Crow Lake (18 page)

Or take Calvin Pye. With hindsight, it seems that Calvin Pye’s fate could have been predicted almost from the moment of his birth. Likewise Laurie’s. But there, it seems to me, you have one of the weaknesses of the argument—namely that everyone’s destiny is tied up, to a greater or lesser degree, with the destinies of everyone else.

And of course, you can just as easily turn the proposition on its head. In Luke’s case, you could argue that without the loss of our parents he might never have developed that remarkable determination of his. He must have had it in him, but without the interference of destiny it might never have come out. He rose to the occasion, you might say, but the occasion came first.

And Matt? How would you explain Matt? But I have never been able to explain Matt. In any case, I have no wish to analyze him. It makes me too sad.

Sunday April 27th

Dear Aunt Annie,

How are you? I hope you are well. Mrs. Stanovich says Jesus says she can spare us two afternoons a week. She says her children are grone and we need her more than they do. Luke says we dont need her at all but Matt says yes we do and it woud be good because Bo and me woud be in our own home.

Love, Kate

“Mornings I’m busy,” Mrs. Stanovich said. “Mornings there’s the men’s breakfast and dinner to get and supper to be got started. Mondays and Fridays are busy all day. Monday’s market day and Friday’s chickens. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays I can double up some things, so you choose which two you want.”

She looked defiantly at Matt and Luke. She was not blessed with beauty, Lily Stanovich, with her small, weak-looking eyes and large, fleshy face, but still, she had presence. And I think now that there was something close to nobility in her defiance. Raw courage. I’m sure she must have known what we thought of her—what everybody thought. I remember my father—even my father—saying that he bet the Lord’s toes curled with embarrassment every time Lily Stanovich opened her mouth, and my mother saying staunchly that she had a heart of pure gold and that was all that mattered. And I remember my father replying (though under his breath) that it was one of the things that mattered, but it wasn’t all.

In some communities she might have passed almost unnoticed, but in ours—well, we were mostly Presbyterians, as I have said. Name-dropping the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost was not the done thing. Likewise emoting, and Mrs. Stanovich emoted like nobody’s business. Even her husband was embarrassed by her. Even her sons.

Nonetheless, she stood four-square in front of Matt and Luke, cheeks flushed, neck mottled, and defied them to turn down her offer. Two afternoons a week. She could look after the girls, do a bit of cooking, maybe a bit of cleaning (she slipped the cleaning in as if it weren’t uppermost in her mind), and Luke could go do some of the things that needed doing on the farms. The Lord had spoken to her and she was going to do His will. I think even Luke must have known that they had no choice but to accept.

“She’ll infect the girls,” he said later to Matt, in an undertone, as if afraid that our parents, up there on their clouds, would hear him and make him stand in the kitchen.

“Infect?” Matt said uneasily, evidently imagining the same thing. “That’s not a very nice way to put it.”

“You know what I mean. They have to testify or something. Whatever it’s called. Bear witness. They have to bear witness.”

“Not here, they don’t,” Matt said.

“How’re we going to stop her? We can’t say, ‘Look, you can clean our house but you can’t bear witness.’”

“We can say it nicely.”

“How do you say that nicely?”

“Say our parents would want Kate and Bo brought up in our own religion. We could say that. She’d accept that. She loved Mum.”

“You say it,” said Luke.

So Mrs. Stanovich came on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and Luke chopped down Mr. Tadworth’s trees and cleared his field for him. Mrs. Stanovich and Bo didn’t see eye to eye on everything, but they worked things out. Mrs. Stanovich let Bo hammer saucepans in the kitchen and Bo let Mrs. Stanovich clean the rest of the house, and then Mrs. Stanovich let Bo take the saucepans into the dining room and Bo let Mrs. Stanovich clean the kitchen. And then Bo was allowed to choose any books she liked to take to bed with her so long as she stayed there for an hour, while Mrs. Stanovich scoured the saucepans and cooked the evening meal. When I came home from school Bo was allowed up and we were both permitted to do whatever we liked as long as we let her “get on with these windows,” or whatever the project of the day happened to be. I’ve never known anyone who could pack more into an afternoon. The house was transformed.

She was easier to take than she had been, mostly because she was less distressed. For a while she galloped to the door and enveloped me when I got home, but that tailed off after a bit. I imagine she saw how I hated it. I imagine she couldn’t help but see. It would have been like hugging a lizard.

