Albert’s hands are large, scarred from fish spines and ropes, his knuckles permanently swollen from lifting nets in winter. From first ice until spring breakup, he fishes, even in thirty below, pulling nets from under the ice, warming his hands by dipping his woollen mittens in a pan of hot water.
After breakfast, he caulks his boat. He has winched it ashore, skidding it over a tamarack frame, then, using a pole, levered it onto its gunwales. The wind from the lake is always cold in the morning, so that although the sky is clear and the sun a warm yellow, he wears a parka against the chill. The boat is painted white with a green trim. Built at Riverton, it is sturdy, heavy. But the summer has been hard on it, and now that it is dry, cracks have formed between the boards. He takes a hammer, a chisel and a bag of cotton from the storage shed. Sitting on the stiff grass, he fits a strip of cotton along a crack, presses it into place with the tip of the chisel, then begins to tap it into the crack. It is an easy job but time-consuming. If the children were home, he’d give them the task.
The grass where he has scythed it is stiff, sharp. The ground slopes down to a shingle beach. The beach is made of flat, white pieces of limestone. Beyond this pale band of rock, the lake is smooth, the colour of old tin, without depth or movement. On the horizon there is no land, just sky and water blending together. Only in summer, when heat rises from the lake in waves, does the far shore become visible. Mirages ride above the horizon only to disappear as the air cools.
Since the lake is still, there is no sound except the steady tap tap of his hammer on the wooden handle of the chisel, the stiff creak of his canvas parka.
He is usually methodical, but today he puts the cotton and tools back before he is finished, turns to the garden. It is smaller than it had once been and needs weeding. Normally, fishermen are not gardeners, and he, himself, when he thinks of it, is surprised by his garden. From eighteen to thirty, he had lived alone, eating out of tin cans, satisfied with rice, instant potatoes, dried fruit, then, while staying in town to be treated for blood poisoning (he had stepped on a gaff and driven it right through his foot), he had met Jane. He had been sitting in the beer parlour with his bad foot up on the seat of a chair. She had known someone at his table and had come to ask for a cigarette. She was young, and he was surprised to see someone like her, pretty, blond, so drunk. She sat down and spent the evening watching them all through half-shut eyes. After that, he seemed to bump into her, in the post office, at the Co-op, at the local café.
At the parlour, he never did more than nurse a beer. She couldn’t handle her liquor, gulping it down until her face took on a glazed, angry look. She would sit and stare defiantly at everyone. After a time, she took to sitting beside him and leaving when he left. When he was better and was getting ready to return, she turned up at his boardinghouse with a suitcase and a shopping bag. He didn’t know what to say or do, so he didn’t say or do anything. When they got to the end of the road and she stepped into his boat, it seemed at once strange and yet perfectly natural.
After she’d been with him eight months, he said to her, “What do you miss the most?” He’d expected her to say the beer parlour or movies or, perhaps, bingo. To his surprise, she’d said fresh fruit and vegetables. He had been taken aback. The end of the road was a day by boat. There was a store there, but it was just one room of a house. The proprietor mostly sold chocolate bars and soft drinks to the Indians. Albert remembered that he’d sometimes seen rather scabby potatoes and some tattered cabbages there. To get to a store with fresh produce was another half-day by car or truck, and the road was only passable if the weather was good.
One day, another fisherman dropped by. He was going to town. Albert asked him to pick up seeds. Albert was rather vague about what he wanted, but he thought that if they managed to grow some onions and a few potatoes, they’d be doing well. When the fisherman stopped again he brought one of everything—zucchini, broccoli, pumpkins, watermelon, muskmelon, tomatoes, strawberry plants, seed potatoes, corn, kohlrabi (Albert had never even heard of kohlrabi). There also were packages of flower seeds. Zinnias, he thought, what am I going to do with zinnias?
But he cut down some trees and used the tractor to pull out the stumps. The soil was rusty red, easy to turn over because there was so much peat moss in it. It was a waste of time, he thought, like planting palm trees in the Arctic, but he kept his mouth shut. They used sticks and lengths of seaming twine to mark rows. He knew nothing would grow, but he used a small motor and some plastic pipe to draw water from the lake. He was amazed when green rows appeared. He hadn’t expected them. The morning breeze from the lake was cold, so he built a windbreak from wooden stakes and black plastic garbage bags. He cut out the bottoms of tin cans and set them around the tomato plants and cabbages.
