her head and resumed digging.
I’d done it again. I should know better than to make any disparaging comment about her man. A month ago, I’d suggested partly as a joke that she should hide her money from him, since Louis seemed to be drinking it up faster than she could earn it. She wasn’t amused, hadn’t talked to me for the rest of the day.
A distant echo of engines caught my attention. I looked up to see a convoy of boats emerge from behind Indian Point. I watched them head towards Whispers Island and beach on the island’s only flat section of shoreline, a narrow spit of land that jutted out from the northern tip. Tiny figures, more like black dots from this distance, swarmed out of the boats. The wind brought the cough of dying motors and the smell of pine mixed with gasoline.
“Still think they’re fishermen?” I pointed to the no longer empty shore of Whispers Island.
Marie narrowed her eyes towards the island. “Where? I don’t see nothing.”
“It might help if you wore your glasses.”
Marie glared at me, then smiled weakly.
I suppose we all have our quirks of vanity. With Marie, it was her glasses. Said they made her look like a raccoon who’d been scared by a bear, which might have been apt, but who was I to confirm her worst fears. With me, it was my hair. Lately, I’d taken to brightening up its greying brilliance with Flame by Clairol.
I watched the figures disappear into the shadow of the giant pines. Other than the ones on my property, they were the last of the ancient white pine that once covered every hill in sight. They extended along the backbone of Whispers Island, making it look like a sleeping porcupine, its tail the spit of land where the boats were beached.
“It looks like they’re checking it out,” I continued.
“What they do that for?”
“I don’t know, maybe they want to have a picnic?”
“Forbidden. Ancestors get mad. Go tell them to leave, Missie.” Marie stood up.
“But Marie, I can’t do that. It’s reserve land. Besides, they must have the chief’s permission, they’re using his boats.”
“No, Miz Agatta Ojimisan. You tell them.” She started walking down the stairs towards the dock.
“Don’t be silly, Marie. I’ve got nothing to do with Whispers Island,” I shouted at her retreating back.
“Hurry!” Marie yelled up as she stepped onto the dock.
Before I had a chance to respond, Sergei, my on-again, off-again watchdog, suddenly erupted into a fit of barking. I scrambled up the stairs to see what had got my large but wimpy black poodle into such a state and was promptly greeted by the small, wiry figure of Louis limping towards me. He ignored the dog snapping at his legs.
He thrust his weather-eroded face into mine and demanded in his thick Quebecois accent, “Where my woman?” Without waiting for an answer, he brushed past me and down the stairs, leaving me in a wake of alcoholic fumes. I made a grab for the dog but decided to let him snap at Louis. Sergei was a good judge of character.
It wasn’t more than a couple of minutes before Louis reappeared over the brow of the hill with a subdued Marie in tow. Head bowed, she never gave me a glance as she shuffled to the rusted metal box Louis called a truck.
An all too familiar feeling of dread washed over me. I didn’t move. I didn’t speak.
With a final challenge from his startling blue eyes, he slammed the door, rammed the gear into place and rumbled down the drive.
I whispered “Bastard” at the retreating car.
TWO
I returned to the planting, determined to finish what Marie and I had started, but I couldn’t. My heart was no longer in it.
Annoyed with my cowardice, I stomped up the stairs to my cottage, which stared back at me with unblinking opacity from its perch on top of the Point. One of the turrets seemed to cast judgment when the windows suddenly flared with reflected sun and as suddenly returned to the shadows. I stopped and stared back at this brazen hussy that dared to call itself a cottage.
It was a folly that more properly belonged in one of those turn-of-the-century summer playgrounds like the Charlevois or Bar Harbor. Instead, Great-grandpa Joe had it built in the middle of nowhere with the only neighbour being the reserve of the Fishhook Algonquin or Migiskan Anishinabeg as they preferred to call themselves. A hundred years later, it was still a folly, and while the reserve now boasted a general store and hockey rink, it was still a hundred miles from nowhere.
I loved this cottage, always had from the first moment I began spending summers with Aunt Aggie. There was something about its rambling Victorian quirkiness, the turrets and arches and wrap-around verandah, all fashioned out of squared timbers, cedar shake and stone, that seemed to shout “I don’t give a damn”.
I sure wished some of that thick-skinned nonchalance could rub off on me. Instead, I was feeling depressed and mad at myself for letting Louis just take Marie away without making so much as a whimper. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know what was probably happening right now. I’d seen that look Louis had worn enough times myself to know the kind of mood he was in.
Gareth.
Gareth used to wear that look. And, like today, whenever I’d seen that look, I’d done nothing. As if in punishment, my arm started throbbing. I rubbed it, as I always did, and headed into the kitchen for the only thing that could wipe out Gareth—vodka, lemon vodka to be exact.
Fortified with a three-finger-full tumbler, I retreated to the deep recess of the verandah, away from the reach of the late afternoon sun. It was the kind of sprawling verandah, complete with fretwork and a whimsical roofline, that modern architects decreed superfluous. It was the place where I spent much of my time, when the weather wasn’t brutally cold.
I sat, where I normally sat, in Aunt Aggie’s old rocker, and took a searing swig of vodka. My fingers, toes tingled.
With a groan, Sergei eased his large curly-haired body onto the wooden floor by my feet. He placed his long, black, pointed snout on his neatly trimmed paws, paws which made him look more like a citified dandy than the dirt-grovelling country dog he had become. I supposed it was unrealistic of me to think I could keep him in the same elegant clip he’d worn in Toronto. But, if he didn’t mind the tugging, I didn’t mind the daily brushings to remove burrs, twigs and whatever else was entangled in his thick coat.
I rocked back and forth, back and forth. Took another swig of vodka. Gradually, the pace slowed as the tonic coursed through my veins. It was a good tonic. It worked every time, a blend of numbing vodka, unrelenting wilderness and syncopated rocking. My arm stopped throbbing.
When I’d first moved in, I’d tried placing the rocker in several different locations, but for one reason or another I was never satisfied, until finally I’d placed it under one of the turreted roofs where a bulge in the verandah extended over the cliff wall. It wasn’t until several months later that I remembered this was the spot where Aunt Aggie used to sit hour by hour. It had a clear view of Whispers Island.
Right now, that clear view of the beached boats showed that the men were still on the island. Who were
