Crow Lake

Praise for
CROW LAKE
#1 National Bestseller

“A compelling and lovely study of sibling rivalry and family dynamics in which the land literally becomes a character… . [Lawson’s] sense of pace and timing is impeccable, and she uses dangerous winter weather brilliantly to increase the tension… . This is a vibrant, resonant novel by a talented writer whose lyrical, evocative writing invites comparisons to Rick Bass and Richard Ford.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review),
a Best Book of the Year

“Darkly unpredictable and compelling … A wise book too, saying as much about how we deny our capacity to hurt as about how we deny our ability to help.”

—
The Financial Times
(London)

“Every detail in this beautifully written novel rings true, the characters so solid we almost feel their flesh… . Lawson creates a community without ever giving in to the Leacockian impulse to poke fun at small-town ways, instead showing respect to lives shaped by hard work and starved for physical comfort… . Stunning.”

—
Quill & Quire
(starred review)

“The kind of book that keeps you reading well past midnight; you grieve when it’s over. Then you start pressing it on friends.” —
The Washington Post,
a Best Book of the Year
“Crow Lake
is a remarkable novel, utterly gripping and yet highly literate, written in such a fresh, believable voice that I had to keep reminding myself that this was fiction. I read it in a single sitting (almost unheard of!), then I read it again, just for the pleasure of it.”

—Joanne Harris, author of
Chocolat

“[Crow Lake]
conveys an astonishing intensity of emotion, almost Proustian in its sense of loss and regret.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“I didn’t read
Crow Lake
so much as I fell in love with it. This is one beautiful book.”

—David Macfarlane, author
of Summer Gone

For Eleanor,
for Nick and Nathaniel,
and most of all
for Richard

part
ONE

PROLOGUE

My great-grandmother Morrison fixed a book rest to her spinning wheel so that she could read while she was spinning, or so the story goes. And one Saturday evening she became so absorbed in her book that when she looked up, she found that it was half past midnight and she had spun for half an hour on the Sabbath day. Back then, that counted as a major sin.

I’m not recounting that little bit of family lore just for the sake of it. I’ve come to the conclusion recently that Great-Grandmother and her book rest have a lot to answer for. She’d been dead for decades by the time the events occurred that devastated our family and put an end to our dreams, but that doesn’t mean she had no influence over the final outcome. What took place between Matt and me can’t be explained without reference to Great-Grandmother. It’s only fair that some of the blame should be laid at her door.

There was a picture of her in my parents’ room while I was growing up. I used to stand in front of it, as a very small child, daring myself to meet her eyes. She was small, tight-lipped, and straight, dressed in black with a white lace collar (scrubbed ruthlessly, no doubt, every single evening and ironed before dawn each day). She looked severe, disapproving, and entirely without humour. And well she might; she had fourteen children in thirteen years and five hundred acres of barren farmland on the Gaspé Peninsula. How she found time to spin, let alone read, I’ll never know.

Of the four of us, Luke, Matt, Bo, and I, Matt was the only one who resembled her at all. He was far from grim, but he had the same straight mouth and steady grey eyes. If I fidgeted in church and got a sharp glance from my mother, I would peer sideways up at Matt to see if he had noticed. And he always had, and looked severe, and then at the last possible moment, just as I was beginning to despair, he would wink.

Matt was ten years older than I, tall and serious and clever. His great passion was the ponds, a mile or two away across the railroad tracks. They were old gravel pits, abandoned years ago after the road was built, and filled by nature with all manner of marvellous wriggling creatures. When Matt first started taking me back to the ponds I was so small he had to carry me on his shoulders— through the woods with their luxuriant growth of poison ivy, along the tracks, past the dusty boxcars lined up to receive their loads of sugar beets, down the steep sandy path to the ponds themselves. There we would lie on our bellies while the sun beat down on our backs, gazing into the dark water, waiting to see what we would see.

There is no image of my childhood that I carry with me more clearly than that; a boy of perhaps fifteen or sixteen, fair-haired and lanky; beside him a little girl, fairer still, her hair drawn back in braids, her thin legs burning brown in the sun. They are both lying perfectly still, chins resting on the backs of their hands. He is showing her things. Or rather, things are drifting out from under rocks and shadows and showing themselves, and he is telling her about them.

“Just move your finger, Kate. Waggle it in the water. He’ll come over. He can’t resist.”

Cautiously the little girl waggles her finger; cautiously a small snapping turtle slides over to investigate.

