‘Are you going to the birthday party?’ Bobby asked. I was sitting out front of the Tamarack dorm, sorting through my tackle box. They’ve got a curious way of getting all tangled up, do tackle boxes, however careful you are putting stuff back into them. But I’ve always enjoyed sorting through them. It’s real soothing somehow – finding the right place for everything and discovering old hooks and lures you don’t even remember having. I’d already found one of Virgil’s old ones in the bottom of my box: a homemade jig, with black eyes and bright red and yellow feathers, like some kind of South Seas idol.
‘Whose party?’
Bobby looked at me as if maybe I was joking him. But I wasn’t.
‘Crooked River’s!’ he said. ‘You must know about that birthday. We’ve been doing stuff in school for it all week and there’s posters and everything all over town.’
‘I knew about the birthday. I guess I must’ve forgotten about the party.’ And I had clean forgot. The day before, as I was walking back from the mine site, a car had pulled up beside me and it was Officer Red, who was called that because his hair was that colour, almost the same colour as the dust on the road.
‘Hey there, Eli,’ he’d called out from the window of his car. ‘This is some coincidence – I was just meaning to call on you out at the Poplars.’
I figure it was a coincidence. He did a lot of driving, Officer Red. Because there were less and less people in Crooked River there was less crime too and so he just drove around a lot hoping someone might break a law or two.
‘Where you been?’ he asked.
‘Out at the mine site,’ I said. ‘I was on the beach, where they used to have the picnics.’
‘Beaches and picnics, eh? I don’t recall ever seeing either of those on the mine site. You weren’t shooting up those buildings?’ he asked. ‘Because I’ve sure noticed a bunch of holes in them.’
‘I wasn’t shooting nothing,’ I said.
He smiled then and said, ‘I was only kidding, Eli. Now, why don’t you hop in the car and we can go down to the station?’
In the station house everyone had seemed pretty excited. Sergeant Hughie was pointing this way and that and Miss Kadychuk the secretary was scurrying around trying to follow his pointing. There was a man I hadn’t seen before, standing by the desk, and I think all the fussing and pointing was to find him a room to use. I guess I’d come in sooner than they’d expected. As I watched them I remembered Virgil reading out the Police Watch. 12.58. Dog in road. 12.59. Dog departed of its own volition. Sergeant Hughie waved to me and Officer Red told me to take a seat.
‘Don’t you worry yourself, Eli. This is all just routine,’ he told me, looking kind of proud and important as if this much was always happening in the station.
It was the same as what Gracie had said. They wanted to get a sample from me, of my DNA stuff. I didn’t know what they needed for a sample.
After they’d sorted out the room for the man, Officer Red led me over to the door and we went in together.
‘This is Officer Mathieu,’ Officer Red said. ‘He’s from forensics in Thunder Bay and he’ll take your sample.’
‘It’s very simple, Mr. O’Callaghan,’ said Officer Mathieu. ‘All we require is a single swab with some of your saliva on it.’
A swab. I looked at him and then at Officer Red.
‘It’s that,’ Officer Red told me, pointing at Officer Mathieu’s hand. He was holding one of them things you clean your ears with. He put it in my mouth for a second and that was that. Apparently even a tiny drop of my spit had a fingerprint of Clarence in it. Even my spit was full of bits of lost people.
Afterwards Officer Red told me it wouldn’t take them long to get the results, and as he was leading me to the door out he started asking if I was going to the street party they were having to celebrate the township’s birthday. ‘But of course you will be,’ he’d said, answering his own question. ‘You being related to the founding father and all that.’ And then he’d looked over at some plastic bags with tags on them that were sitting on a desk in the corner and stopped speaking, as if it weren’t proper to bring Clarence up when it might be his remains right there in those bags. But I wasn’t thinking about those remains. I was thinking that if I spat on the ground there’d be bits of them all in it somehow.
‘So,’ Bobby asked, ‘are you going?’
‘I’m not too sure,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel much like celebrating, Bobby.’
‘But there’s going to be a parade and floats and everything. My teacher said there’s even going to be a float with someone dressed up as your grandfather on it.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ I said.
