Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [84]
I found the boys very glamorous. Or no: I was too young for glamour. I found them, instead, magical. They were a longed-for destination, the object of a quest. Going to see them was – in anticipation, at least – a radiant event.
The boys arrived at the Lab every spring, around the time the new leaves and the blackflies and mosquitoes appeared. They came from many directions; there were different ones every year; they worked with my father. I wasn’t sure what this work involved, but it must have been exciting because the Lab itself was exciting. Anywhere we didn’t go often was exciting.
We would get there in a heavy wooden rowboat, built in the five-house village half a mile away – our mother would row, she was quite good at it – or by following a twisty, winding footpath, over fallen trees and stumps and around boulders and across wet patches where a few slippery planks were laid across the sphagnum moss, breathing in the mildewy smell of damp wood and slowly decaying leaves. It was too far for us to walk, our legs were too short, so mostly we went in the rowboat.
The Lab was made of logs; it seemed enormous, though in the two photographs of it that survive it looks like a shack. It did however have a screened porch, with log railings. Inside it there were things we weren’t allowed to touch – bottles containing a dangerous liquid in which white grubs floated, their six tiny front legs clasped together like praying fingers, and corks that smelled like poison and were poison, and trays with dried insects pinned to them with long, thin pins, each with a tiny, alluring black knob for a head. All of this was so forbidden it made us dizzy.
At the Lab we could hide in the ice house, a dim and mysterious place that was always bigger on the inside than it was on the outside, and where there was a hush, and a lot of sawdust to keep the blocks of ice cool. Sometimes there would be a tin of evaporated milk with holes punched in the top and wax paper stuck over them; sometimes there would be a carefully hoarded stub of butter or an end of bacon; sometimes there would be a fish or two, pickerel or lake trout, already filleted, laid out on a chipped enamel pie plate.
What did we do in there? There was nothing to actually do. We’d pretend we had vanished – that nobody knew where we were. This in itself was strangely energizing. Then we’d come out, away from the silence, back into the pine-needle scent and the sound of waves plocking against the shore, and our mother’s voice calling us, because it was time to get back into the rowboat and row home.
The boys at the Lab had caught the ice-house fish, and would cook them for their supper. They did their own cooking – another unusual thing to know about them – because there weren’t any women there to do the cooking for them. They slept in tents, big canvas tents, two or three to a tent; they had air mattresses, and heavy kapok sleeping bags. They horsed around a lot, or so I like to believe. There’s a photo of them pretending to be asleep, with their bare feet sticking out the end of the tent. The names of the boys with the feet were Cam and Ray. They are the only ones with names.
Who took these photos? And why? My father? More interestingly, my mother? I expect she was laughing as she did it; I expect they were playacting, having fun. Maybe there was some harmless flirtation of the sort that used to go on more because everyone knew there would be no consequences. It was my mother who pasted the boys into her photo album, and wrote captions under them: “The boys.” “The boys at the Lab.” “Cam and Ray, ‘sleeping.’ ”
My mother is lying in bed, where’s she been for a year now. In some ways it’s an act of will. She became progressively blinder, and then she couldn’t go walking alone because she’d fall down, and she needed to have someone with her, one of her elderly friends; but even when the two of them would set out, arms linked, she’d trip and stumble