Chapter Twenty-Two

Martha wondered if you always had to give something up in order to gain something. In spite of the fact that she still felt a little shy around him, she had been delighted when her father returned so unexpectedly. She loved her grandparents fiercely, but the sudden appearance of the long-lost father she had been told of made her feel more normal, like the other children she sat in a row with at school. Their conversations centred on what their pas had done or said, how strong they were, or how mad they had been over some misbehaviour. There were one or two who reported at times that they had been “whupped good,” but they said this almost with pride, as if being “whupped” was proof of their father’s regard.

When Francis had turned up at the hotel, Martha had been afraid that this meant that she would now be “whupped” on a regular basis. Her grandfather never laid a hand on her. He hardly ever even yelled at her, and she wasn’t sure that she could bear being hit. Francis had seemed very gentle, though, and took no part in any decisions that affected her. She suspected that this might change soon. She knew that Sophie really liked Francis, and that he liked her in return. Maybe they would get married. That was all right with Martha because she liked Sophie, too, but she wondered if that would mean that she would have to live with them instead of with her grandma and grandpa. And she would be a “step” if that happened. Margaret Robison, who was two years older than Martha but still in the primary class, was a step, and she said it was awful.

“My stepmother makes me work all the time, and she whups me if I don’t do it fast enough,” she reported. “She’s got all these little babies now and Pa makes an awful fuss over ’em. Me and Harry have to sleep in the shed out back and we have to get up early every morning and get the fire going and cook the breakfast so she don’t have to do it. Harry says he’s leavin’ as soon as he’s fourteen.”

Martha privately felt that Harry’s departure would be a welcome event, as he was one of the meanest bullies in the schoolyard. But Margaret’s account worried her. What if Sophie married her father and had a whole lot of babies and she had to sleep in the shed? She thought that perhaps Grandpa could prevent this from happening if he was close by, but what if Sophie and Francis moved away and made her go, too?

She hadn’t told anyone but Horatio that she had lost the coral necklace that Francis had given her. The last time she could remember having it was Saturday, the day they had found the muskrat trap. Grandma would be annoyed. She’d told Martha to put it away safely and only wear it for good so it wouldn’t get lost. Grandpa would help her look for it, but he wouldn’t do it without telling Grandma first, and then Francis would probably find out. She couldn’t imagine her mild-mannered father getting angry with her, but all of the other children in her school seemed to think that getting angry was a father’s primary function.

Horatio helped her look at first, but he became bored and impatient and wanted to hunt the Holey Man or go off and play with some of the boys instead. So Martha stopped looking. Maybe if she were willing to forego the necklace, she could keep Horatio. But if she didn’t have the necklace, would Francis be so mad that he’d go away again? If Francis went away, did that mean that she could stay with her grandparents? But then she’d be fatherless again. She went round and round the argument dozens of times, but couldn’t decide what the best bargain was. She only knew that somewhere along the line, she would end up losing something.

The wintry weather had abated over the previous few days. Although the temperature plummeted at night and made everyone grateful for the warmth of their stoves, the sun shone brightly and mid-afternoon temperatures had crept upward past the freezing point. The snow melted away entirely in the well-travelled areas. Where no one walked, it collapsed into sullen grey mounds against fences and buildings. The sun softened the ice, and open holes began to appear near the wharves and along the edges of the shore. Farther out into West Lake the surface glistened with puddles of melted water.

Lewis knew that Martha and Horatio often played down near the shore and realized he should caution them about venturing too far out onto the ice. He decided to bring the subject up that night at the supper table. This meal had become a pleasant evening ritual for them all, a time when they shared the events of the day and discussed their plans for the morrow. They were all far less hurried than they had been, and not as tired, now that Sophie had taken over in the kitchen and Francis had proved eager to earn his keep. The addition of the two made the mealtime conversation livelier, as well, although they often seemed to be addressing their remarks to each other rather than to the room in general.

Frequently it was Martha who amused them the most, with accounts of her adventures at school or with Horatio, but today the child had been uncharacteristically taciturn. Lewis was sure something was bothering her, and was surprised that she hadn’t confided in him. She had always been so open and quick to spill out whatever was on her mind. Perhaps she was just growing up, but the thought that their old, easy-going relationship might be changing made him sad.

