A Good House (16 page)
To her everlasting credit, Charlotte put her watch and her rings up on the windowsill beside all the others, poured a pink stream of dish soap into the deep porcelain sink, and threw on both taps, full blast.
A
LMOST
every evening after a light, early supper, Bill and Margaret went for a long walk along the shore of the lake. They would start out barefoot on the warm sand but they carried their shoes because Margaret liked to go far beyond the main beach, she liked especially to go the two miles south to Stonebrook Creek, and they eventually ran into sharp, coarse stones and, at the Point, shale and a broad outcropping of rock.
When she was a girl Margaret had been invited once by a young friend, who was really just the daughter of an old friend of her mother’s, to spend three summer days at a cottage which was not on the main beach with Dunworkin and all the other big cottages but down near Stonebrook Creek. Her mother hadn’t had many actual friends because she was an occasional kleptomaniac, bringing home things that her father had to quickly find and immediately return or once in a while pay for if it was something that had been partly used up, like perfume, but this one woman had been a true friend and Margaret could remember her quiet kindness. She had been exactly the kind of woman people guessed to be slow-witted but she was not slow-witted in the least, she was simply shy and clumsy the way some women are, the way very young men are before they come into their own, and, regardless, she was very kind.
Angela’s parents’ cottage was not as old as some of the others at the creek but it was small and dark and ramshackle, with one main room that was mostly kitchen and two bedrooms added on and then another room, a porch, added on to that. On the first day of Margaret’s visit, the girls had played hopscotch on the white-sand shore of Lake Huron and practised their swimming strokes both in
the air and in the water and then they were given a picnic lunch to eat on a blanket in the dunes. After they’d helped Angela’s mother cut up apples for pies, Spies, the apples were called, they used the afternoon to explore, to crouch down low to watch some of the other cottagers through their windows, and to follow the footpaths worn through the trees and scrub brush and poison oak that filled the empty space between the cottages and the road to town.
By this time, Margaret realized that the lemonade she’d shared with Angela at their picnic had worked its way through to her bladder and, because she refused to pull down her bathing suit and squat in the shelter of the trees, as Angela suggested, they had to find the nearest outhouse. At the end of a short dirt path lined on either side with painted stones, when Margaret reached to open the outhouse door, her hand was stopped by the sounds they heard inside, a wet slapping like the hurried beating of a cake at a kitchen table, and then a very sad moan, and then another. Angela put her finger to her lips, the signal for opportunity, for discovery, and they crouched again, as if this position were as natural to them as walking upright, the perfect stance for girls loose in the world. They took their turns at a small knot low in the weathered outhouse boards, each of them encouraging the other with a sharp elbow in the ribs: You look. No, you look. They watched him in silence, although they could see there was little chance they’d be heard. They could not see any part of his face so they couldn’t begin to guess his age or his place in the world. It was Margaret’s eye at the knothole when he delivered himself, his delivery a big, bursting achievement, and after Angela pushed her away she had no choice, she did have to run into the trees and squat naked to empty herself. And Angela was soon beside her, laughing quietly and holding her stomach and reaching up to pull clean summer leaves from a small maple. When they heard the outhouse door creak open behind them they were careful to look busy, to look away.
Then Angela turned to check and, positive that he was gone, or almost gone, because she did see someone ducking around the corner of a cottage, she said, “You know what that was?” She was erupting with laughter now, so pleased with what she already knew, with the things she did not have to learn. “It was the dastardly one-eyed
worm. And that’s what they do with it. All the time. Day and night, my aunt says.”
Pulling up her bathing suit, Margaret laughed too, but privately, with only the shaking of her skinny shoulders. Although it had been her first sighting, her first true exposure, she didn’t believe there was much point to being surprised. And it wasn’t the achievement she would remember but the helpless pulsing and the colour, the deep blush of red in the pale, fisted hand, like something left outside the body by mistake.
