At our end of the point, early on Monday mornings the fathers all left to return to Toronto, leaving the mothers with us. Our family had only one car so when my mother wanted to go to Bridgenorth during the week, to shop or pick up mail, we went in our red-bottomed fourteen-foot cedar boat with its fourteen-horsepower Evinrude motor.
The milkman and the bread man had both come and gone. Rob was at Glory’s cottage and I was searching through the stony gravel by the shoreline, looking for the roundest and flattest stones to skip across the lake’s still water. Angus, lying in the grass, was watching me. I hoped that making stones skip as many times as I could might make them flatter but I was interrupted by my mother who asked if I wanted to go to Bridgenorth with her.
‘I’ll have a cigarette then we’ll go,’ she called from the cottage porch.
The lake lay listless, shrouded in a heat haze. The water by the shoreline was warm, almost hot. I walked through it and with each of my steps, grey clouds of lake bottom swirled up to the surface where it just lingered. A school of jet-black, baby catfish darted away in all directions then, as if drawn by an invisible magnet, found comfort in each other once more and moved on.
Across the lake a mile away, a single cotton candy cloud cast its shadow on the hills, then onto the lake itself. When the wind was blowing, I sometimes watched a cloud’s shadow cross the lake and would run down the point and up to the highway, just to see if I was faster than the sky itself. Today, I shuffled around on the shore playing with seaweed. Others thought seaweed was smelly and dirty but I was intrigued by it. A single strand of lake weed was as soft and as fragile as a strand of cooked spaghetti but when it was torn by storms from the bed of the lake and twisted and tied by the lake’s waves it became stronger than my father.
Outside, on the cottage terrace, my mother lit her Black Cat cigarette and looked out over the lake. I knew that I shouldn’t speak to her until her cigarette had burned to its cork tip. This was her quiet time.
My mother always checked up and down the lake before taking the boat out. If there was a wind developing, even if it wasn’t strong, even if there weren’t any whitecaps, the shopping trip was cancelled. Today the lake was calm. She took from the wall her pencilled list she had tacked there, put it in the pocket in her shorts and walked with me to the boat.
‘Reub, put this cardigan on if you get cold,’ she said to her brother as she stopped by the lawn chair where he was sitting, a heavy book resting on his lap, unread.
In the boat she lifted the gas tank and gave it a shake: she never blithely trusted the arrow on the fuel gauge. If it was low we would stop at the marine gas station at the Blewetts’ lumber mill.
Mum and I put on our Kapok-filled life preservers. Hers was like a vest with ties in front. Mine slipped around the back of my head, down my chest and tied at my waist. In her short shorts and tight blouse and wearing her padded life vest, I was aware of how my mother’s arrival in the village always attracted the attention of the local men in Bridgenorth. At the age of ten I didn’t understand how exotic, how alien and how sexy she appeared to them. I don’t know whether the other young ‘city’ mothers had the same effect on the local men. They probably did.
On a calm day like today it took no more than fifteen minutes to reach the bridge, then only five minutes more to get to where the boat could be beached. Mum talked to me most of the way but what with the engine noise I didn’t hear much. There was no dock to tie up to, so Mum always approached the beach at a good speed then cut the motor and lifted the propeller out of the water, allowing the boat’s momentum to drive us far enough onto the beach for her to hop over the bow onto the sand without her getting her feet wet, then tie the boat’s bowline to a tree while we walked up the steep dusty road to the general store at the top of the hill.
Bridgenorth had all the necessities of cottage life and no more. A general store, a post office, Mr Bell’s gas station, a bait shop that also sold grilled sandwiches, an ice house, a barber’s shop with a pool room the children were not allowed in, and a machine shop. My mother had a Bridgenorth shopping ritual. We never visited the ice house. Collecting sawdust-covered lake ice for our kitchen icebox, where my mother kept her meat, fish and dairy and my father kept his fishing worms, was left to my father to do on weekends. Her first visit was to the post office, to collect that week’s mail and read whichever letters couldn’t wait until she returned to the cottage. ‘Now she’s going to ask the postmistress about her children,’ I thought and as always she did. Then we’d visit the general store, to stock up on the raw materials of life, soap suds, powdered cleanser, matches, spare fuses, forty-eight ounce tins of tomato juice, packets of Freshie and Kool-Aid, popping corn, sewing materials, oil for the lamps. Shopping always took a long time. There were others in front of us, summer people but also local people from Bridgenorth and the surrounding farms, and no one was in a hurry. There wasn’t much more than polite talk between the summer people and the local people although my mother, always smiling, always asking questions, talked to everyone.
Somehow I knew the local people were unlike my family and my friends. They looked different. Paler. Less animated. They didn’t seem to smile much. Their clothes were old although on Sundays when they went to the white clapboard or red-brick churches in Bridgenorth they dressed in dark suits and dark dresses. It seemed to me they came from a separate world and lived in their own muted solitude.
I enjoyed going shopping. There were no shops in Toronto like Bridgenorth’s general store, where someone served you and where you could buy just about anything, but now I was getting bored and was happy to leave. It was hot. I wanted to get back to Grace and the cottagers and go with Perry to our fort in the woods.
At the bottom of the hill, Mum untied the boat, told me to get in and to sit by the motor, then she pushed the boat off the beach into the lake, hopping onto the long bow deck at the very last moment. She paddled far enough out so that she could lower the propeller, then she pulled the starter coil, put the motor into reverse and backed out until it was safe to put the motor into forward, swing around and head back out into the lake. It wasn’t safe. The propeller hit a rock and the shear pin on the propeller broke. Only our momentum now carried us forward.
Mum cut the engine, lifted the propeller out of the water, rotated it with her fingers and knew exactly what she had done. In the freshening westerly wind she paddled the boat back towards the cedar-lined shore. In the shallows she got out into the water and with a pliers from the fishing-tackle box, removed the flexible safety pin, took off the propeller, removed the broken shear pin and inserted another, one of many spares kept in the tackle box. My mother lowered the propeller back into the lake and got in the boat.
‘I bet Grace knows how to change a shear pin,’ she said.
THE SWIMMING LESSON
Grace’s mother drove her daughters, Rob and me to our swimming lesson the next day. The sky was threatening and there was a chop on the lake. My mother knew it was best not to venture out in the boat on days like that.
‘I don’t want to go,’ I told Mum.
‘If it’s too rough to go swimming, Mrs Blewett will teach you artificial respiration instead,’ she replied. ‘She will never put you in any danger.’
I wasn’t worried about danger. On a steely cold, blustery day I didn’t want to get into angry, rough water.
Steve and Perry were already at the marina. Mrs Blewett arrived and she was in her bathing suit. That meant we’d have to go swimming.
When my father built
