing like it had ever happened before and I can’t think of anything else that it could have stemmed from—I hadn’t received a critical review of a paper or hit a stumbling block in my research or anything like that. It had to be related to thoughts of home.

My job—assistant professor, invertebrate ecology— has a number of components: carrying out research, analyzing and writing up my findings, writing papers for publication, giving papers at conferences, supervising graduate students, teaching undergraduates, plus a ridiculous amount of administration.

The research I love. It calls for patience, precision, and a methodical approach, and all of those I have. That makes it sound dull, but it is far from dull. On a pure level, it allows you to feel that you have added your own tiny piece to the jigsaw of scientific knowledge. On a more basic level, an understanding of the environment is essential if we are to avoid destroying it. Research is the most important part of my job, and I never have enough time for it.

The writing of papers and articles I don’t mind. The exchange of ideas is vital, and I’m prepared to do my bit.

I don’t much care for giving papers at conferences because I know I don’t speak terribly well. I’m clear enough, I can present a well-structured paper, but my delivery lacks zip.

Teaching I don’t enjoy at all. This is primarily a research university, and I only have four hours a week in front of a class, but it takes me almost a week to prepare each lecture and it eats great chunks out of my research time. Also, I find it hard to relate to the students. Daniel enjoys them. He pretends not to, in the same way that he pretends not to work—he works all the time, he just calls it something else. Secretly, he finds the students interesting and stimulating. Secretly, I do not. I don’t understand them. They don’t seem to take anything seriously.

Anyway, this “crisis,” if that isn’t too dramatic a name for it, came in the middle of a lecture. It started as a minor hiccup. I’d been explaining the hydrophobic nature of the hair piles of specific arthropods to a lecture hall filled with third-years, and I suddenly had such a vivid flashback that I completely lost my train of thought. What I remembered was Matt and me, in our usual pose, flat on our bellies beside the pond, our heads hanging out over the water. We’d been watching damselflies performing their delicate iridescent dances over the water when our attention had been caught by a very small beetle crawling down the stem of a bulrush. He was about six inches above the surface when we spotted him, trotting purposefully downward. Where did he think he was going, we wondered, and what would he do when he reached the water? Did he realize it was there? Matt said insects don’t have noses as we do but they can smell and detect damp with their antennae, so probably he did. In which case, what was he after? A drink? Matt said he’d thought insects got all the liquid they needed from the plants they ate or the blood they sucked, but maybe he was wrong about that. I said maybe the beetle was a she and was going to lay her eggs in the water as the damselflies did. Matt said he didn’t think beetles did that, but he could be wrong about that too. I said maybe the beetle was just thinking of other things, like what to have for dinner, and wasn’t looking where he was going, and Matt said in that case he was in for a surprise.

But we were the ones who got the surprise. When he reached the water the beetle didn’t so much as pause. He just kept on walking. The surface of the water dimpled for a moment as his head butted into it, and then it wrapped itself around him and swallowed him up.

I was alarmed, I thought he’d drown, but Matt said, “No—look! Look what he’s done!”

I peered down into the water and saw that our beetle, still marching steadily downward, was surrounded by a glistening silver bubble.

“It’s air,” Matt said, craning forward, shading the surface of the pond with his hands to cut down on the reflection. “He’s got his own submarine, Katie. Isn’t that something? I wonder how long he can stay down.”

I know how the beetle did it now of course—there’s no mystery about it. Many of the creatures who live on the water-air boundary carry down an air bubble with them when they submerge. The air is trapped in a velvety pile of hairs, so densely packed that they are completely waterproof. As oxygen is used up, more diffuses in from the surrounding water. As to the length of time our beetle could stay down, that would depend on the amount of oxygen dissolved in the water and how rapidly he was using up his supply. Generally, the more active the insect and the warmer the water, the less time he can remain submerged.

It was the composition of the hair pile that I was explaining to my third-year students when the memory of that day suddenly floated across my mind, momentarily dispersing my thoughts and causing me to stumble and come to a halt. I pretended to study my notes while I got myself together and carried on with the lecture. The third-years, who had roused themselves briefly in the hope that something interesting was going to happen, settled back in their seats. In the front row a girl yawned so massively that she seemed in danger of dislocating her jaw.

It was the yawn that got me. I’d been yawned at before—all students are chronically short of sleep and most lecturers have had the experience of looking out over a sea of snoring bodies—but for some reason I suddenly found I couldn’t go on.

