Providence Island. Gregor Robinson
I turned forty two months before my father’s funeral.
The flight attendant touched my shoulder; we were making our final approach. I buckled my seat belt.
| Chapter 2 |
“Ray Carrier, you’re back!” said Mrs. Ault. And you still smoke.”
“Only at weddings and funerals,” I said.
“And between meals.”
I handed her my cash — strangely coloured Canadian bills. She took my money from the counter and handed me my cigarettes. My father used to say that Mrs. Ault was the Greek chorus of Merrick Bay.
Merrick Bay was the village at the bottom of the swampy inlet that serviced the resort community of Bellisle out on the point. Bellisle was attached to the mainland by a narrow causeway. There was a clubhouse, the golf course, an aging resort hotel, immense summer houses, and the green islands to the west. Those farthest out had expansive views down the lake. They had names like Greatview, Westwind, The Pines, Blackwood Island, Providence Island.
“Are you alone?” asked Mrs. Ault.
They knew of my failed first marriage and they appeared to know, in Merrick Bay, that I was with Katie.
“We were sorry to hear about your father,” said Mrs. Ault. “What could have come over him, walking out into the lake, a cold day like that?”
She pulled her fleece jacket tighter around her, even though outside the sun was shining. In less than two weeks, the May long weekend would mark the start of the summer season for the businesses of Merrick Bay. It was what they waited for all winter.
“I can’t imagine,” I said.
“That stupid boat,” said Mrs. Ault, answering her own question, “that’s what.” She paused to hear if I would say more, then asked, “You’ll be staying up at the house?”
The car I had picked up at the airport was ill-suited to the roads of Merrick Bay. Every winter they grew worse, cracked and buckled by the weather, and every spring the municipality repaired them as best they could. Now they were a patchwork of colours and textures. But with the rise in property values and new development, attention was being paid to what the government called “northern regional infrastructure.”
After J.D. Miller drowned and the Millers began their withdrawal from Bellisle, speculators and land developers started filling in the swamp at the mouth of Sucker Creek. Over the years, they moved farther along the creek until the Ministry of Natural Resources finally put a stop to the destruction of what they had started to call wetlands rather than swamp. Where Phil Havelock and I used to set minnow traps in the bulrushes there were now big yellow bulldozers parked on mud flats. Farther back from the creek, there were a couple of new streets of small, concrete-block houses with squat air-conditioning units beside the front doors. The people who lived in these houses commuted to Iron Falls where an auto parts company had built a plant.
When we first came to Merrick Bay, my father would take me to the Government Wharf or up to one of the outcrops behind the house, where granite broke through the thin soil, to look for the Northern Lights. In August the sky would be ablaze with shooting stars — invisible at home, in the city’s electric buzz. We would gaze over the line of the forests, the low hills rising in the distance. You could go north from here without meeting another soul, my father said. No lights, few roads, nothing but the dark forest and shambling beasts, the trickle of water into nameless lakes and muskeg, the sighing of the trees. Eventually the stunted pines, tundra, snow, and ice, the cold black water of Hudson Bay, and the Arctic Ocean.
“We are standing at the very edge of the North,” my father would say. “The last wilderness.”
A century earlier, when the Havelocks and the Applewoods and the other settlers who had received acreage under the Free Grant Lands Act — while they were clearing and trying to farm the hopeless land — rich families from the south were already buying the islands, distant green forests in the lake. Mr. Havelock would tell us how, as a boy, he would accompany his own father as he walked twenty miles with grain on his back to be ground to flour at Iron Mills. At the same time, a few miles away, steamers loaded with materials and equipment that had come by rail from the south were unloading along the shore and on the islands, for the building of elaborate summer cottages, designed by the likes of E.J. Lennox, or McKim, Mead, and White from New York City. People used to take the train to the foot of the lakes then a steamer up to their cottages. By 1910 the Millers had their own steam yacht, Hiawatha, at Providence Island. It had been built in Glasgow, disassembled, and shipped out in parts.
My father’s house was over half a mile from the lake. It had been remote until the highway went through. The place had been one of the original settlers’ farmsteads, but aspen, hawthorn, sumac, and birch had long since reclaimed the fields; even the tops of some slender white pines had started to appear above the new green forest. People from the city were always surprised: why come to Merrick Bay and not have a house on the lake? But my father said that we could see the lake from the attic windows, and if you wanted to, you could always take the yellow canoe and paddle down the creek to the lake. Paddle your own canoe. A rule to live by. Although he was himself afraid of the water and took to a boat of any kind with trepidation. The real reason he had bought a house away from the lake: to him, it didn’t make much difference.
My father had acquired the house at Merrick Bay in an estate sale through one of his partners. We didn’t use it much at first, perhaps a week of holidays and a few weekends. My mother refused to stay there alone during the week; she had always been nervous, and she said that she didn’t know anyone there — that we were part of neither Merrick Bay nor the summer community. After she died, my father decided I should spend more time at the lake. He invited my mother’s elder sister, Aunt Beth, to spend the summers with us there. Someone had told him this would be good for me. He once went so far as to take an extra week of holidays himself, but he spent most of his time reading the papers on the porch, tending the garden, and fiddling with the radio, trying to get the opera.
When the house came into view, I saw my aunt standing on the front verandah. She and the house were both smaller than I remembered. She wore one of her generic flowered dresses and a faded blue cardigan. A few strands of white hair blew across her face in the breeze. She was waiting. No doubt Mrs. Ault had already phoned. I parked the car by the weathered posts that marked the edge of the vegetable garden, now overgrown, and carried my suitcase up the front steps. The smell of the poplar trees carried me back.
Aunt Beth gave me a peck on the cheek. “You’re in the front room upstairs.”
I said I’d be fine with my old bedroom at the back, on the ground floor. (I used to be able to sneak out the window onto the back porch.)
“We always put guests in the front rooms,” Aunt Beth said. She turned to open the door for me. She was in her mid-eighties, almost fifteen years older than my father, but she still moved quickly. She was short and getting shorter, and she walked with a slight stoop. “I’ve made some good thick soup. You go up and wash your hands.”
I recognized the creaking in the floorboards as I carried my suitcase up the stairs, and the smell of Aunt Beth’s bathroom soap — Yardley’s Lavender. In the guest room there was a pair of pictures in matching silver frames on the bureau: my mother and father, myself as a boy.
After my mother died, my father hired a housekeeper, Mrs. Ireland, who worked half days, two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. He also took me out of the public school I’d been attending and sent me to St. Jerome’s. He had the idea that they took their teaching more seriously in the Catholic schools — they did it because it was a vocation, he said, and not for the pensions and the long summer holidays — and he liked the discipline. But the main reason I was sent to St. Jerome’s was that the school days were longer there. They kept you busy after class: in the fall, soccer and football; in the winter, hockey and basketball; and in the spring, track, tennis, and baseball. With the exception of hockey — St. Jerome’s regularly lost players to Junior A — the priests didn’t take sports too seriously, which was just as well for me. I