“See? They’re very curious when they’re young. When he gets older, though, he’ll be suspicious and bad-tempered.”

“Why?”

The old snapper they had trapped out on land once had looked sleepy rather than suspicious. He’d had a wrinkled, rubbery head, and she had wanted to pat it. Matt held out a branch as thick as his thumb and the snapper chopped it in two.

“Their shells are small for the size of their bodies— smaller than most turtles—so a lot of their skin is exposed. It makes them nervous.”

The little girl nods, and the ends of her braids bob up and down in the water, making tiny ripples which tremble out across the surface of the pond. She is completely absorbed.

Hundreds of hours, we must have spent that way over the years. I came to know the tadpoles of the leopard frogs, the fat grey tadpoles of the bullfrogs, the tiny black wriggling ones of toads. I knew the turtles and the catfish, the water striders and the newts, the whirligigs spinning hysterically over the surface of the water. Hundreds of hours, while the seasons changed and the pond life died and renewed itself many times, and I grew too big to ride on Matt’s shoulders and instead picked my way through the woods behind him. I was unaware of these changes of course—they happened so gradually, and children have very little concept of time. Tomorrow is forever, and years pass in no time at all.

chapter
ONE

When the end came, it seemed to do so completely out of the blue, and it wasn’t until long afterwards that I was able to see that there was a chain of events leading up to it. Some of those events had nothing to do with us, the Morrisons, but were solely the concern of the Pyes, who lived on a farm about a mile away and were our nearest neighbours. The Pyes were what you’d call a problem family, always had been, always would be, but that year, within the privacy of their big old grey-painted farmhouse—offstage as far as the rest of the community was concerned—their problems were developing into a full-scale nightmare. The other thing we didn’t know was that the Pye nightmare was destined to become entangled with the Morrison dream. Nobody could have predicted that.

There’s no end to how far back you can go, of course, when you’re trying to figure out where something started. The search can take you back to Adam and beyond. But for our family there was an event that summer catastrophic enough to be the start of practically anything. It took place on a hot, still Saturday in July when I was seven years old, and brought normal family life to an end; even now, almost twenty years later, I find it hard to get any sort of perspective on it.

The only positive thing you can say about it is that at least everything ended on a high note, because the previous day—our last day together as a family—my parents had learned that Luke, my “other” brother—other than Matt—had passed his senior matriculation and won a place at teachers’ college. Luke’s success was something of a surprise because, to put it mildly, he was not a scholar. I remember reading somewhere a theory to the effect that each member of a family has a role—“the clever one,” “the pretty one,” “the selfish one.” Once you’ve been established in the role for a while, you’re stuck with it—no matter what you do, people will still see you as whatever-it-was—but in the early stages, according to the theory, you have some choice as to what your role will be. If that’s the case, then early on in life Luke must have decided that what he really wanted to be was “the problem one.” I don’t know what influenced his choice, but it’s possible that he’d heard the story of Great-Grandmother and her famous book rest once too often. That story must have been the bane of Luke’s life. Or one of the banes—the other would have been having Matt as a brother. Matt was so obviously Great-Grandmother’s true intellectual heir that there was no point in Luke even trying. Better, then, to find what he was naturally good at—raising our parents’ blood pressure, say—and practise, practise, practise.

But somehow, in spite of himself, here he was at the age of nineteen having passed his exams. After three generations of striving, a member of the Morrison family was about to go on to higher education.

It was a first not only for the family but also, I think, for Crow Lake, the small farming community in northern Ontario where all four of us were born and brought up. At that time Crow Lake was linked to the outside world by one dusty road and the railroad tracks. The trains didn’t stop unless you flagged them down and the road led only south, there being no reason for anyone to want to go farther north. Apart from a dozen or so farms, a general store, and a few modest houses out by the lake, there was nothing there but the church and the school. Historically, as I say, Crow Lake hadn’t produced much in the way of scholars, and Luke’s achievement would have made banner headlines in the church newsletter the following Sunday if our family catastrophe hadn’t got in the way.

Luke must have received the letter confirming his place at teachers’ college on Friday morning and told my mother, who phoned my father at the bank where he worked, in Struan, twenty miles away. That in itself was almost unheard of; never, ever, would a wife disturb her husband at his work if that work was at a desk. But she phoned him, and the two of them must have decided to announce it to the rest of us at supper that evening.