“So, what have you and the famous Horatio Joe been up to?” he asked.

Martha gave a little shrug of the shoulders. “Not much. We went down to the lake, but there wasn’t much to do.”

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that,” Lewis said. “The ice is pretty punky with the mild weather. I hope you’re careful and stay on the shore. In fact, it might be a good idea if you didn’t go down there at all until it freezes up again.”

She looked at him with alarm. “But we don’t go on the ice unless we know it’s safe.”

“But how do you know it’s safe until you go on it?” her father asked.

“We look for the footprints,” she said. “If the Holey Man has crossed the ice, we know we can, too.”

“The Holy Man? Who is that?” Did she mean some other preacher or one of the priests from Tara Hall? They were immediately recognizable with their long black robes. But what would one of them be doing at the lake?

“We don’t know who he is. Just that he’s holey.”

Lewis struggled to understand the words from an eight-year-old point of view. “How do you know that he’s holy?” He briefly considered halos, wings, or even miracles performed along the sandy shores of West Lake.

“Because of the holes in him,” Martha said matter-of-factly.

Not holy, but hole-y he understood then, but it made no more sense to him than a halo would have.

“Holes? In his clothes, you mean, or his boots?”

“No. Well, yes, he has holes in his boots, but there’s a big hole in his face, too. We don’t know who he is, so Horatio calls him the Holey Man. He has traps and he goes back and forth across the ice all the time. We see his footprints in the snow.”

Sophie had at last finished dishing up their meal and joined them at the table. “The Holey Man,” she laughed, “what an excellent description of him.”

“Do you know who she means?”

“Well,” she said, settling down happily beside Renwell, “I don’t know what his name is, but everybody thinks he’s the son of this strange old couple that lives somewhere over in the cedar dunes. They’ve been there for years. You see them once in a while when they check the traps that are close to this end of the lake. Once in a while the old man comes in with a bale of hides and trades them for sugar and tea, but not often.”

Not an angel or a saint then, but an unfortunate, child of unfortunates.

“Does he really have a hole in his face?”

“And in his clothes, he’s so raggedy,” she said. “But yes, he does. You can see right up into his nose, if you can get close enough. He’s like a wild animal.”

A hare lip, then, and worse perhaps.

“He tried to talk to us one time,” Martha said. “But he wouldn’t get very close, and he was all drooly. He said something, but it was hard to figure out what it was.”

“Poor thing,” said Sophie. “It can’t be much of a life back in the woods like that, but I don’t expect things would be easy for him anywhere.”

“He never comes to Wellington with his father?”

“Never. The old woman never comes either, and nobody ever goes near the cabin. They say there are traps set everywhere in the marsh and on the dunes, and none of them too well-marked. I know Dad always warned Martin and the other boys to stay well away, in case the old trapper decided to take a shot at them.”

This was alarming information, and briefly Lewis considered banning the shore as a play area for the children. But then he realized that, other than from treacherous ice, there was probably little danger. The trapper would be unlikely to bother anyone so close to the village and the Holey Man — for Lewis was now unable to think of him by any other name — had proved to be unapproachable, even by the irrepressible Martha. Still, it did no harm for them to be careful.

“I want you to let me know if you’re going down to the harbour,” he said to Martha, “and you’re not to go wandering along the sandbar. Stay close to the village, do you hear? And I think it would be a good idea if you just stayed right away from this Holey Man. In fact, if you see him down there, I think you should just come right back home again.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “I don’t think I want to talk to him anyway. There was some really icky stuff coming out of the hole in his face.” She wasn’t sure what Horatio’s reaction to this directive would be, but she was tired of his obsessive quest for the odd creature anyway.

Lewis wondered if he should warn her about traps and how to look for them. The trapper would be hoping for muskrat, most likely. The traps would be light, set in the water at the entrance to their dens. It would be an easy matter to avoid them, if you knew what to look for. The trapper would have to mark where he had set the traps; otherwise, it would be difficult to find them again once a heavy snow had obliterated landmarks and drifted into a different landscape. The children most likely played in the open areas along the shore, not near the banks where the muskrats burrowed or in the weedy growth where they sometimes built their small lodges, poor replicas of the enormous mounds the beavers made, but Lewis decided he would take no chances. He would walk along the sandbar and see where they were. And then he would make sure that the children knew, too.