Eye Lake (5 page)

‘Then turn it on,' I said.

‘That's what I'm trying to do.'

It was bigger than it looked from above. The sides were bare earth studded with rocks, and the ceiling was made out of boards.

There were four rows of shelves, mostly stacked with cans. George and me walked along them one by one, telling each other what kind we saw.

‘Green beans.'

‘Ham.'

‘Corn.'

‘Tomatoes.'

And so on. But there was lots of other stuff apart from the cans. We found pots and pans, matches, knives, coils of rope, boxes of freeze-dried food, axes, nails, bullets – pretty much everything you could think of. Two hunting rifles and a shotgun sat on a rack by the door.

The paper spread out on the table was a map of Canada and America. Somebody had drawn a bunch of little red circles on it, mostly around cities in America, and connected them with lines to Crooked River. They made the map look like a huge red spider's web, and there were numbers beside every line, saying how many kilometres it was from each circle to Crooked River; the closest ones had a second, much bigger, circle around them – but none of them quite touched the tiny blue squiggle of the Crooked River.

I don't know how long we were down there – maybe ten or fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour, it was hard to tell. It seemed like time had got stuck or stretched or something, the way the dust moved slow, barely falling, through the beams of the flashlight that hung from the ceiling, still rocking gently back and forth
from when George had knocked it with his head; as if one movement could last a hundred years down there, could keep on going and going and going like a clock that keeps ticking even when there's no more time to tell. It was like being in a kind of trance or dream and it wasn't till we stepped back into the place where the light came in from the door that it broke. There were ravens croaking up above and a long
chick-ka-dee-dee-deee
drifted in from the woods. The world was out there with things living and moving in it, things we'd almost forgotten to think about.

‘Do you think someone lives here?' George suddenly said.

‘I don't know. I reckon … '

‘Do you think it's a shacker?'

You won't see any mention of them in the museum but when we were kids there were still some shackers about, the same as there still used to be caribou about when the old-timers were kids. Or maybe you would find something about them somewhere in the museum, but Mr. Haney wouldn't call them shackers, he'd call them ‘characters.' There'd be a picture on the wall and underneath it a name with ‘a real character' written beside it in brackets. I never knew what the difference was exactly. Shackers were just guys who lived out in the bush by themselves – in shacks. Some of them did a bit of trapping and a few did some prospecting, but mostly you didn't really know what they did. They minded their own business and everyone else minded it too. You didn't see them in town much, which was the whole purpose of being a shacker I guess: if you lived in the bush you must've wanted to be alone, because that's what you'd be about 99 percent of the time.

I suppose one difference was there were ones it was okay to say hello and talk to if you saw them and others you were meant to stay good and clear of. For instance there was the Earl, who used to live right on the shore of Eye Lake, no more than a couple of hundred
yards from where the Poplars is now. He was an Englishman, old and short and skinny, who wore thick glasses and spoke like he was the queen's husband. It was fine to say hello to the Earl, if he ever came out of his shack; not that you'd expect him to say hello back or anything – mostly he talked to himself or his invisible friends and didn't want to be interrupted. (Sometimes Virgil stopped for a drink with him when he went fishing, but that was the exception.) Then there was Oskar the Finn, who lived a ways down the tracks. You weren't supposed to even look at Oskar. Nobody ever said anything exactly, but you were meant to keep a good rifle's shot of distance between him and you if you did see him. We kids all got the idea he'd slit people's throats or eaten babies or something worse – Billy had a bunch of ideas. The Earl was a character; Oskar was a plain shacker.

‘It could be,' I said to George, and we looked at each other for a bit, all hushed and breathless, probably thinking of throats being slit and babies being eaten. George's eyes were beginning to water around the edges. They did that from the sun, or sometimes from when he was excited or scared or thinking hard about something. Right then you could tell he was excited
and
scared
and
thinking hard.

‘I reckon we should get,' I said. There was something about that place that made me not want to be there.

