Toby was now halfway across the field, running hard, then slowing down. That morning he had wanted to visit the duck nest they had found earlier in the week, but Paige hadn’t felt like it. She was grumpy and tired, and there was a weird ache in her chest. Paige had wanted to be alone, so she had taken Tom Sawyer and gone off to the tree fort by herself.
After crossing the turf Mr. Thorvald had planted in front of her grandfather’s old house, and after climbing over the rail fence he had built to separate lawn from field, Paige had avoided the foot trail to cut through the tall grass and weeds. In her grandfather’s day, when Paige was a little girl, there had been no lawn or fence. The field was a pasture, cropped short by grazing sheep, and the foot trail had led up to the house, with a branch heading off to the barn. Her grandfather’s big woolly sheep had wandered wherever they had wanted. Back then, if she was out with her grandfather on the farm, little Paige had always hidden behind his legs whenever the sheep, with their bony white heads and bulging black eyes, had come up to him, bleating for food. She had wanted to pet them but was afraid, and her grandfather had always said she was being silly.
What Paige had loved best were the lambs, especially coming up from the city in the spring to see them being born. She remembered the first time, standing in the cold barn in the middle of the night, her coat on over her nightgown, her breath exhaling in little puffs. Her mother had woken her, whispering, “Quick, quick!” and they had rushed out through the dark to the barn. A single clear bulb hanging from a black cable had lit the pen. Paige had squeezed her mother’s fingers and watched as her grandfather, down on his knees in the hay on the concrete floor, his sleeves pushed up and his hands shiny with blood, had coaxed the lamb out of its wailing mother. When Paige touched their noses, the little lambs had sucked her finger, tickling it.
This September Paige would enter grade ten. She had skipped grade seven, and as a result was always younger than the other kids in her class. They called her “browner,” and the girls teased her about her inexperience with boys. The idea of another year of high school was daunting, and it had been made worse back in May when her grade nine class took a field trip to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
The night before the trip Paige and her mother had quarrelled. When Paige returned from school that day, her mother had said there was something in her room. Puzzled, Paige had run upstairs. On her dresser was a training bra.
“I’m not wearing that,” Paige had said to her mother, who had come into the room behind her.
“Why not?”
“Everyone will see it through my clothes.”
“Oh, Paige, don’t be ridiculous.”
“Mo-ther!”
“Well, better they see that than your chest.”
Paige had felt her face burn. The next morning she had refused to wear the bra. It was a cool day, but by the time her class had gotten to the museum, the sun had come out and warmed things up. Everyone had taken their coats off and carried them. Paige was wearing jeans and a yellow cotton turtleneck. As her class had toured the dinosaur exhibits, she had noticed a group of older hippie boys with long hair staring at her, whispering, and grinning. She had scrambled to put her coat back on and sweated out the rest of the visit. The next day she had worn the bra.
Now, in the pasture, a long way from the city, school, and boys, Paige felt safe. The pasture was a secret, untouchable place. When she walked through it, she felt her grandfather was with her and she was no longer the Paige who had skipped ahead of all her friends, nor the Paige who needed to wear a bra, nor the Paige who was grinned at by wolfish boys. She was little Paige, who bottle-fed the greedy lambs, who rode on her grandfather’s bear-like shoulders, who one day, when she was about Toby’s age, had climbed up to the tree fort all on her own and couldn’t get down.
“How did you get up here then?” her grandfather had asked that day, his round, sunburned face rising above the edge of the fort.
“I climbed the ladder,” Paige said, weeping. The fort was actually a bunch of old planks, like a raft about ten feet square, that he had nailed onto a triangle of beams roped into the tree. He had built it for Paige’s mother when she was young. There was a knothole at the centre through which you could spy on anyone directly below, and a rope ladder hung down twenty feet to the ground.
“Did you really?” her grandfather said, swinging himself up onto the planks. Paige wanted him to carry her back down, but instead he sat beside her and gazed out over the countryside. “My, it’s a long time since I been up here.”
Paige was still sniffling.
“What you crying about?” He untucked the tail of his shirt and wiped her eyes and nose, then pointed across the landscape. “See that tall pine beyond the highway?”