I stood speechless, staring out over my audience. Inside my head, my inner ear played back to me the sound of my voice. The drone of it. The flat, monotonal delivery. And overlaid on top of the drone, like a film joined up with the wrong soundtrack, I kept seeing my own introduction to this subject: Matt and I, side by side, with the sun beating down on our backs. The beetle sauntering along under the water, safe in his tiny submarine. Matt’s amazement and delight.

Matt thought it was miraculous—no, there is more to it than that. Matt
saw that it was miraculous.
Without him I would not have seen that. I would never have realized that the lives which played themselves out in front of us every day were wonderful, in the original sense of the word. I would have
observed,
but I would not have
wondered.

And now I was putting an entire class to sleep. How many of the students reclining in front of me would have had the opportunity to see what I had seen, let alone in the company of someone like Matt? Most of them were city kids; some had never seen a real pond in their lives until they went on one of our field trips. This lecture was their first introduction to this particular subject. And they were more unfortunate than they knew, because if things had turned out differently, it would have been Matt standing in front of them instead of me. If that had been the case, not one of them would have been yawning. I am not exaggerating this. I am not glorifying him. It’s a fact. If Matt had been speaking to them, they would have been riveted.

They had roused themselves again, curious now, aware that something was wrong. I looked down at my lecture notes, moved the pages around, looked up at them again.

I said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been boring you.”

I packed up my notes and left the room.

“I shouldn’t be in this job,” I said to Daniel, later that night.

“Kate, it happens to everybody. No one is in top form all the time.”

“It isn’t a question of form. It’s a question of basic ability. I can’t teach. I can’t put it across. I’m killing the subject for them.”

I was sounding melodramatic, which I didn’t intend but which was how I felt. I felt tearful and desperate and absurd. I’m not given to that sort of thing; normally I’m quite rational.

Daniel put both hands through his hair, what there was of it, in a way that reminded me of Luke. “You are so
hard
on yourself! You give one substandard lecture. Most of the lecturers in most of the universities in most of the cities of the world are total
crap.
And most of them don’t care.”

I said, “The point is, Daniel, it isn’t one substandard lecture. It’s all of them. And what it means is I’m not doing my job properly. And I just don’t think I can carry on, week after week, year after year, doing something so badly.”

“You’re overreacting, Kate.”

Silence for a moment.

Daniel said more gently, “What did Prof. Kylie say?”

I shrugged. “He’s always nice. You know him.”

“Kylie? Nice? Well there we are—there’s your answer. You’re the only person in the department Kylie bothers to be nice to. Now why would that be? Ask yourself that.”

But I was thinking of Matt. I was thinking that I felt as if somehow, I had betrayed him. That was how I felt. And I couldn’t understand it, really, because the truth was, Matt betrayed himself.

chapter
SEVENTEEN

All that winter, while we were preoccupied with our own problems, things must have been deteriorating for the Pyes. I imagine there were clues if we’d been on the lookout for them, but the Pyes’ farm was quite isolated and the winter being such a hard one people weren’t getting around much. The Pyes stopped going to church but for some weeks that didn’t strike anyone as significant; the roads were snowed in half the time so the congregation was often pretty sparse anyway.

During the rest of the year Matt and Luke would have been the ones to know if anything unusual was happening, but there was no work at the farm during the winter months so they had no contact with the family either.

Laurie hadn’t been to school since the fight with Alex Kirby in October. According to Mrs. Stanovich, who lived on the Northern Side Road and therefore saw such traffic as there was to and from the Pye farm, Miss Carrington had called at the farm several times in the run-up to Christmas. Presumably she was reminding Calvin of his legal obligation to send his children to school until they were sixteen, but she obviously didn’t get anywhere. Laurie would have been nearly fifteen by then, and the school board was inclined to turn a blind eye to truancy among farm children because they knew they were needed at home.

At the end of March, when the thaw came, Matt and Luke resumed their work for Mr. Pye. About that time Rosie started missing quite a bit of school. She’d always been sickly, inclined to catch every germ going, but maybe Miss Carrington suspected there was more to it this time, because the week after they went back to work she came to see Luke and Matt. (If she knew about our own little crisis she didn’t let on. I don’t imagine she did. Dr. Christopherson was not a gossip.)

She came to ask, delicately, clearly aware that it was an uncomfortable question, if the boys thought everything was all right with the Pyes. I know that much because I was eavesdropping, but then Matt shut the door so I don’t know what they said. Whatever it was, though, it wasn’t enough.