Back at the cottage, they found Angela’s mother sitting halfway down the hill watching the waves pour in and tickling herself, her weathered face, with a long blade of dune grass. She must have been lost in thought because when Angela crept up and hugged her from behind, she jumped and yelped as if she’d been attacked. Then she said she was very happy to see that they were having some fun together and before they went inside she made them stand still against the cottage door for a picture. After she’d got their fun recorded for posterity, she handed the borrowed box camera to Angela and stepped up to the door herself. She ran her fingers quickly through her short, thin hair and smoothed the skirt of her summer dress and then she squared her shoulders to smile into the afternoon sun.
On the second morning the father walked with the girls to one of the farms that bordered the lakeshore to take them horseback riding. This was the surprise he’d promised the night before at the supper table. The men saddled the horses and then Margaret and Angela climbed up on the rail fence, as they were told, to mount. The farmer rode a blue-black stallion, the father was given a big russet mare, and the girls rode strong fat ponies. Margaret’s pony was friendly and calm and obedient, its tan-and-white face almost pretty, its knobby flanks patched like the map of a world that was nothing but desert and snow.
They’d gone for miles along the beach, the horses long since trained to walk out into the shallow lake to skirt the stones on the shore, knowing in their horse heads that soon there would be sand again. The men stayed behind the girls, ignoring them, trusting their good sense and trusting the ponies, but their voices carried through
the summer air and the girls heard their talk, which was briefly about their time together at Vimy, where they had both been stablers for the cavalry. Because she knew even as a ten-year-old girl that Vimy Ridge had been a battle and that the war these men had fought was called the Great War and because it was the first time in her life she had heard it used like any other word, Margaret remembered that the farmer said the word
gallantry,
and she remembered too, the way you remember a fright, the dark burst of laughter that fell on that word. The men didn’t stay with the war for long. Soon they were talking about a stallion stolen in the dead of night from a neighbouring farm and then about a flaxen-haired woman they didn’t name but seemed to have known well, both of them, their laughter falling much more gently on the shared memory of this woman.
The horses had to be turned inland to follow the rutted road only at Kettle Point, the Indian reserve, where the wet black shale that covered the shore was dangerously slick underfoot and the rocks extended deep into the lake. There were still kettles to be counted at the Point then, large grey stones worn perfectly spherical by the action of a million waves, resting in the water like oversized pearls. This was before the time when people started to drive onto the reserve to pull the kettles out and haul them home to use as decoration on their front porches.
Margaret’s mother had accepted the invitation on her behalf without asking her if she even wanted to spend three days at a cottage but in the end it didn’t matter. They had been the best three days of her childhood.
Any summer evening, standing as an adult woman at the mouth of Stonebrook Creek, Margaret found it hard to believe that the creek entered the lake at all, the offshore waves pushed in so surely, with such a steady force. But the creek did join the lake. On calm days, most days, it crept in slowly, nearly invisibly, the only evidence a murky cloud of silt drifting out into the cleaner blue of the lake. And after a storm, after a pounding, roaring, creek-rising rain, the force of the current was more than strong enough to overtake the shoreline waves. Running down the bank, surging down, the creek emptied its mud-churned, overflowing self full force into the larger body.
It was widest there on the sand, meeting the lake, maybe sixty feet across. Back from the shore where the land began its quick sloping climb up and inland, the creek narrowed and the banks soon became steep enough to require buttressing with fieldstones and large broken slabs of scrap concrete, refuse from highway upgrades.
At the edge of the water, swamp grass grew wherever it could find purchase among the stones, and higher up the bank, where the real soil began, sumach took hold, and then trees, beech and maple and oak, leaning in over the creek to make a leafy tunnel above the current. Even in a canoe, you would have needed to duck your head here.
There were still cottages on both sides of the creek, built up on the high ground that overlooked Lake Huron, situated close together and at odd angles to one another, perhaps to catch the extraordinary sunsets through the desired windows. Margaret thought she recognized the cottage she’d visited as a girl but she couldn’t be sure because most of them were old and rambling now.