In the dark woods on the other side of a two-lane highway that curved in front of the farm, a single giant pine towered above all else. Paige nodded.
“That’s a white pine,” he said. “Biggest tree for miles around. The camp’s right there at its base. We wanted to cut that one down, we did, my brothers and I, to make crossbeams for the camp’s roof. But our papa wouldn’t condone it.” His voice went squeaky. “Anyting’s been alive dat long, I won’t be responsible for takin’ down.”
Paige giggled.
“Oh, ya t’ink me old dad’s voice is funny den, do ya?”
Paige nodded, and he tickled her with his enormous fingers. Then he scooped her up and strode to the edge of the fort. Far to the south a ridge of purple clouds ranged like mountains along the horizon. “Storm coming,” he said. Then he carried her down the ladder into the flock of bleating sheep waiting below.
Ever since, the tree fort and pasture had held no fear for Paige. They were home.
Only now things had changed. The boards of the fort were rotting and loose in places, and the pasture was overgrown and unkempt like the yard of an abandoned house. And there was that older boy she had met earlier who she couldn’t stop thinking about. He had been so mean to her, as though she hadn’t belonged here. For the first time in ages she felt out of place on the farm. Watching Toby now in his panic, Paige thought how, if you weren’t careful, the thick grass and weeds could snag and tangle you and pull you down. But Toby didn’t fall. As he ran, frantically criss-crossing the line of the trail, he seemed unstoppable. Dressed in a red T-shirt, and with his mop of orange hair, he resembled a wild little flame following an erratic line of fuel to its source.
“Paige!”
She rolled over and sat up. Toby was almost out of steam. Three-quarters of the way across the field he was yelling something Paige couldn’t make out, and waving at the farmhouse with his free hand. She glanced at the old red-brick house with its steep black roof, white-framed windows, and shady porch. It stood on a small plateau up the lawn. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary — except that strange ash-grey pickup truck parked in the long gravel driveway where she had met the older boy.
Beyond the house, Paige could see the rows of her grandfather’s apple orchard extending south beside the highway. Across the highway three fat crows squabbled for position on a power line. Crows always gathered on those wires. Paige’s mother said the proper name for a flock of crows was a “murder.” That creeped Paige out, because the crows were always perched above the opening of the dirt road that cut in through the woods to their cottage.
Built by Paige’s grandfather, his brothers, and their father long before Paige or even her mother were born, the cottage was made out of logs and mortar. It stood in the shadows of pine, birch, maple, and ash, halfway down a steep hill on the southern shore of steel-blue Perch Lake. They had called it their camp, those men, and it was where they went to hunt and fish. Its three rooms — two small bedrooms joined by a hallway to a large living room with a stone fireplace and open kitchen — smelled of cedar, wood smoke, and dust. Two picture windows faced north over the lake, and a door in the hallway opened onto a deck above the water. From the side of the deck a long, rickety staircase descended to a dock where a red canoe was tied. There was an outhouse in the woods.
When Paige’s grandfather died, his will had left it all — farm, camp, woods, and a half-mile of lake-front — to Paige’s mother. She was his only child. His brothers had never married, and there were distant cousins in Calgary, but Tobias Mackenzie Hartmann had left everything to his daughter, Susan, including a debt so large that to pay it off she’d had to sell the farm to Mr. Thorvald.
It was a decision her mother had come to regret. Mr. Thorvald didn’t know anything about farming. He and his wife, Lianne, had come to Canada from Latvia after the Second World War. Mr. Thorvald had made his money in the city selling army surplus and had retired to the country to live on the farm with his wife and their son, Stanley. He and Stanley didn’t get along. When they first moved to the farm, Stanley was a clean-cut boy just out of high school — obedient, a little bored, and a lot restless. He had gone off to journalism school at Carleton University in Ottawa two years ago, stayed with friends that first Christmas, and come home the next summer a changed person. Paige and Toby had been visiting Mrs. Thorvald, helping her bake pies, the Saturday Stanley had arrived.
“What’s that noise?” Mrs. Thorvald asked, standing in her kitchen and clutching a floury rolling pin. From outside came the whir of an engine — like a small aircraft.