George's eyes watered some more. He was looking back and forth from the light at the door to the stuff on the shelves, moving his weight from foot to foot the same as when he'd found stuff and stood outside our porch. I knew he wanted to go and he didn't want to go all at once. And I knew as well that we'd be coming back. It was the most stuff he'd ever found.

On our way to the canoe I kept two eyes on the ground. I didn't want to find nothing more. I wished George wasn't so curious.

By the end of the third day they still hadn't found George. Every morning the men gathered in our kitchen before they set off, eating bowls of Nana's porridge, checking maps, and talking about where they were headed. Every time they crossed off a section of a map they talked a little less.

‘This is beginning to feel like Dad all over again,' I heard my dad say.

‘Don't I know it,' Virgil replied sadly, looking out the window. ‘It's the Bermuda Triangle,' he said.

The Bermuda Triangle

O
ne of the first times I saw the Earl he was wandering about in his pyjamas talking to himself. Or if he was talking to someone then I sure couldn't see them. Virgil had taken me to Eye Lake to go fishing and we were at the boat launch, getting ready to set off, when I spotted the Earl outside the door of his shack pacing back and forth in his slippers. ‘This,' he kept on saying, spreading his arms out in front of him, ‘this is my Bermuda Triangle.' When I asked Virgil what he meant he said the Bermuda Triangle was a place in the Atlantic Ocean where things went missing – like ships and planes and people – and were never found. ‘Then why's the outside of his door the Bermuda Triangle?' I asked. ‘Has he lost something there?' ‘Not exactly,' said Virgil. ‘I think it's him who's a little lost.' I didn't really understand that. When I asked why the Earl was wearing his pyjamas and talking to himself Virgil said it was a free country and it was no business of ours if a man wanted to walk about in his pyjamas and enjoy his own conversation. But after that, whenever I couldn't find something, or lost a lure, Virgil would say, ‘It's the Bermuda Triangle.'

The Bermuda Triangle was where I imagined my grandfather was. I couldn't imagine exactly what it looked like there but I was pretty sure you could have your own version of it, like the Earl did. And in my head my grandfather's version was quite a bit like the Crooked River, except looped into a big circle – somewhere with no watershed at all, where he paddled around and around without getting anywhere.

Because the last thing anybody saw of Clarence O'Callaghan was a set of footprints leading away into the bush east of Eye Lake
and along the banks of the Crooked River. Some people said there were two sets of footprints going into the bush and one coming back; others said there was just the one and none coming back. But to tell the truth I couldn't say exactly what was there. Clarence took those steps fifteen years before I was born. They were washed away before I was even a twinkle, and all he left behind for me was this picture I have – not like the one of him in the photo or anything, but in my mind and sometimes in my dreams – of him walking down to the river through the trees, slipping in and out of view until at last he's out of sight, somewhere my eyes can't find him. I can't tell if he's reached the river and I can't ever be sure if he's really gone or not. In the picture he's always there and never there. He could walk back any second but he never does. They didn't ever find a body, not a single bone.

And that was all – until I found his castle.

I must have been sitting in the living room for hours, leafing through Dad and Virgil's records, before I decided to go down into the basement to look at Clarence's things. I'm not sure why I went there – it'd always been the one place in number one O'Callaghan Street I was afraid of – but it was like once I'd started looking back I couldn't help myself. I had to look further and further. I had to follow the footprints.

