it. Even the girls, who were brainier, and who were expected to continue in school because there was nothing else for them to do except get into trouble at places like the Rexall Soda Fountain and the Shalomar Tavern, even they were discouraged from any path that might take them too far from the community. The people of Merrick Bay hated airs — people being too big for their britches.
“I remember,” Aunt Beth said, “one time at the store hearing Charmaine Ault tell her mother she thought she might like to go away to school, like Marjorie Applewood was planning to. You remember Marjorie wanted to become a high school English teacher, perhaps even a doctor. ‘Fine for Marjorie Applewood, but you better learn typing first,’ Mrs. Ault said to Charmaine. ‘A girl who knows how to type will never be without a job. Bookkeeping, too. We could use some bookkeeping around here.’”
She paused for a moment. “Actually, I think Marjorie did go to teachers’ college, somewhere down east.”
“You said in your letter the Millers were selling the island,” I said. She had also told me that some of the Millers were supposed to be coming up later, after the funeral, I reminded her.
“I suppose that means you’ll be staying on, does it?” she asked sharply.
I was not a son of Merrick Bay. The Carriers were outsiders. And although neither were we one of the old families that made up the community at Bellisle, I always liked to see myself as one of the summer people. Aspired, perhaps. I didn’t have Aunt Beth’s contempt for them.
The next day, despite my protests, my aunt sent me out to St. Andrew’s United Church. St. Andrew’s-in-the-Fields, my father used to call it: the church was at least four miles back from the lake at crossroads in the middle of hay fields, a place called Merrick Centre. “Centre of what?” I used to ask. Even when I was a boy the other buildings of the hamlet had long since vanished; even the railway through Merrick Station, one concession road to the east, had been torn up.
I remembered driving this road with my parents the first summer we came to Merrick Bay and getting a flat tire in the middle of nowhere. My father couldn’t get the bolt off the wheel. The road was low and spongy, just above the muskeg it seemed to me, as though we would gradually sink into the earth if we didn’t get out of there, and by dusk no one would be any the wiser. The swamp water was black and I imagined alive with tiny creatures. We stood there in the hot sun, listening to the frogs, the drone of insects, diseased bubbles gurgling up from the swamp. Finally a car came, an ancient black Ford sedan with a sloping trunk. When the man and the boy got out, I saw that the floor of the car was rusted right through; you could see the dirt of the road below. The man said he had a wrench, but he couldn’t get the trunk open. So he yanked the back door and told the boy to get in and pull the rear seat forward. The seat wouldn’t move. The man started yelling at the boy. “Bust it! Go on! Keep pulling, boy! Bust the goddamn thing!” Finally the seat back gave way with a rip and the boy tumbled out of the car onto the ground. He was about my age. His neck was so dirty it was crosshatched with deep black lines like an old shoe.
When we were on our way again, I asked my parents why those people were dressed like that, about the way they smelled, and what was wrong with them.
“They’re just poor,” my father said.
I was to meet the minister at two o’clock. My father had been dead five days, the funeral was in three days, the out-of-town people were starting to arrive, and yet arrangements were still being made. In Merrick Bay, as in many small towns, funerals were not even held in the winter; the bodies were stored in a vault at the undertaker’s until the ground thawed and the graves could be dug.
We had no family plot, but my aunt was hoping we could put my father out there near the church, anyway. This proved impossible.
“You’ll have to get a place at Iron Falls,” said the minister. His name was Reverend Hamm. We stood outside because the church would be cold inside — they only fired up the stove on Sundays. And the weather was warm for May, almost like summer, but without the white light or the settled dust everywhere. The fields were the luminous summer yellow-green of my dreams.
“The graveyard here has been closed for sixty years,” the minister said, pointing. “Filled with pioneers. Have a look if you like. Not the actual graves of course, everything’s been moved around.”
The tombstones, about fifty of them altogether, had been assembled into ragged rows inside a rusty fence. I saw the names: Reed, Merrick, Havelock, Alpenvord, Dixon, Macdonald, Mackenzie, MacNab. Some of the oldest stones were the graves of children.
“Do you remember some story — something they found in the swamp?” I asked.
“The swamp? When?”
“Twenty, twenty-five years ago maybe.” For some reason, I pretended to be vague.
“Before my time, I’m afraid. Only came up here up ten years ago. I’m from the east, you see,” said Reverend Hamm. “Nova Scotia.”
We went over the order of service, the readings, some possible hymns, and then he was off; he was responsible for three of these country churches now, he said — the congregations were all in decline, people dying and moving away, what could you expect — and there was a lot of road to cover, terrible roads at that.
Before leaving, I walked around the church. The mortar between the bricks was pocked with holes, and from the open windows you could smell mildew and dampness, the odour of rotting wood.
Before my mother died, my father used to suggest we attend church once or twice a summer. “For tribal reasons,” he would say. “Before Union, (he meant the union of the Methodist and Presbyterian Churches) this building was Presbyterian.”
It would seem strange to be sitting in church, warm air wafting across the pews from the open windows, and, outside, the buzz of the cicadas. The minister liked to speak to us of something that he called the power of alternative imagining. Four miles away people with gin and tonics would be lounging on the docks by their boathouses. I loved the smell of suntan lotion.
On the way back from the church to my aunt’s house, I passed the Applewoods’ farm. The built-up banks of Sucker Creek had collapsed and shallow water covered the fields. The roof of the barn had collapsed, too; the house was grey and sagging and the windows were boarded up. It was from one of those windows that I had first set eyes on Quentin Miller.
The stone pump house still stood, as solid as a gravestone, in a grove of weeping willows by the creek.
PART II
| Chapter 3 |
Late June. In the fading light of dusk, Phil Havelock and I walked through the bush and fields to the Applewoods’ farm. Walking wasn’t as fast as taking the canoe because you had to skirt the tamarack swamp, but we were in no rush. Besides, it had been a dry winter and spring; the creek was low, and we would have had trouble paddling all the way.
Phil Havelock was almost three years older than me. His family, along with the Applewoods, was one of the last in the area that still farmed. They had a few sheep (at one time the district had been famous for its lamb), chickens, some cattle, and several fields of hay. It was a relative of theirs from whom my father had bought our house. The Havelocks had mixed feelings about my father, partly because the land had been sold out of the family, and partly because they would have liked to sell their own place. All the descendants of the original settlers who had shoreline — the last of the land grants were made as late as the 1890s — had been steadily selling off to summer people, but it was almost impossible to sell land