‘Please,’ Bobby said. ‘My mom doesn’t want to go – because of the bruises on her face. But she might go if you go, and if she doesn’t then I could go with you.’
I said yes then, even though I didn’t want to go. It seemed like I always ended up going places I didn’t want to go.
The three of us walked together down the dirt road towards town. The sun was out and it was warm and the smell of the pine sap was soft and sweet. It was already hard to even imagine there’d been a winter. It was like this every year – the seasons slipped from one to the other so fast it was like you’d just blinked and didn’t quite believe what’d been in front of your eyes the second before. Bobby was scouting through the roadsides for frogs and toads. I would’ve liked to have joined him. When he was around it made me want to do all the stuff I used to do when I was a kid.
Sarah was wearing a dress with pictures of flowers on it. She looked really pretty, even with her black eyes. She was wearing sandals too but after a bit she slipped them off and started walking in her bare feet.
‘I love being able to walk barefoot,’ she said. ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it? It seems like yesterday it was winter and now you’d never even believe it. Thank you so much for coming with us, Eli. I haven’t felt much like going anywhere recently.’
I was happy then, thinking how we’d been thinking the same thing. And then I wanted to ask her where all the frogs and toads went in the winter, because I’d been thinking that as well when I was watching Bobby.
When we came to the crossing I looked down the rail tracks and there were flowers growing everywhere at the sides, beyond the cinders. There were pink ones and delicate blue ones and yellow ones. I’d never known their names and they only ever grew by the sides of the tracks. Virgil told me they were prairie flowers and grew from seeds that fell off the grain trucks when the wheat trains passed through. I remembered watching them passing – the trucks coloured half yellow and half rusty brown, with a big picture of a head of wheat on each one – and how many there seemed to be. They’d go on and on until it seemed like the train was a hundred miles long, so long you could imagine how big and wide the prairies were just from watching them go past. And looking at the flowers now I wondered if Sarah recognized them and knew their names from when she lived out west, and if she’d seen the fields of wheat that’d filled all those trucks. I was going to ask her that, but before I could she’d taken hold of my hand and was holding it in hers. Her skin felt as soft and smooth as pine sap.
Outside the museum doors Mr. Haney was standing on a platform made of boards, dressed as a voyageur. He had a buckskin coat on, with tassels on the front, and a red scarf and hat.
‘Ça va,’ he called out to us as we walked by. He was smiling and happy. There were a bunch of people outside the museum, as many as the town could muster.
Beside Clarence’s canoe there was a table where they were giving out hot dogs, and a barrel full of corncobs, and another table where a big cake sat with a hundred candles on it. Mrs. Hamalainen and Mrs. McKay were handing out the food and Mrs. Arnold was standing nearby talking to Gracie. She didn’t teach anymore – she’d retired. Her hair was grey all over these days.
‘Hi there, Eli. Good to see you here,’ she said. I tried to remember something she’d taught us in school, so I could show her I’d remembered it, but I couldn’t think of nothing.
‘Hello, Mrs. Arnold,’ I said.
‘Please, Eli. I think you can call me Frances now. And who is this?’ she asked, smiling down at Bobby.
‘This is Bobby,’ I said. ‘And this is … ’
‘Hello, Sarah,’ Mrs. Arnold said. ‘I’m so glad you could make it.’
Everyone has always met everyone else in Crooked River. I forget that sometimes.
Mrs. Hamalainen and Mrs. McKay were busy shoving hot dogs and corn and pieces of cake into Bobby’s hands. They were cooing over him and mussing his hair and he looked a bit nervous. It was like all the grown-ups were searching out kids to give stuff to – like there weren’t enough to go round.
‘If I were you I’d get some hot dogs down you quick and get going before Tom there starts off with his speeches,’ Gracie whispered to me. ‘I swear he spent three hours practising them yesterday – maybe more. I was asleep after ten minutes.’