The three of them went to the front door and saw a green-and-white Volkswagen bus coming up the driveway. It rattled to a stop in front of the house, and a man sitting behind the wheel swung the door open. He was shirtless, had long hair and a beard, and was wearing jeans, sandals, and tiny purple sunglasses. “Hi, Mom!” he said.
“Stanley?” Mrs. Thorvald said, clasping a dusty hand to her mouth.
From the passenger seat a woman with very short hair smiled at them.
“This is Eudora,” Stanley said. She was black.
Mr. Thorvald had gone to town that day, but when he returned and found the five of them in the kitchen drinking iced tea, he was aghast. “What is this?” he demanded, grabbing Stanley’s hair. “You want to join the hippies?”
“Take it easy, Dad.”
“Don’t tell me to take it easy! Are you demonstrating against the Vietnam War now?”
“Wilf, please ...” Mrs. Thorvald started to say.
He wheeled around. “We fought Nazis so people like him could be free!”
“Oh, yeah, right, Dad,” Stanley said. “Now we’re all free to buy Coca-Cola, watch Gilligan’s Island, and murder babies in Vietnam.”
“Go!” he said, pointing at the front door, his voice thundering. “Go join the hippies! But don’t come to my house with your hair and your beads and your —” He turned and looked Eudora up and down.
“Maybe we should just split,” Eudora had said.
That was the man who now owned the farm. Stanley and Eudora had left that day and hadn’t been back. Paige knew Mrs. Thorvald was in touch with him, but the rift between father and son remained. Mr. Thorvald carried on as though nothing had happened. That summer he had put down the sod around the farmhouse and built the rail fence. Every day he could be seen fussing over the lawn, trimming its borders, pouncing on dandelions, puttering around on a little red tractor mower. Meanwhile the pasture went to seed.
Mr. Thorvald had wanted to buy the lake property, too, but Paige’s mother had said no, that she could never, never sell the camp.
Now, looking out over the farm at the giant white pine, Paige imagined her mother sitting on the deck at the cottage and staring at the lake, a cigarette burning down in her fingers and her other hand wrapped around a sweaty drink on the table. Her papers fluttered in the breeze under the rocks she used to weigh them down and her typewriter glistened blackly in the sunlight. She was waiting, thought Paige, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for her husband to call, or perhaps it had already rung and she had talked to him, and now she was just remembering. Only the clink of ice melting in her glass pulled her back.
After the fight with Paige’s father that first Friday three weeks earlier, their mother had made sure to clean up the cottage the next week before he arrived. Everything had been fine that weekend, but then last Friday he hadn’t come up at all. Paige and Toby had spent that Friday afternoon at the tree fort, and when they returned to the cottage before dinner, they had found their mother at the kitchen sink peeling hard-boiled eggs, dishes drying in the rack, half a bottle of wine on the counter.
“Your father called,” she told them, her back to them. “He has to stay in the city on business this weekend.”
Paige remembered her father’s promise to bring her another book once she finished Tom Sawyer. “But he was going to bring me a special book!”
Her mother wheeled around, eyes puffy. “Well, you’ll just have to do without your special book.” An egg dripped water onto the floor. “Now come and wash up for dinner.”
From that moment on Paige had kept the bookmark in Tom Sawyer where she had left it that afternoon, refusing even to pick up the book all week, as if to freeze time. Only today had she resumed reading in anticipation of her father’s arrival.
But now, contemplating the huge pine and hearing Toby’s panicked voice ringing across the landscape, she knew it was pointless. Gloom descended. Their father, she knew, must have called again to say he wouldn’t be coming up this weekend.
Her gaze shifted to the moon. “Not again,” she whispered.
A door slammed, and Paige’s eyes shot back to the farmhouse. Mr. Thorvald’s black dog was racing down the lawn. On the porch Mr. Thorvald, with his fat belly and camouflage cap, stood beside a tall stick man, a thin stranger with grey-hair, dressed in red coveralls and holding a sheath of papers. The boy was there also, the one she had met earlier, the one with the black hair who had been so mean to her. The three of them looked out across the field, and Mr. Thorvald pointed as the dog leaped through the rail fence.
“Paige!”
