Defiant Spirits (28 page)

Some speculation involved suicide. Thomson certainly seems to have suffered from bouts of depression—what Carmichael called his “blue streaks.” But might he have killed himself? Shannon Fraser wrote to Dr. MacCallum on July 24, in garbled English, that Thomson “must of taking a cramp or got out on shore and slip of a log or something.”
52
But to Plewman he told a different story, suggesting the “shy and sensitive” Thomson, facing a “showdown” with Winnie regarding their impending marriage, decided “that a settled, married life was not for him, but that he just could not say so to Miss Trainor.”
53
When his theory reached the ears of the Thomson family, Fraser emphatically retracted: “No one ever mentioned such a thing as suicide at the inquest,” he assured George Thomson. “The verdict was death due to drowning. I am feeling very badly about this terrible thing as I thought so much of Tom & would be the very last to even mention such a thing.”
54

One of the people who knew Thomson best, Frank Carmichael, found the suicide theory unconvincing. Two days after the Canoe Lake funeral he wrote to Lismer, “The idea of Tom himself being responsible for it (which seems to have entered into some of the discussions) hardly strikes me as being probable. It is hardly fair to presume on his eccentricities to that extent.”
55

Suspicions lingered of foul play, some implicating Fraser, possibly because of his swiftness in promoting the suicide theory. Fraser's true crime seems to have been his petty and unseemly greed. Winnie Trainor regarded him as “money grabbing,”
56
and his conduct in the weeks following Thomson's death led to a falling-out with the Thomson family. Fraser seems to have been guilty of sharp practice. He tried to sell Thomson's shoes after his death, he undervalued Thomson's two canoes by claiming they were “full of holes” and therefore worth only $10 each, and he charged both the Thomsons and Dr. MacCallum for the services of the rangers. “I tell you frankly, Mr. Fraser,” Thomson's brother-in-law wrote in a stern letter, “I am suspicious that you are not dealing square and I hope you will be able to give a satisfactory explanation of everything.” The family was understandably concerned about the $250 loan from Thomson to Fraser in 1915, though Winnie assured them it had been repaid in full. Even so, Thomson's sister Margaret began to wonder if Fraser was guilty of more than minor irregularities in dealing with Thomson's estate: “Sometimes I wonder if the man did do anything to harm Tom,” she wrote to Dr. MacCallum. “I suppose it is wicked to think such a thing, but if anyone did harm him, it was for the little money they could pocket.”
57

It hardly seems convincing that Fraser, however avaricious, should have ambushed and murdered, in broad daylight, for the price of two canoes and a pair of shoes, the man who was such an asset to Canoe Lake and Mowat Lodge. Nor would Fraser have done away with his friend to get his hands on his paintings: Thomson was only too happy to give away his sketches. Little claimed he “often gave away his panels for the asking or to pay for some minor obligation,” and Plewman believed that in the summer of 1917 he, if he so wished, “could have had them for about a dime a dozen.”
58

Sixty years later, Fraser was blamed for Thomson's death by Daphne Crombie, the newlywed who came to Canoe Lake with her tubercular husband. In 1977 she gave two interviews incriminating Fraser, one for the Algonquin Park Museum Archives, the other to the journalist Roy MacGregor, a distant relation by marriage of Winnie Trainor and the author of the 1980 novel
Shorelines
(later retitled
Canoe Lake
).

Although not at Canoe Lake in July 1917, Crombie claimed that when she returned four months later Annie Fraser told her that Thomson's drunken altercation on the night of July 7 was not with Martin Bletcher but with Shannon Fraser. Fraser and Thomson, both the worse for drink, had argued over money. Thomson needed Fraser to repay him because Winnie was pregnant and he needed a new suit for their forthcoming wedding. After an exchange of blows, Thomson fell to the floor and struck his head on a fire grate. He either died outright or—as Crombie believed more likely—was knocked senseless. The panicked Fraser roused his wife, and the pair disposed of the body in the lake. “My conception,” claimed Crombie, “is that he took Tom's body and put it into a canoe and dropped it in the lake. That's how he died.”
59

Crombie's story, with its sketchy, second-hand details related long after the fact, has the obvious flaw that Thomson was still alive—and seen by witnesses like Mark Robinson and Molly Colson—on the morning after his supposed death. MacGregor suggests the fight might have taken place not on the evening of the seventh but on the eighth. Thomson's overturned canoe, however, was spotted by the Bletchers on the afternoon of the eighth, whereas Crombie's description of a drunken Fraser rousing his wife implies a late-night drinking session: hence her insistence on the seventh. The cause of the fight—the money owed by Fraser—was contradicted by Winnie, who claimed the debt had been discharged. Other puzzles abound in this version of events. Why would the Frasers dump a still-breathing Thomson into the lake? Why did Annie Fraser confess these details to Crombie? And why did Crombie, once in possession of them, not inform the police?