But it was already too late for that. Buddy Bryce, the Reeve and a few other old-timers had sat down on chairs on the platform, and Mr. Haney had rounded up some kids to stand in front of it and sing ‘O Canada.’ A couple of them were dressed as voyageurs as well, but most of them weren’t. As soon as they’d finished he stepped onto the platform himself and started fussing with a microphone.
‘Jesus,’ Gracie rasped. ‘He doesn’t need that damn microphone. We’re hardly the five thousand here, are we?’
‘Testing. Testing, one, two, three,’ Mr. Haney said into the microphone, but you could only hear his normal voice.
‘Everyone can hear you just fine as it is, Tom,’ someone shouted.
‘Get on with it,’ Gracie called up at him.
‘It’s a great pleasure,’ he began, ‘to see so much of our community gathered here today to celebrate a hundred years of Crooked River. What an achievement it’s been. For a community like ours to grow and flourish in the wilderness has been no mean feat. Of course over those hundred years there have been ups and downs and obstacles to overcome, but each time, pulling together as a community, we’ve managed to overcome them. I’d say Crooked River truly is “The Little Town Who Could”.’
Mr. Haney went on for quite a while after that, talking about Clarence and the railroad and the mine and just about everything that’d happened in Crooked River over the last hundred years – at almost the same speed it’d happened too, it felt like. One of the old-timers fell asleep on his chair. Then Buddy made a loud coughing noise and Mr. Haney said: ‘But to conclude, I’d like to make a special presentation to one of our citizens for their exceptional contribution to the life and history of our community. The story of Red Rock Mine belongs not only to our town’s history, but goes down as one of the most audacious and remarkable feats of industry and engineering in the history of our entire nation. That story began with one man and his vision. While others before him had suspected that somewhere beneath our wilderness lay a potential wealth of iron ore, it had eluded all of them; until one day a young man arrived in this town with nothing more than a hunch, a bagful of determination, and an unshakeable ambition to succeed. Where others had confined themselves to the probable – to the shore, if I might put it that way – he let his vision range further, across the water. Where they saw a lake, an insurmountable obstacle, he saw a possibility. And so it was, almost sixty years ago now, that he walked out onto the ice of Red Rock Lake, drilled down through it, and discovered the ore lodes beneath its bed. And of course that was only the beginning. I’m sure all of us here know the subsequent history: how, as the president of Red Rock Mines, this man assembled the finest, most imaginative engineers and undertook nothing less than the diversion of a whole river and the draining of a whole lake; how he brought out the first loads of ore; how – sixty years ago – he turned a small railroad division point into a thriving and prosperous town. As a token of the township of Crooked River’s gratitude for all his many achievements, I would now like to present a special “Outstanding Living Citizen” award to Buddy Bryce. I’m sure he’ll be the first to appreciate the material out of which it’s been constructed.’
At that Mr. Haney handed Buddy a big key made out of iron. It must have been pretty heavy because you could see him stoop when he took hold of it. Maybe he didn’t appreciate that so much. Most of us thought he was going to drop it, and the crowd kind of held their breath. Then, with a grimace, he managed to lift it up for a second before putting it down on his chair and the people all clapped. I could see Brenda right at the front by the platform with the biggest smile on her face I’d ever seen, but I couldn’t see Billy anywhere. Buddy turned to face them then, beaming through his wrinkles like I remembered him beaming at the table in front of the Halloween candy all those years ago, like he was the king of Big Rock Candy Mountain.
After the presentation there was a parade organized for Main Street and everyone began drifting over there. Sarah, Bobby and me drifted with them for a bit, but then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Billy sitting in his truck in the museum parking lot, drinking a bottle of beer and staring right at us.
‘Maybe it’d be nice to go the other way,’ I told Sarah and Bobby. ‘Down along the river. They won’t be starting the parade for a bit.’
‘That a great idea, Eli,’ Sarah said. I figured she’d seen Billy too.
When we got to the river I noticed straight away how low it was. This early in the summer the water should have been a lot higher. I stopped by the old railroad bridge, where the trunk line had gone across to the mine site, and looked down at the pools behind the iron pylons where George and me used to fish with red and white bobbers. They were hardly deep enough to fish in now, and the current was so weak it wouldn’t have even shifted a bobber.
