Inland Navigation by the Stars. Anne Coleman

sometimes comes in the back and Ruth gets the front seat; I never do and neither does Carol, which is unfair.

      We are at last about to be there. I have almost forgotten to think about where we are going as the driving to it has gone on so long. But then Daddy says, “Who will see the lake first?” and right away we all shout at the same second, “I will! I will!” There are patches of blue water behind some trees. The car stops at a little green hut. It’s tucked in under the steep bank so we mostly just see its roof. Daddy says it is our boathouse, but we don’t get out. I can see more of the lake, smooth and very blue, with another shore quite far off. Close to the shore that’s just below us, an old man is rowing a boat. He leans way back as he dips in the oars and then gives a sudden jerk and sits up straight again, then leans back again. And then he’s out of sight behind trees. Daddy has to back up the car after he shows us the boathouse and drives us off the main road and slowly up a steep little lane with trees very close on both sides and meeting over our heads. It’s like a tunnel. And then at last we stop.

      The house is above us. There is a grassy bank ending in a ditch full of ferns and there are wooden steps going up. The house is white with a shady verandah all along the front. It is a wooden house, which makes it completely different from any Toronto house as they are all brick and stone, and there are vines with big, round, pale green leaves hanging down.

      “It’s elephant ear vine!” Mummy says. She points to its tiny dark, curly pipes, the size for an old man Dutch doll to smoke. She smiles. “It’s a good kind of vine. It doesn’t attract any insects.” I quickly hope no caterpillars. Do they count as insects? Carol and I both hate them, especially the smooth green kind that hide in big leaves. On the verandah, in the shadow of the vines, I can see a glider swing and four canvas deck chairs. We go in the door and right away I love the smell of the house and the dimness of the room we are in.

      I ask, “What does it smell of?” And Mummy says: “Cottage! It’s the smell of a cottage.”

      The living room is square and then we see there is a dining room next to it which has a fireplace, and that’s where part of the nice smell is coming from, so I know it’s smoke from logs, not coal. On each side of the fireplace is a window seat with pillows. I always like tucked away nooks and I right away plan to curl up in one of them for reading, or pretend reading. I really only look at pictures. I won’t learn to read until grade one.

      “A wood stove!” Mummy says when we explore the kitchen next. “Look at the flowers painted on the backdrop, so pretty!”

      A stack of small logs is stored beside the stove, piled in a big basket, with some very skinny sticks for kindling. We know about wood stoves from when we lived at the Lucky Shot gold mine in Alaska. There is no fridge but behind the kitchen is a shed with what Mummy says is an icebox. There is already a big chunk of sharp-cornered ice in it and she is pleased about that. She lifts me up so I can see the ice and I notice tiny brown bits sticking on it that she says is sawdust. She tells us all how men must cut the ice from the lake in the winter and store it all summer long in a place in the woods where it will keep cool and frozen. I think it must be a deep cave, much bigger than a root cellar, and freezing cold, with ice chunks piled to the ceiling.

      We run upstairs to find our bedrooms. Carol and Ruth are faster and they choose the first two bedrooms, but when I get to the last one I am glad because it’s the nicest. Carol and I both laugh because we have doors onto the upstairs verandah and Ruth, who has the middle bedroom, doesn’t. We will be able to sneak along to each other and no one will know. My room has a big bed, a grownup’s bed, with a white bedspread and a pink-flowered comforter folded into a puffy lump. The bed has four gold-coloured posts and the posts have white china knobs at the tops. The dresser has a long white cloth on it and four china things: a little tray, two small pots with lids and a shallow dish. I ask Mummy what they are for and she says, “Why, for you to keep useful articles in,” and we laugh because we both think of Eeyore’s Birthday. I really, really like my room. This is a perfect house and I will have my sixth birthday here in just ten days.

      ~

      We all love North Hatley and our cottage, the grownups just as much as the children. Daddy knows it from long ago and tells us a few things about when he was little here but not much. I can’t see in my mind what he tells us. It feels too strange. I always can see Mummy’s little girl stories but his are different. He doesn’t give enough details.

      We have a lake to learn to swim in — Ruth already can but Carol and I can’t. We rent a rowboat from Mr. Sampson across the lake and try rowing. We often see that old man we saw rowing in that funny jerky way the first day. He is a gardener at a house way up the lake. And we have so many places to explore. First we find a wild place just up the steep bank behind our cottage, with raspberry bushes and some trees, and beyond that we come to the driveway to a big red house. It is one of the houses our Dad used to come to when he was a little boy. There is something sad about that. He shows us a picture of him, then, with his cousins, and he looks too different a person from the Dad I know to believe it can be him. The picture shows a small skinny boy in a funny bathing suit like a girl’s. He’s looking off at something else, away from the other kids, who are smiling. There is a little girl in the picture and two little boys as well as Daddy. The girl has hair like mine and is about my age.

      I ask who she is and he says, “She was my cousin Frances. She died.” It doesn’t give me a good feeling. Did she die in that house? Did she get polio? Daddy doesn’t tell. But we can run across its driveway without really looking at the red house where maybe a little girl with curly hair like ours died and then we are in a very old orchard. The apple trees are almost invisible because they are small and bent low, and there is tall golden rod and milkweed and tall, tall grass, and also some small fir trees. Carol and I make dens in the long grass, each of us stamping down a little circle we can hide in. I lie in mine and watch a ladybug climb a stalk of grass. Ladybugs are lucky to see. It is hot inside my den as the sun darts in through the tall grass and finds me, and I hear birds and sometimes a bee. I hug my knees and sniff my skin. Summer skin smells different from winter skin and nicer, like a biscuit.

      Above the orchard — the countryside is all a hill — is the pasture. Carol and I are tremendously excited when we find it. It is so wide, almost a whole land, like a discovered new world in a fairy story, and it slopes up and up until finally there is a forest at the top. It takes us many days to discover it all. There are little groups of trees and some larger ones almost like woods and a big patch of wild rose bushes, and lots of other wildflowers, and there are zigzagging cow paths that we follow one after another, a different one each day until we know the whole pasture. At first there don’t seem to be any cows in the pasture but then we discover two, and also the farmer, who tells us the cows’ names are Dolly and Daisy. He tells us we can come back when he is milking and we can watch him and maybe he will teach us how to do it.

       3

      As we three girls got older there was a kind of withdrawal of our father’s natural warmth, or the expression of it. I always sensed the warmth was there, but somehow he no longer knew how to talk to his daughters as we became, one after another, adolescents. Unlike his younger brother, our Uncle Bunny, who kept the conversational channels open with his children as they matured, our father lacked confidence in himself and in us. Or that’s how I see it now.

      He was a complicated and vulnerable person. He had to become the man of his family at eleven years old. And having to fill that role, impossibly taxing for a child, must still have been an improvement over the frighteningly uncertain life that had come before. His difficult childhood ensured that he locked down a great deal. Even so, such was his strength that he had taken from what small offerings of love came his way — affection, perhaps, from one grandmother, and definitely from a servant in that grandmother’s house — enough to forge a loving personality. His mother surely loved him too but my sense is that she was so beaten down — figuratively and maybe literally as well — by her situation, the situation created by her husband, that she could not protect her son. He may have found it hard to trust her love’s worth. But I mentioned the servant because I have a sudden memory of a visit our father, Carol