Toby was almost at the oak now, jogging slowly, peering up, huffing and panting. He had been talking to the moon all week, praying — if that was the word — for help in getting their father to come north this weekend. Their mother didn’t know, and Paige had tried to make him stop, saying how stupid it was. But now she found herself doing the same thing, murmuring under her breath to the moon, “Please, please not again. Please let him come up this weekend. Please, please.”
The first thing Mr. Thorvald had done when he bought the farm was pull down the old barn to build an aluminum shed for his blue Cadillac and little red tractor. Paige’s mother had cried a lot over that. But the farm was Mr. Thorvald’s now, Paige’s father had said, and unfortunately he could do with it as he pleased. That was the first time Paige had heard her mother swear at her father.
This summer Mr. Thorvald had erected a billboard at the end of the gravel driveway:
Thorvalds Orchards
Established 1909
Proprietor Wilf Thorvald
Pies for Sale
“He has no right!” Paige’s mother had said when they first saw the sign. “Papa and his father and brothers built that farm!”
Paige’s father had said nothing.
“He forgot the apostrophe,” Paige had said.
The gravel driveway had also been installed by Mr. Thorvald. It looped like the eye of a needle in front of the house, and at the middle of its grassy eye was a planter made from an old, white-painted truck tire that held a scrawny Jack pine in a state of perpetual demise.
“It refuses to live for him,” Paige’s mother had commented.
Parked alongside the scrawny pine today was the ash-grey pickup truck. Strange cars were often seen in the Thorvalds’ driveway — tourists who had stopped to buy pies — but the pickup, which was actually black but so dirty that it appeared grey, was there for some other reason. It was covered with ladders and racks and had an oily tarpaulin stretched over its bed.
Walking past it that morning, Paige had read the sign on its door: LAWRENCE RUSSELL, CERTIFIED ARBORIST.
“What’s an arborist?” she asked herself. Then with her finger she drew a huge smiley face on its gritty flank and wrote: “Wash me!”
“What do think you’re doing?” a voice behind her demanded.
Paige spun around to see a boy striding toward her from the house. He looked about sixteen or seventeen, with straight, shoulder-length black hair pushed behind his ears. An arrowhead hung from a thin cord at his throat.
“I ... I’m sorry,” she said, standing in front of the smiley face, trying to block his view, even though she knew he had already seen it.
“Get away from our truck!”
His dark eyes flashed angrily, and Paige felt her heart jump and her mouth go dry. She ran toward the pasture, embarrassed and terrified, but already wondering how and when she would meet him again. He was the most beautiful boy she had ever seen.
Now the boy and Mr. Thorvald and the stick man had descended from the porch and were walking toward the truck. Below the fort Toby had come to a stop under the tree. Paige shifted her gaze to her little brother. Toby had dirt all over his face, and leaves and pine needles stuck to his clothes and hair. He was still holding the long stick. Then Mr. Thorvald’s dog raced out of the tall grass and grabbed the stick in its jaws, growling and shaking the piece of wood. Toby held fast, his skinny legs wobbling, his free hand flapping back toward the house. “Pa ... Pa ... Pa!” he gasped, sputtering and glaring up at Paige.
The first month after he was born Toby had lived in an incubator. The doctors had called him a “preemie.” There was something wrong with his lungs. Only six back then, Paige wasn’t allowed to visit him, but when he came home from the hospital, she was amazed at the strength in the tiny hand that had grasped her finger. He still had breathing problems — asthma — and glancing down at him now, Paige realized he must have run all the way from the camp. Toby was gulping for air, his shoulders heaving, thin breath raspy and papery.
“Take it easy, Toby!” Paige yelled. “You’re not supposed to cross the highway by yourself!”
He took a deep breath and tried to speak, but all that came out was a long hiss.
“Where’s your puffer?”
Toby threw down the stick and dug in his pocket. As he pulled out an asthma inhaler and pumped it into his mouth, the dog circled in front of him and began yap-ping and pawing at the ground.
“Lay off, Sally!” Paige shouted at the dog.
When Toby spoke again, the hiss evolved into a word. “Ssssssssnake!”
“Snake?” she said.
Wheezing, he continued. “Is tryin’ ... to eat ... the duck eggs!”