I suspect things would have been different if Laurie had been a carbon copy of his father in spirit as well as in looks. There would still have been conflict—from what Miss Vernon told me about the family history, a certain amount of conflict was almost inevitable—but maybe it wouldn’t have been as bad. Calvin had never stood up to his own father, according to Miss Vernon. Laurie did. Laurie would not be cowed. I imagine that was what really got Calvin going. To have lacked the courage to defy his own father, to have taken so much abuse, for so long, and then to be “sassed”—I expect that was how he would have seen it—by his own son; that must have been the last straw.

This would explain why things got worse during that year. Laurie was well into adolescence by then. In childhood he would not have dared, but with all that testosterone coursing through his bloodstream, he did.

I can’t think what it must have been like for Mrs. Pye and Marie, watching, trying vainly to calm things down, trying to intervene. Mrs. Pye broke her arm that winter. She had it in a cast for months. She said she slipped on the ice and hit it on the doorstep. Which is possible, I suppose.

She came to see us one day—it must have been at the beginning of the winter, when she was still getting out a bit. She’d brought us something, an offering of food, probably, and I remember her standing at the door asking Luke how we all were, and I remember that although she was looking at him you could tell she wasn’t paying any attention to his reply. She seemed to be listening for something. Listening over her shoulder, so to speak. I suppose she was in a permanent state of waiting for the next crisis.

As for Rosie, I don’t recall her ever being one hundred percent normal, but for most of that year, even while she was still going to school fairly regularly, she’d been as inarticulate as a stone. Fear must have rendered Rosie stupid. Feeling must have rendered her numb.

But it’s Marie I find it hardest to think about.Empathy, as Daniel says, is not my strong point, and it is more difficult still to empathize with someone you don’t like. I never liked Marie. I remember going out to look for Matt one afternoon; he was late and the fear I always felt at such times had reached the point where I couldn’t bear it any longer, so I pulled on my coat and boots and went up to the road to look for him, imagining, as usual, the bus in a ditch and Matt lying dead beside it. And instead there he was, standing halfway up the bank of snow the snowplough had left, talking to Marie. Her arms were wrapped around herself in that defensive pose of hers, and her eyes were red and her nose was red and she looked her normal pathetic self. I think I despised her. I suppose I blamed her for making Matt late.

But she must have been suffering too. I do realize that.

As for us, Matt and Luke and Bo and I, well, having hit rock bottom with something of a thump, things in the Morrison family finally started to look up.

Sunday March 30th

Dear Aunt Annie,

How are you? I hope you are well. Mr. Turtle fell off the roof agen. He was shuvling snow off so the roof wodnt cave in and he fell off and brok his leg. Mrs. Turtle says hes to dumm and to old so Miss Carrington said wod Luke like to be janitor.

Love, Kate

Sunday April 6th

Dear Aunt Annie,

How are you? I hope you are well. Lukes our janitor now. He has to go to school really early in the morning and lite the furnas and shuvl snow and everything that needs doing, and he has to clean the toilets. But he says he dosnt mind. And in the summer he has to try to get rid of the poison ivy becasue Miss Carrington says its a menis.

Love, Kate

So there you are. It was just like Luke said; Something Turned Up. As a matter of fact, within the space of a few weeks, Several Things Turned Up.

But to go back a bit: in the days following the “incident” between Matt and Luke, Dr. Christopherson had come out several times, ostensibly to check Matt’s shoulder but probably to check on Bo and me as well. On the last visit he took both boys into the living room and read them the riot act. I know that because I listened at the door. He’d brought Molly into the house to entertain Bo and me, but I was wise to that now, and I’d decided I wasn’t going to be kept in the dark any more. I believe it was my first conscious act of defiance.

The riot act started deceptively. Dr. Christopherson said that everyone admired what the boys were trying to do for me and Bo, and everyone knew how hard they’d both tried to make things work.

There was a little silence. I imagine they both knew that wasn’t the sum total of what he intended to say.

He went on. He said that it was hard to accept that sometimes, in spite of all your efforts, things just didn’t work out. There was no shame in admitting it. In fact it was important to admit it. It was important to recognize when something wasn’t working, because otherwise you placed yourself under an impossible strain. And then, of course, things tended to go seriously wrong.

There was another silence. Then Luke said, so quietly that I had to strain to hear, pressing my ear against the door, that they’d sorted everything out now and everything was fine.

Dr. Christopherson said were they sure about that?

His voice was gentle, but there was an underlying gravity that even I could hear. He waited awhile, his question hanging in the air between them. I imagined Luke’s hand raking its way through his hair. Then the doctor said that it was Bo and me he was concerned about. What had happened in front of us must never happen again. We’d been through too much. We were too vulnerable.