‘What you looking at?’ Bobby asked.
‘Just an old fishing spot,’ I said.
‘What did you used to catch there?’
‘Just slubes, mostly. And walleyes too, sometimes – early on after the ice melted in the spring, when they’re moving after spawning.’
‘What’s spawning?’
‘That’s them making more fish,’ I said.
Sarah sat behind us on the grass, staring at the river with her black eyes. Bobby walked up and down the bank a bit, looking into the water trying to see if he could spot fish between the thin weeds that moved this way and that in the current like long human hair, the same as I used to do when I was a kid. But I doubted there were many down there: all the cover for them was stranded out in the air because the water was so low.
They’d made a real effort with Main Street, as much as they could do. There was bunting hanging off most of the storefronts, even the ones that were just fronts and nothing else, and a big ‘Happy Birthday’ sign hanging across the street. It was cheerful and bright as long as you didn’t look too close, or sideways – onto the empty lots with the weeds and brush growing over them, and the broken-down cars and trucks, and the waiting green gums of the woods. I guess I must’ve been thinking about the remains in the police station – I’d told Bobby I wasn’t in the mood for a party – but for a moment I looked at all the decorations and thought it was kind of like someone had put makeup on a skeleton.
The parade was called Crooked River’s Living History and mostly it was people dressed up and driving down Main Street in the backs of trucks. An Indian family went first, in their native costumes, beating a pow-wow drum and singing. Then came Mr. Haney, with two other men, dressed as voyageurs. They were holding paddles, pretending to paddle the truck along, and singing French songs. One of their hats fell off when the truck’s wheels went into a pothole. The trappers came next, with buckskins and beaver hats, and then a truck with a canoe on it. Wade Magnussen, who worked at the gas station, was standing beside the canoe holding an axe in one hand and a sign saying Pioneer Hotel in the other. He was meant to be Clarence.
As each truck went past someone in the front threw handfuls of candy out the window onto the sidewalk for the kids to collect. There were hardly enough kids to collect it all and Bobby was having a field day picking it up. He must’ve filled two bagfuls in the first five minutes. By the time the miners’ and loggers’ trucks went past he was bugging Sarah and me to get him another bag. It was then that Billy arrived on the back of the floatplane truck, with two other bush pilots who worked for Buddy. They were wearing white scarves and leather hats with goggles resting on top of them like real old-fashioned pilots. The two other pilots were waving and smiling at the people clapping and cheering them, but Billy wasn’t. He was staring right at the three of us.
When the truck came up opposite us he started shouting. At first you couldn’t hear him properly because of the clapping and cheering but after a second or two the clapping and cheering died right down. Bradley Cain, who was driving, must’ve thought something had happened and stopped the truck.
‘It’s a disgrace, a fucking disgrace, you flaunting it in front of me like this in public – playing happy frigging families with that retard. That’s my kid, you bitch, and I don’t give a flying fuck what you say about it. He’s mine and I’m allowed to take him whenever I frigging want. There’s no law … ’
And he would’ve carried on except the crash flung him and one of the other pilots right off the side of the truck.
The last truck was made up to look like a train car. They’d collected some old iron ore pellets and filled the back with them. Buddy was sitting on top of them on a chair holding his key. Clyde Fraser, who was driving, must’ve been so busy throwing candy out the window he hadn’t noticed the pilots’ truck stopped in front of him and ploughed right on into the back of it. It was lucky he was going slow, but it still hit hard enough to send Billy and the other pilot flying. And Buddy had got flung right off the back of the truck and was sitting there in the middle of a pothole in Main, holding his key. He wasn’t beaming anymore and he sure didn’t look like no king of Big Rock Candy Mountain.
When I turned around I found that Sarah and Bobby had gone. They must’ve gone in a real hurry because Bobby had dropped his bags of candy and they were lying on the sidewalk, half-spilled. I gathered them up for him and was going to start heading back to the Poplars but instead I found my footsteps taking me back towards the river and then to number one O’Callaghan Street. It was like I couldn’t help it, like they just took me there of their own accord. I went through the gate, into the garden, past the old boards left over from the hotel, in through the porch, and then sat down in the living room beneath the Helsinki picture. The sky hadn’t changed in the picture, it never does – it was as blue and perfect and full of light as ever and the stars still shone on the cathedral’s dome.