When I was a kid there was nowhere worse than the basement. I think it was the noises mostly. During the day Nana would do our laundry there in an old washing machine: a huge, rust-streaked white cube with a big steel mouth that opened at the top. You could hear it all through the house, quaking and shuddering as it digested our clothes. Its appetite was enormous and often Nana would spend whole mornings and afternoons dragging piles of our clothes down the steps to it like she was taking them to a monster to be sacrificed. She kept a washboard beside the machine and a mangle too, which looked like the pictures of torture contraptions in dungeons that were in one of Virgil's history books, and if I went too close to the steps I'd hear the wet, muffled cries of the laundry
being racked and strangled in the shadows below. And then at night the stove would judder into life and terrible gurgling and groaning sounds would come up through the heating pipes into my bedroom. They were the voices of the shapeless things I was sure lived in the basement and only came out at night, the same as skunks and raccoons, and roasted their victims in the flames of the stove. I imagined them hunched in the corners of the room, or hidden behind the pipes, whispering to each other in the darkness. And whispering to me too, trying to persuade me to come join them, because sometimes I'd find myself awake in the middle of the night, standing at the top of the steps, my eyes blinking open from sleepwalk and staring right down into that whispering darkness.

Sometimes even when something stops it keeps on going, and walking down those steps it was as if I could still hear the machine rumbling away and the sounds of Nana squelching my wet clothes on the washboard. But when I got to the bottom there was nothing there except quietness, the heavy quietness of places that have been empty for a long while. The stove was gone but the washing machine was still there – they didn't want that at the museum – and the mangle too. I pictured Nana's hands turning its handle, her raw-wet fingers clasped hard against the wood, knuckles worn red – red like the dots you see when you press your eyelids closed – turning and turning it as though her old body would never run out of strength, washing everything as clean and bright as the Helsinki sky.

Nana had put all of Clarence's things in a big travelling trunk; the old-fashioned kind people use in black-and-white films when they take cruises, with labels on them saying all the places they've been. It made it look like he'd forgotten his luggage, or just got back from a trip and put it down; like you might expect to find a new label on it saying
Nowhere
or
The Bush
or
The Bermuda Triangle
.

When I opened the trunk there were no surprises. It'd been years and years since I'd opened it but everything was still there, the same as I remembered it:

There was Clarence's pistol: a German Luger he'd bought from someone after the war. Virgil used to bring it fishing with us sometimes – to shoot slubes off the end of his line when he didn't want to bring them in the boat.

There was the sign that used to hang on the front of Clarence's hotel before I was born.
The Pioneer Hotel
, it said.

There was a map, a real old one, with lots of blank green and blue spaces and a black X marking the spot where Crooked River would have been, if it had existed yet.

There was a worn, slightly crumpled invitation to a dance at the Pioneer Hotel, signed ‘Clarence O'Callaghan. Proprietor.' On the back was a scribbled note that I could never quite work out the words of.

There was Clarence's fiddle.

There was an envelope, addressed to somewhere in Chicago, with
Addressee unknown/return
stamped overtop of it and our address on the back. Inside it was the photo of Clarence standing beside his castle.

And that was all. It wasn't much.

Of course once upon a time there'd been his clothes and tools and stuff too, but every year he hadn't come back Nana had given bits and pieces of those away until, before I was around, they were gone. I guess they weren't that important. Apparently these – the things that still remained – were the only things Clarence would've kept no matter what. So Nana stored them in the trunk, as if he might walk back in at any moment and say, ‘Where's my luggage? I must've forgot it.'

The first thing I decided to do when I got back to the Poplars was take Bobby minnow fishing. I went to the Tamarack dorm to pick up some pins and line and then headed straight to the Pine dorm. Sarah was outside, putting in her screen windows. She was wearing a pair of overalls covered in splotches of paint, and an
orange baseball cap that said Red Head, even though her hair wasn't red at all – it was black.

‘Hey there,' I said, and for some reason I thought I'd better try and make a joke. ‘You steal that from a real redhead?'

She looked a bit confused at first but then she smiled.

‘Oh this,' she laughed. ‘I think it's an old duck-hunting hat.'

And sure enough there was a little picture of a duck right under the writing. She kept smiling and I would've liked to make another joke but I couldn't think of any.

‘Is Bobby around?' I asked. ‘I thought he might like to go minnow fishing or something.'

She smiled even more then, as if I had made another joke.

‘Of course, Eli. He'd love that.'