I hope she knew we were grateful to her. No—I’ll rephrase that. I hope we were grateful to her. I have an uneasy feeling we weren’t, at the time. But maybe it didn’t matter. She wasn’t doing it only for us.

chapter
EIGHTEEN

Laurie Pye left home on a Saturday afternoon in April. I’m not sure of the date because I didn’t write to Aunt Annie about it, but I know it was in April because we’d had a spell of warm weather which fooled us all into thinking winter was over, and it was a Saturday afternoon because Matt was there and saw him go.

Matt didn’t say much about it at the time. He said Old Man Pye and Laurie had had a row and Laurie’d lit off, and he left it at that. Both he and Luke had witnessed countless rows between Calvin and Laurie before, after all. And Laurie had run away a couple of times when he was small and had always come back of his own accord.

That night the weather revealed itself as the fraud it was and the temperature dropped to minus ten. Matt was uneasy. He said Laurie’d only been wearing a thin shirt when he left. But Luke said it would just persuade him to come home that much sooner. In fact, probably he was home already and probably Mr. Pye had calmed down a bit in the meantime. After thinking about it, Matt agreed.

On Sunday, though, none of the Pyes were at church and there was no snow to account for it. Matt was pretty quiet on the way home and that set off alarm bells in my head. If Matt was worried, so was I; trouble, as far as I was concerned, was bound to be our trouble. So I kept extra quiet and listened extra hard, and after lunch, when Matt and Luke were doing the dishes, I heard what had happened. And grim though the story was, I was relieved, because it wasn’t our trouble after all.

On Saturday afternoon Mr. Pye and Laurie and Matt had slaughtered a bullock. Of all the farm work, slaughtering was the job Matt hated most. He wasn’t sentimental about animals but it sickened him nonetheless, particularly when, as in this case, the bullock got wise to what was about to happen and died in terror. It took all three of them to do the job and in the course of it Mr. Pye got kicked, which didn’t improve his temper.

Matt said Mr. Pye started yelling at Laurie for not pulling his weight. He called him pathetic. Useless as a girl. He said in fifteen years Laurie hadn’t learned one goddamned thing about farming. Didn’t try. Didn’t listen. Dumb as the goddamned bullock.

The bullock’s blood was draining out of him while all this was going on. He was down on his side on the ground, heaving and thrashing while the life soaked out of him into the soil.

Laurie said, “I must’ve got it from you.”

He’d been kneeling on the bullock’s rump, Matt said, but he stood up as he spoke. The bullock had pretty much stopped thrashing. Shudders ran through it in waves, like ripples on a lake. Blood formed a thick dark pool around it. Matt was still crouched by its head, holding it by the horns, his full weight leaning on it. One horn had gouged a deep groove in the soil.

Calvin Pye had been wiping the knife off on an old bale of straw. He looked at Laurie over the great shuddering body.

He said, “What did you say?”

Laurie said, “I said I must have got it from you. Dumbness. Stoopidness.”

Matt said there was a spell where nobody breathed. He himself stayed exactly as he was, holding the bullock’s horns, looking down at it. He said its tongue was lying on the ground. It was spilling out of the bullock’s mouth like a great clot of blood.

Calvin Pye said, “Did I hear you right?”

Laurie said, “Unless you’ve gone deaf.”

Matt said there was a small scraping noise and he looked up, but fortunately it was the sound of Calvin putting down the knife on a concrete block. If he’d been picking it up, Matt said, he didn’t know what he would have done. It was plenty scary enough as it was.

Calvin walked over to the barn. He disappeared inside, and reappeared almost immediately with something hanging from one hand. It was a belt, Matt said.

He walked back toward them, his eyes on Laurie. Matt watched him. He was still kneeling by the bullock’s head, still holding its horns. Laurie was watching his father too. He didn’t look scared, Matt said. Matt was extremely scared.

Calvin Pye didn’t say anything. He was circling the pool of blood around the bullock’s body, and as he walked he was wrapping the end of the belt, the soft end, the non-buckle end, around his hand.

Matt got to his feet. He said, “Mr. Pye?” and he said his voice came out as a squawk.

Neither of them heard him. They were just looking at each other. The belt buckle was swinging loosely but Laurie wasn’t looking at it. His eyes were fixed on his father’s.

