Phil and I often caught frogs and crabs for bait and fished in Sucker Creek. “Why don’t you go fishing?” my father used to ask. “Boys like fishing, don’t they?” He never accompanied me. He swam poorly.
“How come your dad don’t swim?” Phil asked me. “He fuckin’ English or something? What happens if he falls out of the canoe?”
To my knowledge my father had never once ventured out in the yellow canoe.
When we were younger, Phil and I would build rafts and pole our way up the creek past the Applewoods’ farm and as far as the haunted house, the old Allen place, looking for bait. We would hunt for snakes in the pipes and cavities of the Applewoods’ pump house — there were supposed to have been huge squirming nests of them there years before, tangled balls — but we never found any. We didn’t know then that the snakes were only there from November to June; they migrated to the fields and riverbanks in summer.
Sometimes my aunt let us take the outboard — “Three and a half Jesely horsepower,” said Phil, taking a drag on his cigarette. We fished in Merrick Bay, along the inland shore, by some of the islands, or out by the cribs, the ruins of an old steamboat pier that teemed with sunfish, bass, and yellow perch. Or in the haunted lagoon.
In an abandoned drive shed in the corner of the farm property, Phil had amassed a collection of magazines: Popular Mechanics, car magazines, and what he called “nudie” magazines. Earlier that afternoon, while we flipped through these for the hundredth time, sharing one of his father’s beers and smoking his father’s cigarettes, Phil took out his wallet and showed me his condoms. This time he opened one of them. The skin of a long, white worm.
“You put this thing on your dick so she won’t have a baby, see?”
What did I care about babies?
“Know what else you can do with them? Make party favours.” He began blowing it up. I examined the package. “Take one,” said Phil. “I got millions.”
“I haven’t needed one lately,” I said. The foil package was wrinkled and bent. It looked about twenty years old. I didn’t believe he had millions.
“You ought to try it with a piece of liver,” Phil said. “Feels like the real thing.”
“How do you know what the real thing feels like?” I asked.
He smirked. “I know, believe me.”
Life in Merrick Bay always seemed to me to be more about birth and death than did life in the city. In the city I was cocooned, insulated; in Merrick Bay I saw things I could never have imagined. Phil and I watched through a slit in the barn door as his father slaughtered a calf. He held an axe, concealed behind his back, as he patted the calf on the head. Then, a lightning-like flash of sunlight on the blade, and he brought the axe around and over his shoulder in an arc and hit the animal on the head with the flat end. The calf bucked forward on its knees and collapsed. Mr. Havelock took a knife from his pocket and slit its throat. He tied a rope to the calf’s left rear leg, threw it over a beam, and hauled the carcass up to let the blood drain out. Afterward, in the compost pile, Phil stabbed through a garbage bag to the glistening mass of innards with a pitchfork. These images later became associated in my mind with other things.
I remembered the day the year before when Mr. Applewood died. Mrs. Havelock stood at the back door of the farmhouse, both hands to her face. The people of Merrick Bay thought of Mrs. Havelock as a sweet woman married to a stick. She was involved in the Women’s Institute and was often away at meetings or visiting the sick and infirm, and when she was home, she never stopped talking. Mr. Havelock said little. He was a secret drinker: he kept a twenty-four of Dow in the basement and a fifth of Crown Royal in the garage. He would lurk in the yard with a broom with which he chased away the chickens while Mrs. Havelock prattled on. But on that day she was, for once, silent.
Mr. Havelock and Donny, the Applewoods’ silent foster son, ran toward the pickup. They had ropes, crowbars, and the chain saw. Phil stood beside the truck.
Mr. Havelock turned and yelled at him: “No, absolutely not. You stay here. Show the ambulance the way when it comes up the road.”
The pickup roared away, leaving a cloud of dust settling over the pale grass of the farmyard. Phil and I stood still until the truck was out of sight. Then we ran back toward Sucker Creek. We shoved the yellow canoe into the water and paddled upstream as fast as we could.
“What happened?” I asked Phil. “What’s going on?”
“You’ll see.”
After we passed through the tamarack swamp, the creek broadened to a wide bend and the land suddenly seemed to open up — a clearing in the forest like a secret garden. The Applewoods’ farm was out of place there: neat fields, a perfect green barn, and, on a small hill in the distance, a white frame house with green trim. By a stand of poplars, between the creek and the field closest to the old pump house, we saw a group of figures. We saw the Havelocks’ pickup and other cars driving across the fields. As we drew closer, I spotted a tractor overturned in the grass near the trees, one of those oddly thin Massey-Fergusons with the front wheels close together, the kind of tractor people used to scythe grass or plough vegetable gardens. And then the immense roots of a poplar tree that had toppled over, pulling itself loose from the spongy bank of the creek. We scrambled ashore. Through the leaves I saw a hand, palm to the sky although the man lay on his stomach. The hand was faintly blue. The man’s eyes, half-open, were still bright. The trunk of the tree had missed him, but a large branch lay across his back. The branch looked as though it were just resting on Mr. Applewood, that he might stand up and brush it aside. It had crushed him to death.
The buzz of a chain saw. In the distance I saw Mrs. Applewood with her arms around the neck of a girl. Marjorie Applewood. She had dark hair and large dark eyes that shone with tears.
Now, with Mr. Applewood gone, the farm was beginning to slip. The front gate was off its hinges and the lawn at the side of the driveway was going to seed with dandelions and plantain. There was a harrow with grass growing through the tines and a couple of old cars up on blocks — a common sight along the back roads of the district, but incongruous in front of the Applewoods’ still bright green barn.
The cars were Donny’s: junkers that he brought home and sold in bits and pieces to garages and body shops. When Mr. Applewood was alive, Donny had to keep the cars out behind the barn. Donny was the Applewoods’ foster child, had lived with them since he was four years old. Some people said he wasn’t quite right in the head. I thought he was just quiet. Scary quiet.
But Phil Havelock seemed to understand Donny, and he knew people like Chicklet, too, who lived in the district year-round and attended the high school at Iron Falls, and the big Indian from Parry Sound that everyone called Spook. Phil and his friends went to bars — the Shalomar, just beyond the village, or the Golden Dragon, down the highway. Phil was almost nineteen, but he looked about twenty-five. He was six feet tall and had a dark beard. He was starting to go bald. He had deep wings and a bare spot on the back of his head the size of a silver dollar, and the beginnings of a paunch. Phil was working around the farm that summer and helping his father look after the summer places. In September he would even have to pay rent, which I thought was very strange. The good news was he had his driver’s licence.
We’d been sitting in the Havelocks’ kitchen, listening to Phil’s mother talk. She talked endlessly about the families in the district and what they were doing: the MacNabs, the Aults, the Reeds, the Merricks, what was left of them. And the Applewoods, especially the Applewoods, poor Marjorie and Donny — not quite right in
