and I both stared. Kids did things in the lake together. Not grown-ups. Uncle Reub sat on a lawn chair, a heavy book on his lap, looking out at the lake. He was one of many uncles my brother and I had, sixteen of them, almost all in Toronto. The others frequently visited but it was my mother’s big brother who stayed, sometimes just for a few days, sometimes for months. It was only with us, not with his other brothers or sisters. Back then I didn’t think much about why. I knew he’d been married. Twice. My father never seemed to mind, he treated his brother-in-law like a shadow. My mother would sometimes be quite stern with her older brother. She used the same tone of voice she used when she reprimanded Rob and me.
After the rowboat was in the lake, water leaked into it – at least an inch of water.
‘You should caulk and paint that rowboat,’ Mum said. She was always giving instructions, not just to my father. To everyone. She did so with an affable look and an alluring smile, and everyone seemed content to do as they were told to do.
‘Everyone thinks your mother is sexy,’ I’d heard Steve telling Rob. At that time I didn’t know exactly what that meant.
‘The wood will expand,’ Dad replied and it did. It took only days for the leaking to stop. In mid-July my mother repainted the rowboat herself. All summer she was busy. Not complaining busy although sometimes, when I said something that pleased her, she’d say, ‘I wish your father was more like you.’ She was happy busy, taking us by boat to swimming lessons each Tuesday, laughing with the other mothers as they lay together on their lounge chairs each afternoon, talking about I don’t know what, collecting potatoes from kind Mrs Nichols at the farmhouse at the top of the hill. On rainy days she read stories to all the children on the point and taught us how to play poker. In my mind my father was the colour of the land, brown and green. My mother was the colour she painted the rowboat, fiery red.
After the canoe and rowboat were in the lake, Dad went into the boathouse and using chain winches thrown over the ceiling beams he lowered the motorboat back into the water. Dad got the motor out of the tool house, took its casing off, blew in it, cleaned the carburettor, put in a new spark plug, then, without putting the casing back on, carried the motor close to his broad chest to the boathouse, stepped into the boat, hung the motor from the transom, tightened the wing nuts, then pulled the starter cord. More fiddling with the carburettor and another pull and he was surrounded by blue smoke and unmuffled noise. He replaced the casing, then put the motor in reverse and backed the boat out of the boathouse. Once he was clear he throttled forward, slowly at first, and then, after the spluttering stopped, full throttle. With a boyish grin on his face he made tight turns, so tight that water came over the gunwales and he had to throttle back fast or he’d capsize. My father didn’t swim and he never wore one of the Kapok-filled life jackets he always had us wear.
Dad built the cottage himself. Until the previous summer it was the last one in a row of twenty other cottages on the point, with a field next to it where Mrs Nichols’ three black-and-white dairy cows had grazed.
Dad used two-by-four-inch pine for its frame and six-inch-wide cedar planks for its clapboard siding. He sanded and shellacked the cedar sidings each spring for the first three years then last year gave up and painted it all brilliant white, like the other cottages at our end of the point. Uncle Reub was with us when Dad did that and while watching my dad prepare the cedar sidings, he walked over to where my father was and ran his hand gently over the knots and veins of the rich wood. Uncle Reub’s hands were small and soft, like a fat girl’s.
‘Your cottage was once alive and your father is showing his deep respect for it. It lived in the woods, over there by the lake,’ he said.
He turned towards the ancient cedars that shaded the spearmint and raspberries that had seeded themselves in the new hedge my family had planted.
‘They gave up their lives so that your father had wood to build your home, so you could be safe here in your own cottage during the summer. And when you come back here each June it comes alive again.’
Sometimes I didn’t understand what my uncle was telling me but I always knew that even if I didn’t understand, it was – somehow – interesting.
Our next-door neighbour’s cottage had green windows and doors and the one next to that, Grace and Glory’s, had red ones, so to be different my father painted his windows and doors a deep, dark cobalt blue. Under the relentless summer sun, the cobalt had now turned to a soft powder blue.
At the end of June the water in the lake was still too cold for me to swim in, but once we finished our chores Rob went for a dip. He was a better swimmer than I was. Mum had promised him that he could try for his Royal Life Saving Society Bronze Medallion this summer. All I had was my Red Cross Junior badge.
Using a pump from the tool house – my dad’s storage cabin – I inflated a car tyre inner tube and floated on it. I didn’t mind the cold on my legs when the sun melted my back.
‘Chicken!’ Rob spat as he surfaced near me and splashed me with cold water.
‘I’m going over to Grace’s,’ I shouted to my mother.
‘Not in the water, you’re not, unless Robert goes with you,’ she called back from the front of the cottage where she was pushing the rotating-blade lawn mower across the long grass. Uncle Reub had moved his chair onto the dock to get out of her way. Like Angus, Dad had now disappeared.
‘I’m not going with Robert,’ I replied.
‘Then get out of the water and walk over,’ she said.
I did. Grace was more fun than Rob.
CATCHING CRAYFISH
I peered over the side of the boat, looking for the flat rocks I knew crayfish hid under. My father used crayfish for fishing for bass, pickerel and muskies. Grace rowed. In the rowboat we could go far down the lake, farther than we would ever go if we walked in the shallow waters along the shoreline. Less than 500 yards from our cottages a grove of cedar trees had collapsed in a storm into the lake. It was too deep to walk around them and there was too much poison ivy on the ground around their trunks to get past on land. In the rowboat we were on a new adventure, visiting a part of the lake past the fallen trees we had never visited before.
Looking through the calm, clear water I saw small circles of clean rocks and knew that’s where fish – rock bass, I’d been told by my uncle – had spawned just a few weeks before. He had told me that this is how fish made their homes attractive for their partners and said that’s what my mother did with the cottage. Close to shore I spotted unending flat rocks in the shallows and told Grace to row to the shore. We tied the rowboat to a tree and went hunting.
‘Walk slowly,’ I commanded. ‘Don’t scare them.’
Grace knew how to do this. She was as good at catching crayfish as I was. All these rocks were just perfect. We both knew that but neither said so out loud. In slow motion Grace lifted one end of a flat rock off the bottom without causing a ripple on the lake’s surface and there it was, a perfectly camouflaged crayfish, the colour of limestone and sand. My father had shown all the children on the point how to catch bait, worms at night by muffled light, minnows in minnow traps under the dock and crayfish under rocks. Slowly, like Mr Everett’s brown dog stalking a rabbit, she put her hand into the lake and lowered it towards the crayfish, then in a flash with her thumb and her forefinger she grabbed it behind its claws and pressed it to the bottom of the lake. When she was sure it couldn’t bite her she raised it out of the lake and showed it to me.
