LITMIR.BIZ

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just above the muskeg it seemed to me, as though we would gradually sink into the earth if we didn’t get out of there, and by dusk no one would be any the wiser. The swamp water was black and I imagined alive with tiny creatures. We stood there in the hot sun, listening to the frogs, the drone of insects, diseased bubbles gurgling up from the swamp. Finally a car came, an ancient black Ford sedan with a sloping trunk. When the man and the boy got out, I saw that the floor of the car was rusted right through; you could see the dirt of the road below. The man said he had a wrench, but he couldn’t get the trunk open. So he yanked the back door and told the boy to get in and pull the rear seat forward. The seat wouldn’t move. The man started yelling at the boy. “Bust it! Go on! Keep pulling, boy! Bust the goddamn thing!” Finally the seat back gave way with a rip and the boy tumbled out of the car onto the ground. He was about my age. His neck was so dirty it was crosshatched with deep black lines like an old shoe.

      When we were on our way again, I asked my parents why those people were dressed like that, about the way they smelled, and what was wrong with them.

      “They’re just poor,” my father said.

      I was to meet the minister at two o’clock. My father had been dead five days, the funeral was in three days, the out-of-town people were starting to arrive, and yet arrangements were still being made. In Merrick Bay, as in many small towns, funerals were not even held in the winter; the bodies were stored in a vault at the undertaker’s until the ground thawed and the graves could be dug.

      We had no family plot, but my aunt was hoping we could put my father out there near the church, anyway. This proved impossible.

      “You’ll have to get a place at Iron Falls,” said the minister. His name was Reverend Hamm. We stood outside because the church would be cold inside — they only fired up the stove on Sundays. And the weather was warm for May, almost like summer, but without the white light or the settled dust everywhere. The fields were the luminous summer yellow-green of my dreams.

      “The graveyard here has been closed for sixty years,” the minister said, pointing. “Filled with pioneers. Have a look if you like. Not the actual graves of course, everything’s been moved around.”

      The tombstones, about fifty of them altogether, had been assembled into ragged rows inside a rusty fence. I saw the names: Reed, Merrick, Havelock, Alpenvord, Dixon, Macdonald, Mackenzie, MacNab. Some of the oldest stones were the graves of children.

      “Do you remember some story — something they found in the swamp?” I asked.

      “The swamp? When?”

      “Twenty, twenty-five years ago maybe.” For some reason, I pretended to be vague.

      “Before my time, I’m afraid. Only came up here up ten years ago. I’m from the east, you see,” said Reverend Hamm. “Nova Scotia.”

      We went over the order of service, the readings, some possible hymns, and then he was off; he was responsible for three of these country churches now, he said — the congregations were all in decline, people dying and moving away, what could you expect — and there was a lot of road to cover, terrible roads at that.

      Before leaving, I walked around the church. The mortar between the bricks was pocked with holes, and from the open windows you could smell mildew and dampness, the odour of rotting wood.

      Before my mother died, my father used to suggest we attend church once or twice a summer. “For tribal reasons,” he would say. “Before Union, (he meant the union of the Methodist and Presbyterian Churches) this building was Presbyterian.”

      It would seem strange to be sitting in church, warm air wafting across the pews from the open windows, and, outside, the buzz of the cicadas. The minister liked to speak to us of something that he called the power of alternative imagining. Four miles away people with gin and tonics would be lounging on the docks by their boathouses. I loved the smell of suntan lotion.

      On the way back from the church to my aunt’s house, I passed the Applewoods’ farm. The built-up banks of Sucker Creek had collapsed and shallow water covered the fields. The roof of the barn had collapsed, too; the house was grey and sagging and the windows were boarded up. It was from one of those windows that I had first set eyes on Quentin Miller.

      The stone pump house still stood, as solid as a gravestone, in a grove of weeping willows by the creek.

      PART II

      | Chapter 3 |

      Late June. In the fading light of dusk, Phil Havelock and I walked through the bush and fields to the Applewoods’ farm. Walking wasn’t as fast as taking the canoe because you had to skirt the tamarack swamp, but we were in no rush. Besides, it had been a dry winter and spring; the creek was low, and we would have had trouble paddling all the way.

      Phil Havelock was almost three years older than me. His family, along with the Applewoods, was one of the last in the area that still farmed. They had a few sheep (at one time the district had been famous for its lamb), chickens, some cattle, and several fields of hay. It was a relative of theirs from whom my father had bought our house. The Havelocks had mixed feelings about my father, partly because the land had been sold out of the family, and partly because they would have liked to sell their own place. All the descendants of the original settlers who had shoreline — the last of the land grants were made as late as the 1890s — had been steadily selling off to summer people, but it was almost impossible to sell land that was back from the lake, pockets of arable interspersed with granite outcrops and swamp. Finding my father had been something of a coup.

      Phil and I often caught frogs and crabs for bait and fished in Sucker Creek. “Why don’t you go fishing?” my father used to ask. “Boys like fishing, don’t they?” He never accompanied me. He swam poorly.

      “How come your dad don’t swim?” Phil asked me. “He fuckin’ English or something? What happens if he falls out of the canoe?”

      To my knowledge my father had never once ventured out in the yellow canoe.

      When we were younger, Phil and I would build rafts and pole our way up the creek past the Applewoods’ farm and as far as the haunted house, the old Allen place, looking for bait. We would hunt for snakes in the pipes and cavities of the Applewoods’ pump house — there were supposed to have been huge squirming nests of them there years before, tangled balls — but we never found any. We didn’t know then that the snakes were only there from November to June; they migrated to the fields and riverbanks in summer.

      Sometimes my aunt let us take the outboard — “Three and a half Jesely horsepower,” said Phil, taking a drag on his cigarette. We fished in Merrick Bay, along the inland shore, by some of the islands, or out by the cribs, the ruins of an old steamboat pier that teemed with sunfish, bass, and yellow perch. Or in the haunted lagoon.

      In an abandoned drive shed in the corner of the farm property, Phil had amassed a collection of magazines: Popular Mechanics, car magazines, and what he called “nudie” magazines. Earlier that afternoon, while we flipped through these for the hundredth time, sharing one of his father’s beers and smoking his father’s cigarettes, Phil took out his wallet and showed me his condoms. This time he opened one of them. The skin of a long, white worm.

      “You put this thing on your dick so she won’t have a baby, see?”

      What did I care about babies?

      “Know what else you can do with them? Make party favours.” He began blowing it up. I examined the package. “Take one,” said Phil. “I got millions.”

      “I haven’t needed one lately,” I said. The foil package was wrinkled and bent. It looked about twenty years old. I didn’t believe he had millions.

      “You ought to try it with a piece of liver,” Phil said. “Feels like the real thing.”

      “How do you know what the real thing feels like?” I asked.

      He smirked. “I know, believe me.”

      Life in Merrick Bay always seemed to me to be more about birth and

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