The case against Martin Bletcher Jr., the other prime suspect, is even less persuasive. Much later it would be reported that a gunshot was heard on Canoe Lake around the time Thomson was last seen.
60
This melodramatic addition to the story, together with Bletcher's B-movie threat against Thomson and his supposed role as a Boche agent lurking in the Canadian backwoods, consigns the tragedy of Thomson's death to the realms of John Buchan's spy fiction.

ONE REASON FOR continued suspicions of foul play is a piece of evidence that came to light almost forty years after Thomson's death. Mark Robinson mentioned in 1956 a fact that appeared nowhere in contemporary accounts of Thomson's death, least of all in either
Dr. Howland's affidavit or the coroner's report: around Thomson's left ankle, claimed Robinson, “there was a fishing line wrapped sixteen or seventeen times.”
61
The fishing line has been offered as proof that Thomson's assailant, after striking the lethal blow, tethered his body to a rock or other weight so he would, in mafia-victim style, sleep with the fishes. It also supposedly explains why Thomson's body took so long to find: it was anchored to the bottom of the lake for perhaps as long as a week.

Yet there is a more plausible and innocent explanation for the coiled fishing line. Robinson spotted the suspicious tether when Thomson's body was still on Big Wapomeo Island, resting on boards and undergoing an examination by Dr. Howland. Larry Dickson, present for the makeshift autopsy, asked Robinson if he had a sharp knife to cut through the fishing line. According to Robinson, “I said I had
. . .
and I did, and I counted them, that's why I know there were sixteen or seventeen.”
62
Why Dickson should have requested Robinson to remove this incriminating and surely significant piece of evidence in the middle of an autopsy, in the presence of a distinguished medical professional, is a mystery unless one considers that Dickson wound it around Thomson's ankle in the first place: he and George Rowe were the ones who towed the body through the water to Big Wapomeo Island and tethered it to the tree.

Thomson's body would have required no anchor to remain beneath the surface of the lake for a full eight days. Dr. Howland probably entertained no suspicions of foul play because the medical literature of the period taught that a drowned corpse always remained underwater for eight to ten days before floating. That, at any rate, was the sworn testimony, in a case heard before the Supreme Court of the State of New York, of a coroner who examined some four hundred drowning victims. Two assistant coroners from New York City and a medical doctor corroborated his evidence. Only when the water temperature is 70 degrees Fahrenheit or above—certainly not the case at Canoe Lake in the cool spring and summer of 1917—will a corpse rise in less than a week. Thomson's body therefore appeared on the surface of Canoe Lake exactly when medical science would have predicted.
63

Another supposed murder clue—the air reportedly in Thomson's lungs—may also have an innocent explanation. Air in the lungs would mean, so the theory goes, that Thomson was dead before he entered the water, struck on the head by a paddle-wielding assailant who then, in the words of one melodramatic reconstruction, “watched him crumple up and topple over the side of the canoe and sink slowly out of sight without a struggle.”
64
As many as 10 to 15 per cent of drowning victims, however, are found to have air in their lungs. This condition, known as “dry drowning,” results from a laryngospasm, an involuntary muscular contraction of the vocal chords caused by a small amount of water entering the airways. This reflex shuts the windpipe, creating a seal that prevents more water from entering the lungs but in the process stops the victim's breathing. The result is that he or she “drowns” with only a small amount of water aspirated and air still in the lungs.
65

Neither a gunshot nor a blow from a paddle would have been necessary for a death on Canoe Lake. Plenty of hazards and obstacles could be found: deadheads, submerged rocks, rogue sawlogs. Thomson could easily have come to grief on any of them, and he is known to have had spills in rivers such as the Mississagi. But such an accident would have cruelly put the lie to the myth of how, in Lismer's glowing report, Thomson could find his way over open water “on a night as black as ink,” or how, as Eric Brown wrote, he was “the best guide, fisherman and canoe man in the district.”
66
Perils such as tree stumps and hidden rocks were too random and too mundane to satisfy either curiosity or legend.

