Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [4]
Once, while following Willy across stepping stones through the rapids below the open dam at Burleigh Falls, a rock slipped out from under my foot and I was swept off by the fast-flowing current. “Swim! Swim hard!” Willy yelled as he followed hurriedly along on foot across the rocks. When he saw that my struggles couldn’t overcome the strong flowing water, he skipped ahead, and, just feet from the next steep waterfall, he reached in and plucked me out. We stood quietly, overlooking the falls at the jagged rocks below for several minutes. I would have gone right over. There’s not a chance I would have survived.
Late at night, silhouetted against the bright Canadian moon, drunken Dr. Howell, with his beagle standing on the bow of his boat, would cruise up and down the lake singing at the top of his lungs, “Jesus keeps his money in the Bank of Montreal!” to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” One day, I stopped him on the mainland docks to ask him how the rest of the song went and he looked at me as though I was crazy.
One summer, my mother got all of the “bad boys”— mostly native kids who hung around the government docks-together and organized a fast-pitch softball team she called the Burleigh Falls Swingers. They won every game. The only way I could get on base was to stick my leg out and let the ball hit me. But life was hard for the local kids, and by the time I was an adult all but two were dead—even the lovely Barbara Brown, my age, who would call me from the reservation and flirt with me and coax me to come and meet her under the bridge at Burleigh Falls. My mother said that if I encouraged her, the locals would beat her for hanging out with a white boy. I stayed away. The following winter, I overheard my father take the phone message that she had been killed in a car wreck. She had been decapitated.
By the summer of 1968, the charm of nineteenth century living had worn off. We were the last family on the lake to give in to modernization. Plumbing, electric lights, and a telephone were novel but we never could bring ourselves to get a TV.
You see, we lived, during the school year, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., but we grew up on Clovelly.
Clovelly was where my father told my mother he wanted a divorce. They never got one. She never set foot on the island again.
As I grew older and life swept me up in its own fast, relentless currents, I would travel whenever I could to Clovelly to vacation alone, or retreat there to heal and reinvent myself. As I evolved into a writer, a musician, and whatever else I became, it was at those times between careers when Clovelly would call to me. In my dreams, I would fly effortlessly, always at night in the dark, with the stars in the heavens as my guide, circling the island three times upon each arrival and each departure.
Once alone on the island, I would slowly syncopate my routine with the patterns of the sun and moon, to the rhythms of the tides and the big rotating sky, the birds—loons, herons, and gulls—and the raccoons, flying squirrels, beaver, and chipmonks. Dogs love to swim, and there were several around the lake who liked to huff and puff their way through the water to come and visit me and frolic together on Clovelly Island. Sometimes when I was on the mainland for supplies, one of these hounds would approach me for a familiar pat on the nose and a scratch behind the ears. His master would say something like, “He don’t usually like strangers,” to which I would reply, “Well, I might be strange, but I’m not a stranger.”
Coming up the lake at night when there was no moon and the waters were rough would scare visitors from the city half out of their wits, which was nothing compared to the fright they were in for once they confronted themselves alone on Clovelly Island. Many turned back. It astonished