There was a longer silence. Luke coughed.

Dr. Christopherson said that much as he would hate to do it, if he ever had any reason to suspect a repeat occurrence he would have no choice but to contact Aunt Annie. Fortunately I didn’t realize the implications of this. I assumed that he was threatening them with a telling-off by Aunt Annie, a prospect which pleased me no end. It didn’t occur to me that he was saying that Bo and I would be sent out east.

This time the silence stretched out until Dr. Christopherson broke it himself. He said that he needed their assurance on two counts. Firstly, that in future if there was friction they would resolve it peaceably. Secondly, that if they were encountering problems they would seek help. Their desire to be self-sufficient was admirable, but they should remember that too much pride was a weakness, some would say a sin. Many people in the community would like to help, out of respect for our parents. So, their assurances please. No more outbursts of violence, and from now on their own pride would take second place to the welfare of Bo and myself.

They answered him then, first Luke and then Matt, and gave their undertakings. Dr. Christopherson put them to the test, instantly, by saying that he imagined money was a bit short at the moment and he would like to help out. They failed the test, instantly, by saying in strangled voices that they were fine, really, that there was lots of our father’s money left, but thanks very much. He probably knew that they were lying, but decided that they’d eaten as much humble pie as they could reasonably be expected to swallow in one day, and he let it pass. There was the sound of chairs creaking, and I shot back to the kitchen to where Bo and Molly were taking afternoon tea on the floor.

It was a couple of weeks afterwards that Mr. Turtle fell off the roof.

Matt was back at school by then. I don’t know how Luke persuaded him; certainly not by dislocating his shoulder. In fact, it occurred to me recently that it might not have been Luke at all. It could have been Marie. Anyway, Matt was back at school and working like a madman for his exams. He didn’t have what you’d call ideal study conditions. Once Luke took the job of school janitor, Matt had to babysit from the moment he got home from school, and Bo was not the easiest baby to sit. My students come to me from time to time with excuses for not having handed in an assignment. They were sick (hung over), or they couldn’t get hold of a particular book at the library (had gone too late), or they had three other assignments due at the same time (all left to the last minute), and I think of Matt, squatting on the floor with his chemistry text on one side of him and Bo, who was on her potty and refused to stay there unless he sat with her, on the other, furiously scribbling notes into a pad on his knee.

There were still financial worries, of course. The duties of a janitor took up only a couple of hours a day. (Perfect hours, as it happened, because Luke could be back from his morning duties before Matt left for school and leave the after-school duties until Matt got back.) The previous janitors had always been farmers as well, so the job had merely provided a bit extra. I’m sure the school board was as generous as they could be, but they couldn’t pay Luke a living wage for ten to fifteen hours of work a week. It was a help, but it wasn’t enough.

Spring was well underway by then and there was plenty of farm work to be had, but Luke didn’t take it because he still couldn’t bring himself to leave Bo with neighbours. Mr. Tadworth offered a job that was right up Luke’s street. He had two acres, thickly wooded, that he wanted cleared; he wanted the trees felled and the roots dug out, the logs dragged back to the house by tractor, cut into lengths, split, and sold as firewood in town. Luke’s kind of work, but it was a job that required daylight and Mr. Tadworth wanted it done quickly. He couldn’t hang around waiting for weekends, when Luke would be free.

There was a bit of what Dr. Christopherson called “friction” about that one. Matt maintained that Bo would be just fine now if she spent a couple of days a week with someone else. Luke refused to consider it. He’d said he was going to stay with her for a year, and he was going to stay with her for a year.

I remember that argument. I remember Matt saying,
“Exactly
a year? Does it have to be
exactly
a year? How about a year minus a month? Would you consider that? How about a year minus a
week?”

Silence from Luke.

“If the right job came along when there was still a day to go before the year was up, would you turn it down, Luke? Would you say that it was in Bo’s best interests that you turn it down?”

Luke said, “Shut up, okay, Matt?”

I saw Matt’s jaw go tight, but with Dr. Christopherson’s shadow hanging over him, he shut up.

And then Something Else Turned Up.

I heard a debate once on the theme “character is destiny.” It was an undergraduate affair and ended in disarray because the protagonists had failed to define their terms beforehand. They came unstuck on
destiny.
Clearly if a random hit by a meteorite is your destiny, your personality doesn’t have much bearing on your fate.

Still, it’s an interesting idea. Take Luke, for example. You could argue that his determination, his refusal to consider the possibility of failure, made things happen. Matt was far more rational, but Luke’s irrationality paid off in the end, almost as if destiny were bending to his will.