Matt said time seemed to have slowed right down. Less than a dozen steps separated Calvin from his son, but each step took forever. Laurie did nothing. Just stood there. It wasn’t until his father got more or less to the animal’s tail, so that there were only about three steps between them, that Laurie spoke.

He said, “You’re not hitting me ever again, you bastard. I’m going. But I hope you die. I hope you die like that bullock. I hope somebody stabs you through the throat.”

And then he turned and ran.

Matt said Calvin started after him but after only a few yards he stopped and came back. He didn’t look at Matt. He just stood looking down at the bullock, no life left in it now, coiling the belt around his hand. Then he said, indifferently, as if nothing had happened, “What are you waiting for? Start clearing up.”

Nothing to do with us. That’s what I thought. I didn’t know that the Pyes’ story was already starting to converge with our own. No one knew. We were all bumbling along, the Morrisons and the Pyes and the Mitchells and the Janies and the Stanoviches and all the others, side by side, week in, week out, our paths similar in some ways and different in others, all apparently running parallel. But parallel lines never meet.

chapter
NINETEEN

Another thing I didn’t know at the time was that that spring was to be the last I had with Matt. Our visits to the ponds, which had formed such a fundamental part of my life that I had imagined them to be without number and without end, were in fact almost over. By the following September the ponds themselves would have been desecrated twice over, as far as I was concerned, and for some years after that I did not visit them at all. And when I did, it was without Matt, and it was not the same.

Perhaps that is why our expeditions that spring stand out so clearly in my memory. Like the last meal with my parents, they have come to have a special significance. Also, of course, I was finally of an age to begin to understand what I was seeing and to begin to think about it. The interest which Matt had sparked in me had developed by then into a deeper curiosity, and that year I was noticing and wondering about things without being prompted.

Life cycles being as they are, spring is the best time for pond watching, and that spring every form of life seemed bent on revealing its secrets to us. I remember sliding down the path to “our” pond in great excitement one evening, because the surface of the water appeared to be boiling. It bubbled and seethed like soup in a cauldron. We couldn’t imagine what was going on. It turned out to be frogs, hundreds of them, all scrambling together at the surface of the water, climbing on top of each other, sliding off, struggling up again. I asked Matt what they were doing, and he said, “They’re mating, Kate. They’re making frog spawn.” Though he too looked amazed by the frantic urgency of it.

He told me then that for all creatures, from the single-celled to the most complex, the main purpose in life was to reproduce. I remember being puzzled. It seemed strange that something should exist only in order to cause something else to exist. It was unsatisfactory, somehow. Rather pointless, like travelling for the sake of it.

It didn’t occur to me to ask him if it included us—if reproduction was all we existed for too. I wonder what he would have said, that spring, if I’d asked him that.

Springtime had another significance, of course. Then as now, exams were in June. Matt would have been one of very few at the school taking the senior exams and the only one applying to university. Most of the kids from Crow Lake would have been lucky to get their grade twelve. In farming families, if anyone was allowed to complete grade thirteen it was likely to be a girl, girls having less muscle and therefore being less useful.

Generally speaking, the farmers’ wives I knew had more education than their husbands. It was considered a good arrangement; the wives did the farm accounts and wrote such letters as were called for. I don’t think much store was put in education per se. Great-Grandmother Morrison was unusual in that.

I remember those months, during which Matt did battle with the grade-thirteen syllabus (and won, hands down), as being the most peaceful since our parents’ death. We’d settled down at last. Our financial worries had eased and Matt had come to terms with Luke’s sacrifice, if only because he’d worked out how to pay him back. Though he didn’t mention that at the time.

For me there was reassurance and even a certain glory in having Luke associated with the school, however humble his position. Sometimes on Mrs. Stanovich’s days, if farm work permitted, he would come in to school during the afternoon recess to see if anything needed doing. I remember watching him and Miss Carrington down on their hands and knees, peering at the damage done by a porcupine to the wooden foundations of the school. I remember Luke getting to his feet and wiping his hands on his jeans and saying cheerfully that it wasn’t too bad and he’d repair it over the summer and treat the whole lot with creosote, and Miss Carrington nodding and looking reassured. I remember being proud of him, and wondering if everyone else had noticed that my brother had reassured the teacher.

Rosie Pye was back at school by then. After Laurie’s disappearance she hadn’t turned up at all for several weeks—in fact the whole Pye family had disappeared from public view. But gradually things had returned to something like normal. Rosie had been so silent and strange before that she didn’t seem much different. Marie was out on the tractor all day, doing her brother’s job, and if she seemed more withdrawn than she used to be, well, it wasn’t to be wondered at.

