Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [89]
Here comes her married life. Some of the key events are missing. The honeymoon was an escapade by canoe, a watercraft my mother had never dealt with before but soon mastered; there are however no pictures of it. Soon my brother materializes as a bundle, and then all three of them are in the woods. They live in a tent while my father builds them a cabin, in his off-hours, when he’s not at the Lab. My mother does their cooking over a campfire and their washing in the lake, and in her spare time she practises archery – here she is doing it – or feeds grey jays from her hand, or makes a blur on the film as she splashes into the freezing cold lake.
The cabin was already built by the time I was born. It was board-and-batten and had three bedrooms, one for my mother and father, a small one for my brother and myself – we had bunk beds made from two-by-fours – and one for guests. Most of the views of it I have on file in my head are of the floor, which was where I must have spent most of my time: on it, or close to it. I have an audio file, as well: the wind in red pines, a distant motorboat approaching. Beside the front door was a piece of metal: my mother would hit it with a spike to announce that dinner was on the table. I can hear the sound of it whenever I choose.
That cabin is gone now. It was torn down; someone has built a much fancier house in its place.
Nevertheless, here is my mother, standing outside it, feeding a grey jay. She’s far from the world of horses and Fords and floral-patterned aunts by now. The cabin can be reached only by a narrow-gauge railroad or the recently built one-lane gravel road, and after that by boat or trail. All around is the forest, scraggly and vast and bear-infested. Out on the lake – the cold and perilous lake – are the loons. Wolves howl sometimes, and when they do the dogs in the tiny village whine and yelp.
The Lab has been built by now too. It was built before the cabin was. First things first.
Cam and Ray must have been special, because there are a number of pictures of them. They appear on the Lab dock, and in their tent, and sitting on the steps of the log Lab building. In another picture they have bicycles. They must have brought the bicycles on the train with them, but why would they have done that? There was no place in the forest where you could go bicycling.
But perhaps they bicycled to the village along the raw new gravel road. That would have been a feat. Or perhaps they’re on a collecting trip, somewhere with flat trails, because their bicycles are loaded with gear – packsacks, bundles, duffle bags, with soot-blackened billy tins hanging from the sides. They stand balancing the top-heavy bicycles, grinning their wartime grins. They have no shirts on, and their tans and muscles are on display. How healthy they seem!
“Cam died,” said my mother once, when she was looking at these photos with me, back when she could still see. “He died quite young.” She’d broken her rule about not telling unhappy endings, so this death must have meant a lot to her.
“What of?” I said.
“He had some condition or other.” She has never been specific about illnesses: to name them is to invoke them.
“What about Ray?”
“Something happened to him,” said my mother.
“Was he in the War?”
A pause. “I’m not sure,”
I couldn’t resist. “Was he killed?” If he had to die too early, this seemed to me to be a suitable way. I wanted him to have been heroic.
But she clammed up. She wasn’t going to say. One dead boy was enough for that day.
The last time my mother went through her photo album – the last time she could see it – was when she was eighty-nine. My father had been dead for five years. She knew she was going blind; I think she wanted to have one last look at everything – at herself, at him, at those years that must have seemed to her now so far away, so carefree, so filled with light.
She had to bend over so she was close to the page: not