THE SCALE OF the nation's loss in the waters of Algonquin Provincial Park, in a year when so many other young Canadians died overseas, was appreciated at first by only a select group of people. Arthur Lismer was in Halifax, at the Victoria School of Art and Design, when he learned of his friend's death. He wrote immediately to Dr. MacCallum: “We've lost a big man—both as an artist and a fine character
. . .
When one recalls the few years that he had been painting, it is remarkable what he achieved.”
67

Thomson's achievement was indeed remarkable. He had been painting in the Studio Building for less than four years, but during that time he made such astonishing progress that Lismer, Jackson, MacDonald, Carmichael and Varley must all have recognized how he possessed an extraordinary talent that the rest of them could try to emulate but never match. One of the few indisputable facts about his mysterious death on Canoe Lake was that he died just as he was approaching the summit of his artistic powers. His sketches of the night sky suggest he was planning a large canvas of the aurora borealis—a lost masterpiece it is now almost unbearable to contemplate.

At the end of September, Thomson was commemorated by a cairn at Hayhurst Point, on Canoe Lake. This was the age of these sad commemorations, as the traditional mementos of war—statues of generals and other heroes—gave way to monuments dedicated to sorrow and remembrance. Over the next few years, cenotaphs and plaques honouring the Canadian war dead would appear in virtually every Canadian city and town. A bronze plaque listing more than a hundred of Massey-Harris's fallen employees would be fixed to the facade of the company's head office on King Street West in Toronto; nearby stood a statue honouring eighteen employees of Borden's Dairy.

Thomson's cairn was a similar tribute to a fallen hero.
68
A truncated pyramid of rose-grey stones cemented into place, it was financed by Dr. MacCallum and featured a brass plaque designed by MacDonald. The cenotaph was placed against a background of spruce trees a short distance from rocks showing smears of paint made by Thomson as he cleaned his palette. The stones had to be lugged some sixty feet up a cliff, with the sand for the cement brought by boat and then likewise raised to the top. The work was overseen by Bill Beatty with help from Shannon Fraser, George Rowe and (as MacDonald told Thomson's father) some “soft-handed city men, who had not known Tom, but were holidaying at the Lake and cheerfully offered their services.”
69
MacDonald arrived towards the end of their labours with a brass plate commemorating the “artist, woodsman and guide” (as Thomson was identified). The inscription continued: “He lived humbly but passionately with the wild. It made him brother to all untamed things of nature. It drew him apart and revealed itself wonderfully to him. It sent him out from the woods only to show these revelations through his art. And it took him to itself at last.” At the bottom of the plaque, MacDonald wrote that Thomson's friends and fellow artists had joined in this tribute to his “character and genius.”

The memorial on Hayhurst Point marked the second time MacDonald joined with a small group of artists to pay tribute to a fallen comrade, since in 1904 MacDonald was one of those who commemorated Neil McKechnie in the tiny cemetery near Mattagami Lake with a bronze plaque and what an article in
Saturday Night
described as an “axe-hewn cross.”
70
Thomson's tragic death recalled to MacDonald his other drowned friend. A short time later he wrote a poem, “Below the Rapids,” originally dedicated to McKechnie but equally evocative of Thomson's death:

He'll follow no more the sun

Portage and rapid are one

Night brings no need of camping place

The end of the trail is run.
71

Although deeply grieved by everyone in the Studio Building, Thomson's death affected MacDonald most, since he had known and worked with him for almost ten years. “I know how keenly you will feel his loss,” A.Y. Jackson wrote to him from England.
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The stress of Thomson's death and continued financial hardships took a severe toll on MacDonald's health. In November he and his family were forced to move from Four Elms to a smaller property—what his son Thoreau called “a small and rotten rickety house”—across from a gristmill in York Mills.
73
The evening following the move, with their possessions still unpacked, MacDonald suffered a stroke. The Studio Building's latest casualty would be left bedridden for many months, unable to work.