The garden grew. It was like seeing objects fall up instead of down. In the mornings, even before he shaved, he’d look out the screen door just to be sure the plants were really there. He and Jane weeded the garden together. The first thing they ate from it was leaf lettuce and fresh green onions. Potatoes, he thought, I understand potatoes, but sunflower seeds, baby’s breath, pansies? They ate fried zucchini, swiss chard, and one day, in fall, Jane sliced open a cantaloupe, revealing its orange flesh. Other fishermen who stopped to visit acted as if the garden wasn’t there. Because they couldn’t believe it, they refused to acknowledge its existence.
In the fall, they had corn on the cob, tomatoes, fresh potatoes, cabbages. He built a root cellar, ordered glass jars for canning. They fell into the habit of doing the canning together. During the winter, he’d sometimes go into the storeroom just to look at the jars. That winter he did well at fishing, and in the spring, he bought a generator so that they could have electricity. He also bought a freezer.
Jane had their first child, Anne, at the end of the second year. The year after, she had Paul. Children need good food, she told Albert, and he bought a second freezer. This one was for meat. That fall, he shot a moose. Jane, a meat-cutting diagram beside her, turned it into roasts, stewing meat, steaks and hamburger.
Each winter, they planned the next year’s garden, going over the seed catalogues, picking out varieties that might do well during the short, intense summer. They added things. A crabapple tree, raspberry canes, purple cabbage. He built a greenhouse. Jane was able to start seeds in the spring for transplanting.
The year Anne turned six, they didn’t know what to do. Neither of them had much education. Albert had dropped out of school after grade nine. Jane had quit in grade ten to go to work as a waitress. They weren’t qualified to teach the children at home. That year, they ignored the problem, but when Paul turned six, they got a letter from the Department of Education telling them that their children had to go to school.
I can’t live in town, he said. He had never done anything except fish. He knew his area of the lake, every current, every eddy, every reef. He could read the sky, tell from its colour what weather was coming. He could lift nets while his boat rose and fell on waves that would make other men desperately sick. He could go into the bush with a rifle, some lard, flour, beans and rice and stay for two weeks. He didn’t need a compass or even a tent. I don’t know how, he said.
In September, Jane took the children to town. She rented a two-bedroom house. Every month she got enough money from the fish company to cover her expenses. To help out, she took a job in the parlour waiting on tables. He was to come out at Christmas, but the weather was too bad. His nets froze into the ice and he had all he could do to salvage most of them. They wrote, sending letters back and forth with the freighters who picked up his fish.
After school was out, she and the children came back. He already had the garden prepared. The summer didn’t go well. Everything was in too much of a rush. They could stay only six weeks and then had to return to town. Albert and Jane never got over feeling like strangers.
There was no more work in the parlour, so Jane and the children were going to move to Winnipeg. The school would be better. There was more opportunity. A woman she had met had a suite for rent. It was beside a community centre that had a swimming pool and skating rink. Paul wanted to play peewee hockey and Anne was going to take figure skating. Albert didn’t know what to say. Living on his own all winter had made it harder to talk about things.
The second summer, Paul had a bad case of measles and was quite sick. Afterward, there were complications. Anne didn’t want to leave because she was taking painting in the park. Albert went to Winnipeg. All the time he was there, he was restless. There was nothing to do. The kids were in classes and Jane was at work all day. There was no real yard, just a patch of gravel and mud beside the garage. He tried planting a garden there. A few things started to come up, but then someone backed in to turn around and drove over the plants. He went for walks, but all the time he was going through Eaton’s or the Bay, he knew he should be getting ready for fall fishing. There were nets to be spread and boxed. He had to get bridles ready. Now that he had only himself to feed, the garden was much too large. He went back at the end of July.
At Christmas, Jane sent him a card and a pair of socks. He’d sent Paul an ermine skin and Anne a birch bark doll cradle. He had not been able to think of anything for Jane. Finally, he made her a bouquet of dried flowers from the garden. At the end of May, she sent a message saying they’d come on July first. Later, a note came saying she’d got a new job and so wouldn’t have any holidays. She said she hoped the garden was doing well.
He wanted to write to her, to tell her there had been a late frost, then a swarm of grasshoppers. He wanted to ask for her advice on keeping out snails, to tell her about the morning a bear had picked the strawberry plants clean, but he didn’t have the words for it.