Paige dropped her book, and it fluttered down into the grass beside Toby.
On Tuesday they had discovered the duck’s nest in a marsh down the shore from the camp. There were a lot of birds on Perch Lake, but two particular ducks had spent most of their time that summer along the shore by the cottage. They were mallards, a regal male, grey-bodied, with a bright green head and white neck band, and a demure female, brown and speckled with a patch of white on the front of her neck. Paige and Toby’s mother had named them Claudius and Gertrude. Each had a line of shiny blue feathers across the back of its wings.
Last week the two mallards had disappeared. Paige had worried they had been shot by hunters, but her mother had assured her it wasn’t duck-hunting season. Then, on Sunday morning, Toby had said he’d spotted Gertrude flying out of the bulrushes of the little cove down the shore. Paige was skeptical, but early Tuesday evening, while eating dinner on the deck, they had all seen her fly across the lake and descend into the cove.
“That’s probably where her nest is,” their mother had said.
The next day Paige and Toby were lying in the sunlight on the dock, eating peanut butter sandwiches, and drying off after swimming. Paige was reading Archie comics, while Toby was spotting clouds and talking to the moon. They could hear their mother up on the deck, pecking away at her typewriter.
“There’s a hiphopomus,” Toby said.
“Hippopotamus,” Paige corrected.
“And a ice-cream cone, and a parkment building.”
“An ice-cream cone, and an apartment building.”
“I’m not talking to you.”
“Well, there’s no one else here, so you must be crazy.”
Just then a large bird flew overhead.
“There she goes!” Toby said.
Paige looked up. A fat brown duck, the undersides of its wings flashing white and blue, was flying away, east over the lake. Paige checked the deck. Their mother was nowhere in sight. “Come on!” she said, jumping up and untying the canoe.
Small waves lapped at the canoe as she and Toby paddled along the shore. Her brother was in the bow, scraping his paddle on the gunwale, his head encircled by mosquitoes. Paige told Toby to pull up his paddle as they approached the marsh and she manoeuvred the canoe into the bulrushes. Sweating from the heat, she steered toward the shore on the opposite side of the cove, about thirty yards away. Her arms ached from paddling, and mosquitoes swarmed around her head, buzzing in her ears, as dragonflies zipped about, snatching at them. The air was stagnant and humid. The long green stalks of bulrushes rose out of the water, their brown sausage-like ends spilling white seeds into the air. On the surface of the water, spidery bugs floated as though standing on mirrors. Beneath the surface Paige spied tadpoles wiggling through the murk, and the stems of lily pads spiralling down out of sight.
She paddled the canoe forward, but soon they were surrounded by a tangle of branches rising out of the water from a fallen tree. Toby swatted madly at the bugs, and Paige knew it was just a matter of time before he would want to go back. She tried to force the canoe through the branches, but it scraped on something underwater and halted.
“Let’s go back,” Toby said.
Paige dipped her paddle but could feel nothing except the web of branches beneath them. “Can you see anything?”
Toby’s head was down, and he was waving both arms at the bugs. “No, let’s go back!”
Paige scanned the branches. “Wait, I think I see something.” Pulling in her paddle, she crept forward to kneel behind Toby. Over his shoulder, down a narrow canal that led in through the bulrushes, was an old tree stump on the shore, about fifteen yards away. “I think I see it.”
Toby raised his head. “Where?”
Paige pointed. “See that stump? See that white bit at its base?”
“No.”
A thick tree branch sloped up out of the water beside the canoe. Paige grabbed it and stepped out of the canoe onto it. She felt the cool water lick at her thighs as her feet slid down the slimy branch to come to rest on the trunk of the dead tree. Less her weight, the canoe floated free. Paige hooked one arm over the boat’s bow and pulled it through the branches.
The canal was formed by the dead tree trunk underwater. Paige inched down its length. The trunk was narrow and slippery, and as she felt its spring beneath her, she knew it wasn’t lying on the bottom but sticking out into the water like a flagpole. Afraid it might snap, or that she would walk off its end, she held fast to the canoe, moving slowly and feeling her way with her toes. Keeping an eye on the white patch at the base of the stump, she crept forward until the smooth, waterlogged wood finally narrowed and went jagged with nothing beyond. The water was around her knees now, and the bow of the canoe floated an arm’s length from the shore.
