said, but she kept it anyways and put it in the rowboat.
I was pleased with Grace, even proud of her. None of the other girls in the cottages on Long Point ever wanted to go crayfish hunting, but she always did.
We decided to work in opposite directions, me on one side of the rowboat and Grace on the other. Silently, with bent backs and eyes close to the water we looked for flat rocks lying on other rocks, places where crayfish could hide from us, and those rocks were everywhere. Just about every rock we lifted had a crayfish hiding underneath and within a short time the rowboat was crawling with dozens of irritated crayfish. In their anger some were biting others. Each time another was thrown into the rowboat, the nearest crayfish raised its opened claws. In the white bottom of the boat
they looked like a congregation of praying scorpions in a
dry desert.
After a while Grace got bored and walked to the shaded shore where she sat on a large rock between two great cedars that leaned out over the lake. Behind her was a meadow of summer flowers, airy and shimmering and light, gently dancing to the soft south wind. I could see that no one had ever walked through that meadow. ‘I wonder whether this is what heaven’s like,’ I thought. On the shoreline spring storms had washed away soil from around the trees’ massive chocolate-brown roots and peering out from within those roots Grace saw two tiny eyes.
‘Get the flashlight,’ Grace ordered, but I knew I couldn’t. It wasn’t there.
Rowing at night shortly after we arrived, Uncle had broken our shared silence by saying, ‘Let’s throw the flashlight into the lake.’ I was disturbed by the suggestion. I didn’t want to. The flashlight had made me feel safe and, besides, it was my father’s.
‘I’ll buy another. Turn it on. Let’s throw it in the lake and watch what happens.’
I turned it on. Holding it in both hands, not really wanting to throw it in the lake, I asked my uncle, ‘How long will it shine?’ and my uncle, smiling a broad grin, said, ‘Long enough to entertain all the fish in the lake. Then, when it’s served a purpose, when it’s had a reason for living, it will go out.’
I liked that answer so I gently placed the flashlight into the water and watched as it twinkled into the deep. For a moment I had an impulse to follow it, to see what lived at the bottom of the lake.
I didn’t tell Grace why the flashlight wasn’t there, I just said, ‘It’s not here,’ and quietly walked over to where she was.
‘I can’t see anything,’ I said.
‘Stupid! It’s your fault it’s gone.’
‘It’s not my fault. Anything would run away just looking at you!’ I hissed.
Sometimes Grace was like Angus. She didn’t think first. She just said things or did things. That made me angry and I said things I didn’t really mean. We both decided not to talk to each other ever again and to go back home.
Rowing back to the cottage – with Grace rowing because she said so – the army of angry crayfish marched this way and that on the bottom of the boat, all their claws raised in anger. Grace rowed squatting with her feet beside her. I sat backwards with my feet over the transom. That boat filled with crayfish was just too thrilling and it didn’t take long for Grace to speak.
‘Mr Muskratt says that crayfish are tasty and we should eat them.’
‘When did he say that?’ I asked. Mr Muskratt lived up the lake, on the Indian Reserve. He was thickset and strong. His leathery face was the colour of the woods. Even his dark brown eyes blended into the landscape. He never said much, almost nothing at all. ‘Yep.’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Eh?’ when he wanted you to say something again.
On Friday, when he came in his canoe selling fish, he saw the crayfish my dad had for fishing and told him that instead of wasting his time fishing with them, my dad should just buy Mr Muskratt’s fish and eat the crayfish instead. He said that Mrs Muskratt sometimes boiled them and sometimes roasted them for Mr Muskratt and their children.
AN EARLY SUMMER DAY
Sometimes, even when you’re little, you know when life is perfect. You just know. The sun woke me up early and it dazzled off the white clapboard siding on the back of the cottage. It was so clear and it was so bright it almost hurt just to keep my eyes open. Warm rain overnight had left the grass heavy with wet and the black soil in the vegetable patch near the gravelled road steamed.
It was my second week at the lake and so far it only rained at night. I walked round to the front of the cottage. The lake looked like an enormous puddle of mercury and it gave such a pure reflection of the cloudless morning sky and the forested shore on the far side I couldn’t tell up from down. When the water looked like that I knew that nothing would happen. Fish wouldn’t bite. Ducks wouldn’t fly. Only dragonflies enjoyed that nothingness. I wasn’t surprised my uncle was there, motionless in a lawn chair only yards from the shoreline facing the lake. He was always looking out at the lake. Sometimes he’d sit there in his pyjamas all day until my mother would tell him to get dressed. This time I wondered whether my uncle had died during the night and I was the only one to know.
I didn’t move. For a long time I just stared, watching to see if he was breathing but somehow he knew I was there.
‘I’ve been looking down towards the bridge. It’s too far to see now but when cars had their lights on earlier, they looked like tiny fireflies slowly gliding across the water.’
He paused and again we were both silent. That wasn’t unusual. Sometimes Uncle Reub let his silences stretch out and I didn’t mind that.
‘What do you think of this morning?’ Uncle eventually asked but I didn’t answer. I knew what I thought. I knew a lot but I didn’t always talk about it.
‘I’m going to frog bog,’ I finally said, not as an answer but as a fact.
‘With Robert?’
I never did anything with my big brother. If we played together we ended up fighting. We had the same parents and lived in the same house but that was the extent of our shared togetherness.
‘Just me.’
We both looked down the lake, me straining to see a car crossing the bridge, then to my surprise my uncle said, ‘May I come along?’
Uncle Reub didn’t do much at the cottage. He didn’t swim, or even put his feet in the lake. He certainly didn’t take walks on his own like my mother did. He didn’t seem to care much about his clothes. During the first week at the cottage he wore city trousers held up by braces, over a white shirt. Now that it was hotter and more sultry during the day he wore a white undershirt. This morning he was in trousers but still wearing his pyjama top. He always wore black leather city shoes, usually with white socks. To me, my uncle seemed separate from other adults. He listened to me and I was pleased with that attention. I said, ‘Yes.’
Frog bog was part of the dead forest, the part that lay in the lake. I thought there once must have been a great battle with an evil spirit that lurked in the depths of the lake and that the trees gave up their lives and drowned themselves to save their friends in the living forest. Maybe it was just a shooting star that had fallen on them. Most