Not long after the cottagers were established, someone, some group of them, had decided it would be a very good thing to be able to get back and forth between the cottages quickly so they’d built a narrow, swinging footbridge high above the water across the creek. It is likely that the idea behind the bridge was to promote evening visits among summer friends or to allow more interesting morning walks, to free the kids a bit. They’d suspended the footbridge from heavy steel cables that were threaded on each bank through tall, soon-rusted posts and then securely anchored deep in solid ground. When it was first built the bridge gave access not just to the southside cottages but to a grassy picnic spot, with swings and teeter-totters and a fire pit and an open pavilion, for shelter from the rain. The pavilion did not withstand many years of winter storms off the lake, and it was not replaced, but Margaret had seen in Angela’s cottage a framed black and white photograph of summer people in their bathing suits getting ready under the pavilion’s low-pitched roof to share a meal, the very best of everything imagined laid out with pride on the picnic tables.
Pulling away from the shore of Lake Huron, Stonebrook Creek flowed past the tennis courts and the rough stone pillars that marked
the cottage road and then it passed under the first car bridge, under the highway. On the other side of the highway it veered away respectfully from the old cemetery and soon began to cut a shallow valley through the apple orchards and the fields of corn and wheat and oats and barley and white beans, through bush and pasture.
If you were out for a Sunday drive, you could locate Stonebrook Creek from any of the roads by the haphazard trees that followed its twists and turns. The crows and starlings that fed on the crops nested in the trees, as did swarms of hornets, and sometimes you would see herons. In the fall, farmers who watched for bothersome beaver dams became small-time hunters, walked back to the creek with their guns for ducks or pheasant.
Cattle had long since established paths down to the creek bank, had walked the scrub brush flat so they could get to the edge, to drink, and on the hottest days, where the water was shallow, and it often was shallow on its way to town, the cattle waded right into the water, stepping clumsily around the visible stones. Sometimes they’d stumble and go down heavily and then thrash in the mud to get themselves upright and sometimes, once down, they stayed down to let the murky water cool their dung-matted, fly-bitten flanks.
And there had always been garbage. If you were anything like the child Margaret had been, and if, for something different to do, you had biked out from town to stand on one of the municipal bridges to engage in some private dreaming, or to drop small stones into the middle of the current to test the depth of the water, listening for that deep, satisfying plop, you could see, upstream and down, that any number of people used the creek for garbage. Not much of it, only the occasional rim of a tire or a saw blade, a toolbox, a few cement blocks, a few heaps of broken bricks. And you could see islands of drifting twigs. And deadfall, whole trees or rotted, broken limbs blown down by wind storms, resting on the largest of the stones.
And, until the days of DDT, you could enjoy the brilliant presence of butterflies, the rusty orange of Monarchs, the beautiful, shy Northern Blue, lush grey Cabbages, the long-forgotten red of Admirals.
There were five municipal bridges between the lakeshore and
town, on concession roads or side roads depending on the turn of Stonebrook Creek. Most of the bridges were cement and all of them had been constructed high above the water to accommodate spring flood. But the creek seldom overflowed its banks, not significantly and not for long, because the lake was there, just a few miles away, ready to take whatever came.
Although Margaret and Angela had raced across the suspension bridge those hot summer days at the mouth of the creek, protected only by the chicken-wire guard and a light running grip on the steel cable, and both of them loving the rhythm their running made, the snaky sway, she had to coax Bill onto the planks and he went across just once.
“It has never so much as threatened to give out,” she said, pushing him gently from behind, her hands on his narrow hips. “Not once.”
“And they say that’s exactly when you should play a slot machine,” he told her. “Just when it seems it will never give out.” He was laughing now and gripping the steel cable with both hands, exaggerating his terror for Margaret’s enjoyment.
Standing halfway across, they looked straight down to study the water, to watch for movement in the churning mud. Margaret was quickly able to find the ripple of a lost, spinning school of minnows, anxious to get back to the lake where they belonged, and with the minnows found, she turned from the lake and squatted low to look back up the creek. Bill bent down to join her. Through the dark tunnel of overhanging branches they could hear frogs croaking and the squeal of gulls and they could see deadfall and upturned, tangled root balls and drifting twigs. They could gauge how quickly the creek got deep as it began to move inland.