The mossy stump clung to a leafy clay ledge that was about ten feet wide and rose a foot out of the water. Steadying herself against the stump, Paige saw a long gash of pulpy wood running down its right-hand side, where the tree had split years before. The nest itself was on the same side as the gash, protected by the tangle of unearthed roots at the stump’s base. Covered by a fluffy blanket of white and brown feathers, it was about eight inches wide and was made of dry twigs, leaves, and interwoven reeds. It looked like a loose basket or a lady’s hat.
Toby reached out to touch it, but Paige pulled the canoe back, saying, “Don’t.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You’re not supposed to touch the eggs.” She snapped off a reed and used it to lift the edge of the feathers. Eight eggs the size of teaspoons, creamy yellow, like vanilla pudding, with a faint green tint, rested on a bed of white down.
“I don’t think she’s started incubation yet.” Paige had been reading about mallards in an old Encyclopaedia Britannica her mother kept on the mantel in the cottage.
Toby frowned. “What’s ’cubation?”
“In-cubation. It’s when she sits after laying and keeps the eggs warm.”
“She has to lay before she sits?”
“No, laying is what it’s called when she makes the eggs. There should be about twelve of them.”
“How does she make them?”
“Inside her.”
Toby fell silent. They both gazed at the eggs. After a moment, Paige noticed that Toby’s breathing had gotten raspy the way it did when he slept. She studied him. He was transfixed, his little mouth hanging open, his dark blue eyes, magnified by his thick glasses and framed by the near-white eyelashes and strawberry-blond eyebrows common to their whole family, staring intently at the eggs. A smear of dirt — a crushed mosquito — ran across his left cheek, and blackflies crawled in his hair, but he ignored them.
“We better cover them back up,” Paige said.
“Okay.”
As Paige lowered the feathers, a loud squawk came at them from behind and something swooped from above. Toby lurched forward, knocking Paige off the log. She fell backward into the cold lake water. Twisting around quickly, she surfaced, gasping, her feet treading at the mucky bottom. A frenzied squawking filled the air. Paige felt the slimy log pressing against her stomach, and she grabbed it, glancing up at the canoe. Toby was hunched in the bow, bawling. Above his shoulders two large white, brown, and blue-fringed wings flapped madly at the air as though trying to lift him into the sky. Paige gripped the canoe and pulled it away.
Now, at the tree fort, Paige climbed down the rope ladder, scooped up Tom Sawyer, and took off at a run. She followed the foot trail closely, looking back only when she got to the rail fence. Toby was jogging slowly behind her.
“Hurry up!” she cried.
When he caught up with her, they scrambled through the fence and up the lawn past Mr. Thorvald, the stick man, and the black-haired boy.
“Where’s the fire?” Mr. Thorvald called.
“A snake’s trying to eat our duck eggs!” Paige said. She heard laughter as she crossed the gravel drive, descended into the orchard, and ran diagonally through the rows of apple trees. Sunlight flashed in the leaves overhead, and the ground was hard-packed and patchy with grass. She reached the steep embankment of the highway and glanced back. Toby was trotting through the trees, exhausted.
“Come on!” she yelled.
When he reached her, Paige squatted. Toby climbed onto her back, and she scurried up the embankment like a crab, setting him down at the top where Sally the dog was already waiting. The crows on the power line stared down at them, cawing furiously as an empty logging truck approached from the south. Paige seized Toby and hugged him to her breast, turning their faces away from the roar and dust as the truck rumbled past. Across the orchard she noticed that Mr. Thorvald, the stick man, and the boy were gone. Then she spotted them, past the pickup truck, head and shoulders only, ambling down the lawn toward the rail fence. She watched the boy, but he didn’t turn to look back at her. Far beyond them the massive dome of her oak tree loomed in the afternoon sky beneath the placid gaze of the moon.
Paige pulled Toby across the highway. “You okay?”
“Ye-ah,” he said, coughing.
Paige turned and sprinted up the road, leaving him there.
This was their property now.