Calvin was just as always. Matt still worked for him on Saturdays. He was the only person in the community to have regular contact with the Pyes at that time. He said that in fact Calvin was easier to get on with than he had been, because with Laurie gone he wasn’t in a constant rage.

Mrs. Pye was the only one who was noticeably changed. The church women shook their heads about her and said she was taking Laurie’s disappearance very hard. She never left the house any more, and when people called she didn’t answer the door. Reverend Mitchell tried talking to Calvin about her and was told to mind his own business.

As for Laurie himself, no sign had been seen of him since the day he’d run away, though Mr. Janie’s youngest son had been to New Liskeard and thought he’d seen him working in the market there.

It seems curious, looking back on it, that there wasn’t more of a fuss about his disappearance. He had no money, no food, no clothes, no experience of the world outside Crow Lake. You’d have thought people would notify the police or the RCMP

I suppose the thing was, they’d seen it all before. Laurie was just one more dropped stitch in a family tapestry already full of holes.

That spring I was beginning to emerge from the shell I had been in for the better part of a year. Until then I hadn’t been taking much part in things. Like someone with tunnel vision, I’d been able to focus on only a restricted field; Matt and Luke and Bo were clear to me, but everything else was a blur. But finally, that spring, my field of vision was starting to expand. Janie Mitchell, Reverend and Mrs. Mitchell’s middle daughter, had been my best friend in the olden days; one day in May she asked if I would come to play after school, and I said yes. She’d asked before and I hadn’t wanted to. Now I did.

I went on a Wednesday. We played dressing up, as I recall. The afternoon was a success and Mrs. Mitchell suggested that we make it a regular thing. Then she suggested that Bo come as well, initially at the same time as me. That worked well too, so she asked Luke if perhaps Bo would like to come for the whole afternoon. Bo did like. The Mitchells had a baby, whom she was intrigued by, and they also had a dog—not as nice as Molly, but pretty nice.

So Luke had another afternoon free. Progress, you see. I remember the anxious pleasure with which he and Matt quizzed Bo and me about the events of those afternoons. What had we played? Had it been fun? Did Bo join in? Had there been any quarrelling? Like a couple of overprotective mothers, the pair of them.

I turned eight at the end of May, an event which triggered the dreadful realization that we had missed Bo’s birthday by four months. Bo was unperturbed, of course, but the rest of us were guilt-stricken. Mrs. Stanovich was appalled. She had baked me a cake, iced with pink icing; now she stormed into the kitchen and produced another one. Around the top edge of both cakes she stuck sugar cubes, each of which was decorated with a tiny pastel sugar-flower. I was fascinated by them. I’d never seen such delicacy, such artistry, in food before. Heaven knows where she got them—they must have cost a small fortune. I’m sure she wouldn’t have dreamed of giving them to her own children.

I remember her conversation with Bo. They did converse by then. They had formed a relationship which I think both of them found quite satisfactory.

Mrs. Stanovich set the cake on the sideboard, beside mine, and said something like, “There you are, my lamb. Your very own cake.”

“I not my lamb,” Bo said. She was licking out the icing bowl so the cake was of less interest to her than it might have been.

“Well, goodness, you’re right,” Mrs. Stanovich said. “Aren’t I the silly one? You’re Little Bo Peep.”

Bo looked pleased. “Bo Peep!” she said. She disappeared into the icing bowl and then reappeared briefly, waved her spoon at Mrs. Stanovich, and said triumphantly, “As lost-er sheep!”

Mrs. Stanovich beamed at her, but the poignancy of the moment—sweet, pink-iced, motherless child with her tragically late birthday cake—was too much for her, and I saw her mouth start to quiver. I tried to slide from the room but she called me back.

“Katherine, sweetie?”

Reluctantly I slid back. “Yes?”

“Sweetie, as there are two cakes—” She dug a large hanky out of the vast reservoir of her bosom, blew her nose violently, stuffed the hanky back, and drew a quavering breath. She tried heroically, she really did. “As there are two cakes, I wonder if you’d like me to put yours in a tin so you could take it to school and share it with your friends tomorrow.”

It was a good idea. I liked it. I said, “Okay. Thank you.”

Maybe I smiled at her, or maybe it was the “thank you,” or maybe it was the fact that by then Bo had pink icing in her hair, but whatever it was it was too much for her, and she lost the battle and dissolved.