‘I wasn't going to use proper hooks or nothing, just bent pins – to get him started.'

‘That's very considerate of you, Eli. I'll just get him ready.'

I liked the way Sarah spoke in different ways: sometimes polite and proper and then other times like most everybody else in Crooked River. Her father was an engineer and her family had only moved here when she was already sixteen or so. And then they'd moved on because there wasn't much need for engineers in Crooked River anymore, but she'd stayed because of Billy.

Bobby came out of the Pine dorm wearing his sheets and we started off down the path to the shoreline. As soon as we were out of sight he took off the sheets and stashed them behind a rock.

‘I'm sick of wearing them,' he said.

‘That's okay,' I said, ‘I won't tell. You want some bug dope?'

‘I'm not supposed to use it,' he said. ‘Mom says it gives you cancer.'

I took Billy along the shore to where the old dock was, near the boat launch. The Earl used to live about a hundred yards further on along the shore and if you looked a few feet back in the bush there was a pile of boards that used to be his shack. (When they first made the conference centre it'd still been
standing and they'd put a sign on it saying Traditional Trapper's Cabin.)

Bobby was asking me about a hundred questions at once – about why this was a good spot and why we weren't using proper hooks and a whole bunch of other questions like that. I tried to slow him down and answer them as best I could.

I told him minnows were just the same as bigger fish. They liked living beside things, like rocks or logs or reefs or old docks, so they could hide from other fish that were trying to eat them. ‘If you're a minnow you don't want to spend too much time in the open water where everything can see you,' I told him. ‘It's dangerous. You want to find yourself a bit of cover.' Then I bent a couple of pins in half and showed Bobby how to tie the line on to them. I told him pins were fine for minnows and we'd get on to barbed hooks when he'd had a bit of practice.

‘And reels and rods too?'

‘Yes, and reels and rods too,' I said.

‘Why do you need barbs?' he asked.

‘To keep a fish on when you've set it.'

‘What's setting?'

‘It's when you give your line a little tug to get the hook stuck in its mouth.'

‘What's the bacon for?'

‘It's for bait,' I said, and cut us each a tiny piece of white fat for putting on our hooks.

I hadn't fished for minnows since I was Bobby's age or younger. It was strange how having him with me made it feel as if I was doing it for the first time myself and was that age all over again. I could feel that hopeful beating of my heart as I looked over the side into the water, the what's-in-there flutter of the blood that every fisherman starts out with and never leaves behind, not really.

We lay down on our bellies and leaned over the edge of the dock, holding our lines in our hands.

‘Now put her into the water,' I told Bobby.

‘How will I know when I got one?'

‘You just wait till you can't see the bacon fat. When you see it disappear give your line a jerk.'

‘So when I
can't
see it, I got something?'

‘That's it, Bobby. When it looks like it's gone then you'll probably have one biting.'

I dropped my line in near Bobby's and watched the white fleck of bacon fat drift down towards the cradle of the dock, where everything was shadowy and murky. Sometimes it looked like there might be something moving through the water, a shape like a minnow's back or fin, but then it'd turn into shadow again. Bobby had stopped asking questions the moment his line went in. He was staring at his hook all hushed and expectant, the same as me, and everything was quiet, more quiet than the air can be – like we'd become part of the still, waiting quiet of the underwater. This is what I love about fishing: how it gets like this, like there's nothing but you and your line, no thinking or remembering or nothing; how with my hook in the water there was no difference between me now and me when I was Bobby's age.

Virgil told me once, when he was teaching me to fish, that they called it Eye Lake because down there, on its bed, lay all the people who'd ever drowned in it – the loggers and the fishermen and the unlucky ones who'd gone through the ice in the winters – staring up towards a surface they'd never reach again. He called them the watchers and said they never blinked and that if the water was clear and calm then you might see the whites of their eyes glistening like pearls below you.

‘Do they ever sleep?' I asked him.

‘No,' he said. ‘Never.'