I was thinking of my dad then, even though I always try my best not to. Sometimes if I try real hard it’s like he isn’t there – or only a bit there, like a drawing someone’s half-rubbed out with an eraser. Sometimes he’d been like that in real life. I remember once how, when his circle of tempers was getting so bad he couldn’t come down from his room upstairs, he called me up there. When I went in I found him sitting in a rocking chair, going back and forth with his head cupped in his hands. I could see he was crying because his fingers were wet.
‘Eli,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry, Eli. I’m so sorry.’
I didn’t say nothing. I was scared of him because he was crying.
‘I’m so sorry, Eli. I’ve not been here for you. I know that. I’ve not been a proper father to you. But I’m trying, I promise you. Jesus Christ I’m trying.’
And I still couldn’t say nothing because I was scared and he just kept rocking back and forth.
The stars were still shining on the dome and the sky was its perfect blue the same as it always was and I was thinking, even though I didn’t want to, what it was that he found so dark in a picture so full of light. And suddenly it came to me: it was that it never changed; he hated it because it never changed. I thought I could understand it now. He’d seen it for real and it must have looked even more perfect to him than it did in the picture. He’d just got married and was there on his honeymoon. Why don’t you go somewhere warm, everyone had said when he and my mom decided to go. But her grandfather was from Finland, the same as my nana, so they went to Helsinki.
I never knew my mom. I guess I must have seen her but I don’t remember it. After I came out all weak and blue with the cord wrapped around my neck I got better but she got worse. Maybe it was the fifty below and her not being able to be in the hospital. I don’t know why. Nobody ever talked about it. Nobody ever mentioned her. My dad wouldn’t let them. I had a mom for a few weeks and then she was gone. It was like she’d never even existed. There wasn’t any trunk in the basement that was hers, packed with her special things and looking like she might come back and say, ‘I forgot my trunk.’ There was nothing. Dad got rid of everything – everything except the Helsinki picture, which wasn’t hers in any case.
Virgil told me once that that was just his way of trying not to look back. But I don’t reckon it ever worked for him. I could sort of understand that now, looking at the picture. He couldn’t stop his circle of tempers and they were always spinning him around this perfect place and time he could see and remember but was never able to go back to. And the perfect place never changed. He could see and remember it but he could never change it – make it not so perfect, the same as real life – until it became like his own Bermuda Triangle and he couldn’t get out of it. Not until the day he took Clarence’s Luger out of the trunk and shot himself with it.
Nana, Virgil and me were all in the kitchen when we heard the shot. Nana sort of crumpled when she heard it, like she’d been shot. Virgil ran upstairs. The chair was still rocking back and forth when he went in and found him.
Don’t look back. I think I know that now, Virgil. I think I understand that. If something can’t be changed then it’s best not to look for it. Sometimes you’ve got to leave the lost things hidden.
That night I tried to sleep on the porch. I hadn’t slept there in a long time, not since I’d gone to live at the Poplars, and part of me kept worrying I should be heading back there. I had Bobby’s candy and he’d be wanting it. And then there was Sarah and what Billy had shouted. But I reckoned nothing would be happening with Billy: he wouldn’t be giving her any more black eyes tonight; I could hear Buddy and him hollering at each other over the fence at number two O’Callaghan Street.
It was warm on the couch and the screens were still good enough to keep most of the bugs out, but I missed the night trains going through and the sounds of the others being shunted on the tracks.
I missed Virgil and Jim too, sitting out on the porch talking. If I closed my eyes and concentrated real hard, though, it was like I could hear them again and even smell the whiskey in their glasses: Virgil asking about Clarence and Jim answering him. That’s the way it usually went. It was Virgil’s way of looking for him. He must’ve started out looking for him for real, with the search parties, and then afterwards on his own in the bush, but by the time I was around this asking questions must’ve seemed the only way left. It was as if it were a riddle or something, as if he’d found one of his books with a bunch of its pages missing.