I’ve gone over that mealtime many times in my mind, less because of Luke’s astounding news than because it turned out to be our last family supper. I know that memory plays tricks on you and that events and incidents your brain has invented can seem as real as those which actually took place, but I do believe that I remember every detail of that meal. And looking back, what seems most poignant to me is how low-key it was. Understatement was the rule in our house. Emotions, even positive ones, were kept firmly under control. It was the Eleventh Commandment, carved on its very own tablet of stone and presented specifically to those of Presbyterian persuasion: Thou Shalt Not Emote.

So supper that evening was exactly as it always was, rather formal, rather dull, with occasional diversions from Bo. There are several photographs of Bo at that time. She was small and round and had a fine, fair fluff of hair that stood straight out from her head as if she’d been struck by lightning. In the photographs she looks placid and sweet, which only goes to show the extent to which the camera can lie.

We all sat in our proper places, Luke and Matt, aged nineteen and seventeen, on one side of the table; myself, aged seven, and Bo, aged one and a half, on the other. I remember my father starting to say grace and being interrupted by Bo, asking for juice, and my mother saying, “In a minute, Bo. Shut your eyes.” My father started again, and Bo interrupted again, and my mother said, “If you interrupt once more you’ll go straight to bed,” whereupon Bo stuck her thumb in her mouth and started sucking it, balefully, with a regular clicking noise, like a time bomb biding its time.

“We’ll try again, Lord,” my father said. “Thank you for the meal you have set before us tonight, and thank you particularly for the news we received today. Help us always to be aware of our great good fortune. Help us to make the most of our opportunities and to use such small gifts as we have in Thy service. Amen.”

Luke and Matt and I stretched. My mother passed Bo her juice.

“What news?” Matt said. He sat directly across from me. If I slid down in my chair and stretched out my legs I could touch his knee with my toe.

“Your brother”—my father inclined his head in Luke’s direction—“has been accepted at teachers’ college. The school confirmed it today”

“No kidding?” Matt said, looking at Luke.

I looked at him too. I’m not sure that I’d ever really looked at Luke before—really considered him. For one reason or another we’d had very little to do with each other. The difference in our ages was even greater than that between myself and Matt, of course, but I don’t think it was that. We just didn’t have much in common.

But I noticed him now, sitting beside Matt as he presumably had for the last seventeen years. In some ways they were very similar—you wouldn’t have had any difficulty guessing that they were brothers. They were of similar height and both were fair with long Morrison noses and grey eyes. The main difference was in build. Luke was broad-shouldered and heavy-boned and must have weighed a good thirty pounds more than Matt. In his actions he was slow-moving and powerful, where Matt was agile and quick.

“No kidding!” Matt said again, overdoing the astonishment a little. Luke gave him a slant-eyed look. Matt grinned and dropped the astonishment and said, “That’s great! Congratulations!”

Luke shrugged.

I said, “Are you going to be a teacher?” I couldn’t imagine it. Teachers were people of great authority. Luke was merely Luke.

“Yeah,” Luke said.

He was slouching, but for once our father didn’t tell him to sit up. Matt slouched too, but he didn’t work at it like Luke did, he didn’t
sprawl,
so compared to Luke he always looked relatively upright.

“He’s a very fortunate young man,” my mother said. In her effort to hide her unseemly pride and pleasure she sounded almost cross. She was serving the meal—pork from the Tadworths’ pigs; potatoes, carrots, and runner beans from Calvin Pye’s farm; applesauce from Mr. Janie’s ancient battered apple trees. “Not everybody gets an opportunity like that. Not everybody, by any means. Here you are, Bo, here’s your dinner. And eat properly. Don’t play with it.”

“When do you go?” Matt said. “And where? Toronto?”

“Yeah. End of September.”

Bo picked up a fistful of runner beans and clasped them to her chest, crooning.

“We may have to get you a suit,” my mother said to Luke. She looked at my father. “Will he need a suit?”

“I don’t know,” my father said.

“You have to get him a suit,” Matt said. “He’d look so lovely.”

Luke only snorted. In spite of their differences and the fact that Luke was always in trouble and Matt never was, there was seldom real friction between them. Both of them were what you would call slow to anger. And most of the time they inhabited separate worlds, I suppose, so they didn’t often rub up against each other. Having said that, occasionally they did fight, and when they did, all of the emotions which weren’t supposed to come out at all came out all at once, shattering the Eleventh Commandment. For some reason the fighting itself didn’t seem to be against the rules—maybe my parents put it down to normal adolescent-male behaviour, reasoning that if the Lord hadn’t wanted them to fight, He wouldn’t have given them fists. Once though, in the heat of the moment, having swung at Matt’s head and missed and smashed his fist into the door frame, Luke said, “Shit! You bastard!” and was banned from the dining room for a week and made to eat standing in the kitchen.

