South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [132]
How had people done it, back then? She was finding it hard going in town, with a phone and radiators and neighbors and stores. How had it been in a lumber camp? In one of the pictures, a woman, two boys, and two men stood outside a building of massive logs that was banked with snow and hung with icicles as long as a man’s leg. The cabin at Stone Lake. Ada and her husband—named Emmanuel, Gladys had told her—and Joe and Walter, and another man, the cook’s helper posing with a dinner horn.
Ada wore a long striped dress with an apron over it, a knit cap on her head. Her sleeves were shoved Up to her elbows, and sturdy shoes peeped out from Underneath her skirts. She had her arms cocked at her hips and she was grinning, her eyes bright with smartness and cheer. She leaped out of the picture like she was ready to wrestle a bear. Oh, the look of life in her, flashing out after all these years. Ada Stone stood out in the snow like she’d never heard the need of a coat. Madeline’s great-grandmother. It was a good feeling, a strong feeling.
The cook’s helper was slight and dark. His mouth curved Up in a mischievous grin beneath a long handlebar mustache. He held the dinner horn in one hand and a great long carving knife in the other. Emmanuel was taller, broader, in a striped Mackinaw jacket belted at the waist. He stood off to the side, smiling shyly, leaning on an ax. The smaller boy sat on a wooden sled with a tin milk can on it, the other, a little older, stood beside him, his hand on the brother’s shoulder. Joe and Walter. Both were bundled Up in hats, scarves, thick woolen jackets, boots. Impossible to really see them, Under all the layers. Where had they all gone right after the shutter had flashed? The boys down to the lake to fill the can with water? The cook’s helper back inside to chop something Up with that big knife? Ada off to tend the fire, roll biscuits, set places out for the crew?
The other picture was taken inside. The room was filled with benches built of planks and long tables laid with tin plates and mugs. The tables were covered with checkered oilcloths, tan and gray in the photo, but they would’ve been red and white in life. Madeline closed her eyes to picture the scene full of color. A moment in time when the people living it didn’t think of themselves as history, antiquated and done with. They were just about to sit down and eat, that was all.
Ada was a blur, her back to the photographer as she worked at a cookstove. Emmanuel wore a battered felt hat in this picture, a ragged long-john shirt, wide-legged trousers held Up by suspenders. He held a cat Up against his chest, black with white paws, and wore the same shy smile. Madeline thought, He loves that cat. She laid a finger on the photo, over the cat’s nose. “See Marley, a cat,” she said. Marley looked interestedly at her. She picked him Up and went to the windows.
The skies were so beautiful, some days iron-gray and stolid, others bright, others yet celestial with pinks and lavenders and blues. The clouds were enormous. She loved to watch the weather move in from out over the lake, weather that had come from the Arctic, down through Canada, skimming across Ontario before it reached them. The break between sun and cloud was sharp and exact. She’d tried to paint it a dozen different ways and had yet to find the right one.
Most days the lake pounded in the wind, crashed Up over the icebergs in plumes of freezing spray, clawed at the shore. On rare calm days it would settle to a slushy rocking. She had a map of it pinned on her bedroom wall: 350 miles long, 160 miles wide, a surface area of 31,700 square miles. The largest freshwater lake in the world, ten percent of the whole world’s fresh water. Only Lake Baikal in Russia compared to it.
She was entranced by it, this inland ocean. The lake was so deep and cold and large that it created its own weather, and made a kind of weather inside Madeline, as well. A stark, beautiful weather that was Unlike anything else. Intoxicating and grounding both. Just like