‘So when did he start building it?’ Virgil asked.
‘I can’t be a hundred percent on that front, Virgil,’ Jim said. ‘I reckon a week or two after she left. But I couldn’t be sure, nobody could. He didn’t tell nobody what he was up to.’
‘But somebody must’ve noticed. Somebody must’ve noticed something.’
‘We started guessing something was up pretty soon, but nothing definite, nothing for sure. It was a different place back then, Virgil, you’ve got to understand that. There was, what, maybe a hundred and fifty of us living here – at most. When you went out into the bush that was your business. Nobody was going to ask you why and where. And there wasn’t such a big chance you were going to bump into anybody out there neither. I mean, there were shackers who lived nothing more than a couple of miles out of town who I only saw once or twice a year when they came in to Schieder’s store to buy supplies. And don’t forget, it was before the diversion, before the mine. Eye Lake wasn’t no lake then, Virgil, with a road going to it and everything. It was just a part of the bush that the Crooked River ran through before it flowed into Red Rock Lake and then back out again and through town. They hadn’t dammed it yet and detoured it into the loop round Red Rock.’
‘So when did people start noticing something was up?’ Virgil asked.
‘I reckon it would have been when he started neglecting the hotel. It wasn’t anything big or nothing, not to begin with, not the first few years. It was only little things – like forgetting to fix a leak or two in the roof or a creaking floorboard here and there – things you maybe wouldn’t have even noticed somewhere else. But your dad was real proud of that hotel, Virgil. He’d built it with his bare hands, in the middle of nowhere, and he was proud of every board and beam of it. Sometimes you’d hear him saying to the railroad men in the dining room how if he hadn’t taken the chance and built it he’d still have been picking tobacco down there in Sarnia. He’d made something of himself here and he was happy with what he’d made. There might’ve been bears and wolves roaming about outside in the garden but he made sure there wasn’t a fork out of place in the kitchen. So we noticed when them little things weren’t getting done. He’d always spent time out in the bush – doing a bit of prospecting and trapping and hunting on the side, the same as most men here did – but before he’d always paid his full attention to his hotel.’
‘So you knew something was up but you didn’t know exactly what.’
‘That’s it. That’s the nail on the head. There was a bunch of little things but we didn’t know what they were adding up to. Like there was the time me and Jake Ottertale went fishing up the Crooked River. We’d gone a few miles up – further than we normally did: we were looking for new spots, out towards where the eastern shore of Eye Lake is now. We were casting from the banks of the river when Jake says to me that he hears a noise. I listened for a bit, and sure enough I could hear it too: a sawing noise. “They aren’t cutting this side of the river?” I asked Jake, and he said no, they weren’t even planning to. So both of us head into the bush, following the noise, and we haven’t gone far when we come upon Clarence, sawing away at a big red pine with his old bow saw (there weren’t many who had their own chainsaws back then, mostly just the lumberjacks), his shirtsleeves rolled up and about a million bugs taking a dip in the sweat dripping down his face and neck.
‘“Hey there, Clarence,” we said, kind of sheepish. “How’s she going?”
‘And he turns his head around like he isn’t even surprised to see us and says, “Hi there, boys. You’ve come a long ways up river today.” He doesn’t even stop his sawing.
‘“Just looking for new fishing spots,” I told him.
‘“Well,” he says, stopping his sawing for a second and rubbing a few hundred of the bugs off his neck, “I’ll be honest with you boys. I’ve tried this stretch myself and I’ve never had much luck at all. One or two at most. Hardly bigger than minnows.” Which, as you well know, is what every fisherman tells you if he’s got his own eye on a spot and wants to keep it to himself.
‘“I hear they’re catching a ton down by the narrows on the other side of town,” he says. “Can barely get their hooks in the water before they get bitten – that’s what they been telling me.”
‘And Jake and me stood there for a moment or two longer until we started to get the feeling Clarence didn’t want us around, like we were a couple of those bugs and he was trying to brush us off. He wasn’t being unfriendly or nothing like that: he just looked like a man who had a hell of a lot to do.