But I was the one who was really upset by their fights. Matt was the quicker, but Luke was by far the stronger, and I was terrified that one day one of his massive swings would connect and Matt would be killed. I would scream at them to stop, and my screaming annoyed my parents so much that frequently I was the one who was sent to my room.

“What he will need,” my father said, still pondering the question of a suit, “is a suitcase.”

“Oh,” my mother said. The serving spoon paused above the bowl of potatoes. “A suitcase,” she said. “Yes.”

Just for an instant I saw her face stricken. I stopped fiddling with my knife and watched her anxiously. I suppose until that moment she hadn’t quite grasped the fact that Luke would be going away.

Bo was singing to her runner beans, rocking them gently to and fro against her shoulder. “Baby, baby,” she sang. “Baby baby baby bean.”

“Put them down, Bo,” my mother said absently, the serving spoon still hovering. “They’re to eat. Put them down, and I’ll cut them up for you.”

Bo looked horrified. She shrieked and clutched the beans passionately to her chest.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” my mother said. “Stop it. I’m tired of you.”

And whatever it was that had been in her face was gone, and all was normal again. “We’ll have to go to town,” she said to my father. “To the Bay. They have suitcases. We can go tomorrow.”

So on the Saturday they drove into Struan together. There was no real need for both of them to go. Each of them was capable of choosing a suitcase on his own. And there was no need for them to rush off and do it that weekend—it was more than six weeks before Luke’s term would start. But I guess they just wanted to. Odd though the word seems when applied to such calm, practical people, it’s possible that they were excited. This was their son, after all. A Morrison was going to be a teacher.

They didn’t want to take Bo and me with them, and of course we were too young to leave alone, so they waited until Luke and Matt got back from Calvin Pye’s farm. Both of them worked on the farm at weekends and during holidays. Mr. and Mrs. Pye had three children of their own but two of them were girls, and Laurie, the boy, was only fourteen and too small for heavy work, so Mr. Pye was obliged to hire muscle.

Matt and Luke got home about four. My parents asked Luke if he would like to come and choose his own suitcase but he said no, he was too hot and needed a swim.

I believe I was the only one to wave goodbye. It’s possible that I have invented that wave—that I dreamed it up later because I couldn’t bear not to have said goodbye—but I think it’s a genuine memory. The other three didn’t because Bo was in a rage at being left behind and Matt and Luke were staring gloomily at her, wondering who was going to be lumbered with her for the rest of the afternoon.

The car turned out onto the road and disappeared from sight. Bo sat down on the gravel of the driveway and bellowed.

“Well, I’m going for a swim,” Luke said, loudly, to be heard over Bo. “I’m hot. I’ve been working the whole damned day.”

“So’ve I,” Matt said.

“So’ve I,” I said.

Matt prodded Bo’s bottom with his toe. “How about you, Bo? Have you been working the whole damned day?”

Bo roared.

Luke said, “Why does she have to make that Godawful noise all the time?”

“She knows how much you love it,” Matt said. He reached down, pried Bo’s thumb out from her fist, and plugged her mouth with it. “How about a swim, Bo? Do you want a swim?”

She nodded, moaning around her thumb.

It must have been the first time we’d been for a swim together, all four of us. The lake was less than twenty yards from the house so you just went in when you felt like it, and I suppose we’d never all felt like it at the same time before. In any case my mother would always have taken Bo. But we passed her around between us, using her as a beach ball, and it was good fun. I remember that.

I also remember that Sally McLean came along not long after we’d got out of the water. Mr. and Mrs. McLean owned the one and only store in Crow Lake and Sally was their daughter. In the last few weeks she’d taken to dropping by quite often, and each time she looked as if she were on her way somewhere and just happened to come across us. This was odd because there was nowhere for her to be on her way to. Our house was the last in Crow Lake and a fair way out; beyond it there was about three thousand miles of nothing and then the North Pole.

Luke and Matt had been skipping stones, but when Sally appeared Matt stopped and came and sat down and watched me bury Bo. Bo hadn’t been buried before and she was delighted. I’d scooped out a little hollow for her in the warm sand and she sat in it, round and brown and naked as an egg, and watched wide-eyed and beaming while I piled the sand up around her.