breasts breaking the water with each scissors kick of his legs. Mrs Blewett realised her bathing suit had come loose only when she started to climb the ladder from the lake and quickly tied the strap behind her neck.
‘Mrs Blewett went skinny dipping the way you do,’ Grace told her mother as she drove us back to the point.
‘I don’t think so, children,’ her mother replied.
‘She did. Her knockers are enormous.’
‘Where did you hear such a word?’ Grace’s mother asked, and Glory told her how the strap on Mrs Blewett’s bathing suit had come undone.
‘How did that happen?’ she asked.
‘Steve told me it had partly come undone and I tried to tie it back when I towed her but that might have made it worse,’ Rob offered.
‘I think you boys are growing up too fast,’ Grace’s mother said as we arrived back at her cottage.
THE ROCKY SHOAL
Lake Chemong is long and narrow, with few islands and fewer shoals, although there are dangerous rocks just below the lake’s surface near Perry’s cottage on Cedar Bay, about a mile up the lake – beyond frog bog. The day after our artificial respiration lesson it was sunny once more, but not too hot and humid. Perry and Steve’s mother had invited my family and Grace’s family for lunch. That wasn’t unusual. Perry’s parents always came to the Saturday night parties the cottagers on Long Point had. Perry’s father hadn’t built their cottage. In fact no one else’s father had built their cottage except mine. They’d all been built by builders.
The families went to Perry’s by boat, the fastest way. Only children walked along the lake from Long Point to Cedar Bay. At the far end of Long Point was the dead forest and adults didn’t like walking through it. Up by the road was an abandoned barn and from there through the woods to the lake was private property. When you emerged from the woods the ground was wet and boggy and the air filled with mosquitoes, although at night the mosquitoes were joined by fireflies. After that there were three tarpaper shacks where poor people from Europe who didn’t speak English spent their summers. The shacks were no more than four walls and a roof with a round aluminium chimney vent up the outside wall of each one. The roofs were made of red asphalt tiles all covered in lichen. I don’t know who built them first but the people living in them repaired them each year, nailing overlapping rolls of new tarpaper on the outside to the simple shack frame, floor to roof. It was easy to see what was fresh and new and black. Old tarpaper went slate grey in a year. The tarpaper shack cottagers got their water from the lake and shared an outhouse you could sometimes smell even from frog bog. Fronko, the same age as me, lived in one of those shacks and every now and then went to our fort in the woods. Adults got to Cedar Bay by walking up the hill to the county road, then along that road to the narrow lane that led back to the lake. That took at least half an hour. The boat trip took only a few minutes.
My mother drove the boat with Angus in the bow. He liked to be lookout. As she neared Perry’s cottage she slowed it almost to an idle and asked us to look in the water for rocks. She didn’t want to shear another pin on them. I saw the rocks first and guided my mother away from them to our landing at Perry’s dock.
We had lunch together on the lawn and after lunch Perry and I went down to the lake and waded out to where the water was up to our waists. With our feet we felt the sand for clams. It wasn’t long before we had dozens of them. Our families didn’t eat them. We only ate fish with scales on them, but Dr Sweeting loved these clams almost as much as he loved the catfish we caught but were too frightened to take off hooks.
Uncle Reub watched us and, out of the blue, Perry asked him why there was that rocky shoal near here but nowhere else.
‘Well, that’s interesting,’ Uncle explained.
‘You see, long before the summer folk came to Lake Chemong, long before Farmer Everett’s ancestors cut down the forest and cleared the boulders from the land alongside the lake, for his corn and pigs and cows, long before the Bleuets became the Blewetts, an Indian hunter lived here. His name was Albert Gonquin although his good friends called him Al, Al Gonquin.
‘Al had a beautiful daughter, Minnemoosah, and all the young men in his tribe were in love with her and asked Al for her hand in marriage.’
The other children all knew that my uncle was a great storyteller. I thought that he enjoyed telling his tales as much as we enjoyed listening to them. Mum sometimes reads us stories, especially on rainy days when we were tired of playing cards, but my uncle told stories. We never knew whether they were for real or whether he made them up as he told them. One rainy day, when Mum had gone shopping in town with Grace’s mother, and Perry was visiting and my uncle had been left to look after us, he emerged from his bedroom with a tomahawk in his hands and a twinkling look of worry in his eyes. ‘Men and women,’ he said, ‘we’re under attack from Indians!’ But we knew he was making that up. He told his tale anyways and today, on the front lawn of Perry’s cottage, he continued.
‘Now Al couldn’t decide which brave should marry his daughter so he set a competition. Whoever threw the heaviest stone the farthest into Lake Chemong would marry her.’
Grace grinned and pushed me with her hands.
‘Boys, the day of that competition wasn’t a calm day like today. It was a rough day, a hellish rough day. The sun was shining in the sky, shining with all its might. It did its very best to make the day seem smooth and bright but the North Wind was howling down the lake and the whitecaps were taller than the tallest brave in Al’s tribe. The braves threw stone after stone out into the lake but because of those waves no one could tell exactly which was the heaviest that had landed the farthest. From dawn until dusk those strong braves threw rock after rock into the lake until they had thrown so many stones that that shoal of rocks just down from your cottage had grown in height to where it is today.’
My uncle continued, ‘Al Gonquin was now in a pickle. He’d promised the hand of his daughter in marriage to the brave who threw the heaviest stone the farthest but no one knew who that man was and now Minnemoosah entered the picture. She was a bit like your mother, Brucie, small, sensible, feisty, a good woman but with her own mind. “Fearless Father,” she said, “it’s my life and I'll decide who I marry,” and right then and there she chose a brave brave named Mikkimoosah.’
‘What happened to them?’ Grace asked.
‘Well, Al moved up north to Haliburton and named a park after himself, the braves all moved up to Mud Lake, where the Reserve now is, and Minnemoosah and Mikkimoosah moved to California where they went into the movies.’
Grace’s eyes danced and she clapped her hands until they hurt.
‘Tell me another!’ she implored my uncle.
‘Would you like to hear a true story told to me by Edgar Ten Fingers?’
‘Yes! Yes!’ Grace answered. Glory also gave an affirming nod and our mothers smiled.
Perry and I were more interested in doing rather than listening. We decided to see what was happening at frog bog.
THE GANG'S HIDEOUT
Nothing