‘That was a month or so after the picnic and we didn’t think much of it at the time. We didn’t even get around to asking what he was doing. He was chopping wood. There was nothing special about a man chopping wood in Crooked River, especially one who had a whole hotel to keep heated. He’d found himself a good stand of tall red pines there by the river. It was only afterwards it occurred to us that usually you wouldn’t cut good lumber like that for burning. And besides, in Crooked River terms that was a hell of a long ways to go to get firewood.
‘And then, of course, there was his correspondence.’
‘His correspondence,’ Virgil said. ‘With who? About what?’
‘Well,’ Jim said, ‘it was easy enough to figure some of that out afterwards, the same as everything else, but at the time we didn’t have much of a clue. All we knew was that every Friday afternoon, at five minutes to five on the button, Clarence would walk the twenty feet from the front step of his hotel to Schieder’s store and hand Schieder a letter and the money for a stamp. The highway didn’t reach us then so all our mail came and went by train five o’clock Friday. There was always quite a bustle around Schieder’s at that time, with everyone coming to send or collect their mail. One of the railroad men would bring the sack of incoming mail from the train to Schieder’s, and Jake, who used to help out in the store, would take the sack of outgoing mail over to the train. It was a real social occasion, with everyone hovering about the store waiting to see if they’d got something and, if they had, oftentimes reading it then and there and sharing their news with others. The mail was a big deal back then. We didn’t have no TV and there was only two radios in town, so whatever news you had of the world came in that sack.
‘Clarence treated the occasion different from everyone else though. For a start, it was only twenty feet for him to walk but he got real dressed up for the journey. He’d wear his Sunday finest – a black suit, polished shoes, a hat … hell, even his buttons were polished. You’d see them glinting like pieces of silver as he walked across the dirt of the road. It was as if whoever he was sending his letter to would know just what he looked like when he sent it. And when he got to the store he wouldn’t say anything, only nod politely at the people grouped outside who said hello to him, and he’d look so serious and determined and solemn that when he got near the door they’d sort of open a path through for him, like the parting of the Red Sea. Then he’d hand his letter – always just the one letter – over the counter to Schieder, as if he were trusting him with a nugget of gold.
‘Schieder must’ve known where those letters were going – he must’ve seen the address on them – but being responsible for the post back then was like being a doctor or lawyer, as though you’d taken one of them oaths of secrecy. Where something got sent was strictly between you and the postmaster. So Schieder never spoke to nobody about Clarence’s letters and Clarence never spoke to nobody about them neither. And when he got one back – which he didn’t get that regular, not as regular as he sent them – every month or two maybe, often less – he didn’t open it there and then like most other folks did, but would put it carefully in the inside pocket of his suit jacket and walk slow and steady back to the hotel, as if he wasn’t in much of a hurry to read it at all. Not that that fooled anybody: every week, after he’d handed over his letter, he’d go wait quietly in the corner of the store for the time it took for the train to arrive and Jake to bring back the mail sack and everybody else to get their mail, rubbing his hands together while he waited like he was nervous, until there was just him left.
‘“Is there something for me?” he’d ask then. And if Schieder said no he’d pause a second and ask, “Are you sure?” And Schieder, being polite, would hold open the empty sack for him to look.’
‘I guess it must have been her,’ Virgil said.
‘I don’t see who else it could’ve been, Virgil. He didn’t have any correspondence before that picnic, not that I knew of. And he sure didn’t fancy himself up and walk to Schieder’s store every Friday afternoon.’
‘So that piece of paper, the one you saw her put in his hand that day on the platform, it must’ve been an address.’
‘It must have,’ Jim agreed.
‘And he never said what was in those letters.’
‘He never said a word about them. But they must’ve promised something to him because he kept turning up like clockwork at Schieder’s store five-to-five every Friday afternoon and he kept trekking out there into the bush every day too. By the fall when Jake and me went back up the river to check for fishing spots we found he’d cut down a good part of that red pine stand already. It was plain to us then he was building something.’