In the background, always, there was Matt with his books. All through April and May while the rest of the household careered around him in its normal chaotic fashion, there was Matt, sitting at the kitchen table, scribbling away. A lot of the time he was babysitting and no doubt felt he had to be where Bo was, but even when Luke was home it didn’t seem to occur to him to seek the quiet of his bedroom. Maybe we were background noise. Certainly he had phenomenal powers of concentration.

I loved watching him. I’d sit beside him sometimes, drawing pictures on the back of his study notes and watching the movements of his pencil. He wrote so fast that it seemed to me the words just ran down his arm and out onto the page. When he had math to do there would be a great row of numbers snaking across the paper and the pencil would make marks and squiggles between the numbers which I knew meant something, though I didn’t know what. When he got to the end of a question, if he’d got the answer he was expecting he’d underline it hard. If it wasn’t what it should have been, if he’d made a mistake somewhere along the line, he’d say, “What?
What?”
in an outraged tone, which always made me giggle, and score a line through it, and start again.

I don’t remember him showing any sign of exam nerves, either before or during the event, though our visits to the ponds became shorter for a while in the immediate run-up. Once the exams actually started he became positively laid back. When Luke asked him how one or other of them had gone, he’d say “Okay” in a noncommittal tone and leave it at that.

And then, with no fuss or celebration to mark their passing, they were over. He cleared his papers off the kitchen table, stacked them neatly on the floor in his bedroom, and went back to work for Calvin Pye for the summer.

Think of all that work. The dedication and determination. The hours and hours of study. Work carried out as a tribute to our parents, to wrest something good from the devastation of that year, to prove himself to himself and to Luke, for my sake, for his own sake, for
its
own sake, for the pure joy of it—perhaps that above all. Work so that he could in his turn support the rest of us, work for the future of the family. Work because he knew he could do it, knew his efforts would be rewarded.

As if life were as simple as that.

People say, “You can do anything you want if you want to badly enough.” It’s nonsense, of course, but I suppose we all work on the assumption that it is true— that life is simple, that effort will be rewarded. It wouldn’t be worth getting out of bed in the morning if you didn’t believe that. I’m sure it underpinned Great-Grandmother’s efforts to educate her children. Jackson Pye must have believed it—think of the incredible commitment of energy and effort he put into wresting that farm from the wilderness. The handsome farmhouse, the well-made barn, the sheds and outbuildings, the fields carved out of the forest, the tons of rock shifted, trees uprooted, fields fenced. Arthur Pye must have believed the same—believed that he could succeed where his father had failed, if only he worked hard enough. And Calvin after him.

And all the Pye women—they all must have been filled with excitement and determination when they first saw that farmhouse, seeing in their minds’ eyes a large and happy family slamming in and out of the door onto the wide veranda. They must have willingly shared their husbands’ dreams, believing in them and clinging desperately to that belief for years. Because in an ideal world, effort, like virtue, is rewarded, and it simply makes no sense not to act as if it’s an ideal world.

I finished school a week or two after Matt’s exams ended and we settled into the summer routine. Mrs. Stanovich still came on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and Bo and I continued to go to the Mitchells’ on Wednesdays, so Luke worked on those days. Mr. Tadworth, whose field he had cleared earlier in the spring, had asked him to help with the building of a new barn. He’d offered more money than Calvin Pye was prepared to pay and was a good deal pleasanter to work for, so Luke took the job, though I imagine he felt guilty at leaving Matt to go to the farm alone. With Laurie gone Calvin was extremely short-staffed and Matt worked twelve-hour days. He said Marie worked closer to twenty-four; she spent her days on the tractor and the evenings doing the cooking and the housework.

Mrs. Pye was not in good shape. She was found in a distressed state one evening, wandering the roads around the farm. Mr. McLean came across her when he was driving back from town with the week’s provisions for the store. She said she was looking for Laurie. Mr. McLean said she looked as if she’d fallen into a ditch. He said her hair was all tangled and her face and hands were scratched and dirty and her skirt was torn. He wanted to take her to see Reverend Mitchell but she refused, so he drove her home.

July came. I remember overhearing Matt and Luke in the kitchen one evening saying that it seemed incredible that it was a year already. I didn’t know what they were referring to. What had been a year? I listened, but they didn’t elaborate. After a minute Luke said, “When do the results come out?”