‘But you didn’t know what.’
‘No, we didn’t know what. I guess we figured maybe he was building a new hotel or something. It didn’t seem that promising a spot, out there in the middle of nowhere, but hell, he’d sure got it right the first time! I guess we figured he knew something we didn’t, like they were going to put in a highway out there or something. Oh, and there was another thing I almost forgot. He didn’t play his fiddle again that whole summer. In fact he didn’t play it for a good long while after.’
‘How long?’
‘A good few years, I reckon,’ Jim said.
‘And how long was he out there building for?’
‘Fifteen years. About the same time he didn’t play his fiddle for, now I come to think of it.’
‘Jesus,’ Virgil said. ‘Fifteen years! He spent fifteen years building it! And the letters? Was he still getting the letters that whole time?’
‘He was still getting some the first few years. They kind of trailed off slowly after that – you know, one every six months and then one every year – so nobody really noticed exactly when they stopped coming altogether. But he still kept on sending his as regular as clockwork. And each time he went in to send them he’d wait just the same as before until everybody else had collected their mail, and then he’d ask Schieder, “Is there something for me? Are you sure?” And when Schieder died he’d ask his son – who was running the store then – the exact same thing.’
‘And when did you know what it was?’ Virgil asked.
‘Well, after about ten years it already looked like no building we’d ever seen before. The whole thing was made of logs, red pine logs, and it was three storeys high. There was a high wide door at the front and who knows how many rooms inside – we could just see the windows, and there were plenty of them, cut out of the wood. God knows how he did it, Virgil! God knows how he stuck at it! Those logs were real big and he cut and hauled and hoisted every one of them himself, with just a block and tackle. He built it with his bare hands and his sweat and nothing else – with no architect or plans to work with either, just a picture he had in his head, I reckon. Of course he’d built the hotel himself too, but that was different. He’d seen what he was going to build beforehand with the hotel, you could tell; he must’ve looked at other places and copied them. And once he’d done the foundations, he’d had boards and nails and cut timber brought down the river for him to work with. He had that hotel up and finished in a year. There’s all the difference in the world between putting up a frame and nailing on boards, and hauling twenty-foot logs and notching them and hoisting them into place one by one by one until they’re three storeys high, thirty feet high. All the difference in the world! And you could tell that too: there were a bunch of buildings that looked the same as that hotel but there were none that looked anything like this one. And it wasn’t even finished yet.’
‘Of course, the tower,’ said Virgil. ‘There was still the tower?’
‘That’s right,’ Jim said. ‘There was still the tower, or the turret – call it what you will. He started on that after ten years. It was built onto the left of the building – as you went upriver – and every time you went up that way to look it’d be a little higher. Because by now me and Jake and other folks from town weren’t even pretending to find new fishing spots: we were going there to look at Clarence’s tower and how it was getting on. We’d bring back reports when we returned to town. “How high?” people would ask. Ten feet it was in the first year, then twenty in the second, then thirty in the third – the same height as the building’s roof – until at last it was almost forty feet by the fifth year and he stopped after that. It was finished then.’
‘And you knew what it was then?’
‘When that tower thing was done we had a pretty good idea. It was a castle, or what Clarence guessed one would look like. We started calling it Clarence’s castle. And for those of us who’d been at the picnic that day it wasn’t so hard to put the two and two of it together. As soon as he’d finished the tower he cleared a field in front of his castle, right down to the banks of the river, and started seeding it with grass and flowers. It was clear as day then, Virgil. It was his version of that castle on the banks of the Danube. It was how he’d imagined it. And he’d built it for her! He’d built it for her and it was a damn sight more real than the one he’d heard about that day fifteen years before. I wish you could’ve seen it, Virgil. It was really something.’
‘I have seen it. I’ve seen it in a picture, Virgil told him. He had a picture taken.’
‘I never knew he kept that, said Jim. Well, I’m glad you got something, Virgil. I’d like to see that picture again one day myself, to remind me of it. It really was something. And it was only there that one summer.’
‘Again?’ said Virgil.
‘It was me that took it,’ said Jim.