Surface Rights Read online

  For my own sister,

  Pamela Rooks

  The author would like to thank the Ontario Arts Council for its ongoing support over the years.

  When a massive coronary took out Verna’s father in the Keele Street TTC station, she was down in Cocoa Beach prepping the condo for sale. The Rothmans next door took the dog for the interim — while Verna was dealing with her grief, of course, and then the funeral and the settling of her father’s small estate. She had sort of hoped they would offer to take Jude off her hands permanently, but Sue Rothman hadn’t realized how much work he was. “I’m hardly ever home …” she explained, handing Verna the leash. “It wouldn’t be fair to the poor dog. And here’s his toy and his dishes and his Iams … you’ll need more of that. You have no idea how much he eats.”

  As she took the half-empty bag of dog food, Verna thought, What on earth am I going to do with a dog?

  Verna Macoun Woodcock drove north. It was ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning — a workday, or what would have been a workday had she not retired from the Ministry of Agriculture the previous Friday. After twenty-eight long years in a cubicle overlooking Bay Street, Verna could no longer be described as “a worker ant.” That was what her twin sister Fern had insisted on calling people who, unlike herself, got up every morning and punched in at some soul-eroding job. Not that Fern’s liberated lifestyle and free spirit had done her much good — dead four years come October. Verna sniffed and shifted in the seat and peered through the windshield at the 400 unrolling before her through sleet the consistency of a slushy.

  “Hey, Jude!” she asked the black Lab perched on the Volvo’s back seat — Jude, her father’s dog, hers now. “Starting to look familiar?” Jude must have made this particular journey with her father a dozen or more times. Whenever they hit a curve in the road, he banked like a pro. She pointed the Volvo toward Barrie and hunkered down for weather.

  It was the Tuesday before the long Victoria Day weekend — May Two-Four. According to Canadians this celebration of a dead queen’s birthday marks the beginning of summer. More often than not, the weather fails to support this contention; indeed, sleet, hail, and frost are more typical of the long weekend than sun and warm breezes. Nevertheless, this perception — that Victoria Day serves as some kind of magic portal through which summer’s blessings flow — provides an occasion for binge-drinking while scantily clothed, for the reckless commitment to the earth of surely doomed annuals, and for opening cottages. The latter activity, when multiplied by a factor of thousands, routinely results in bumper-to-bumper traffic stretching along the 400 from Toronto to Huntsville, and, now that the Muskokas have become so expensive, points north. That was why Verna was travelling on the Tuesday — to beat the traffic — and what she had woken up this morning, a middle-aged woman in her little-girl bed in her dead father’s house, and headed north to do — to open the family cottage. But that’s where the whole cottage thing ended. As soon as it was prepped for sale, she planned to engage the services of a real-estate agent in nearby Greater Gammage — “Carmen the Cottage Lady” — to list the property for sale. Verna had found her on the Internet.

  “Hey, Jude!” she sang slyly.

  The dog opened his mouth and panted lightly.

  “Don’t be afraid!”

  The dog yelped.

  “Take a sad song …”

  Bark!

  “And make it better!”

  Ruff! Ruff!

  It was a routine that her father had worked out with the dog, their schtick. Donald Macoun would sing a line and Jude would bark and everyone would clap and laugh.

  “There. Feel better?”

  Certainly the interchange seemed to have raised the Lab’s spirits. He fluffed up to the extent a short-haired dog can, sat up straighter, and, opening his mouth, beamed at her. At least he looked like he was beaming. Not for the first time Verna thought, What am I going to do with a dog?

  In addition to prepping the cottage for sale, Verna had set herself another task for this sojourn into her past — scattering the ashes, or, as the woman from the crematorium solemnly insisted on calling them, the cremains, of father, sister, husband. Accordingly, ranged beside her on the front seat of the Volvo were three identical white cardboard boxes the size of a phone book. To each of these a typed label had been affixed: Donald Macoun; Fern Macoun; Robert Woodcock.

  Her father had wanted his ashes scattered in the glen up at the cottage. Purported to be an old Ojibway burial ground, it was also the place where generations of Macouns had laid cats and dogs and several parakeets to rest and where Fern had buried the placentas of her various children — what she called “Offerings to Gaia.” The ashes of her grandfather, George Dewey Macoun, were scattered there and those of her aunt Margie and Joan Macoun, Fern and Verna’s mother. Joan had died as a result of “complications following the birth of twin girls.” That is to say, she had bled to death on Verna and Fern’s birthday, putting a considerable damper on that event the girls’ entire lives — their father stricken, the girls tip-toeing about, afraid to make a noise, a pall cast over birthday cake and presents.

  Fern had never specified where she wished to be laid to rest, so, for the past four years, the carton containing her cremains had sat tucked away on a shelf in the hall closet of the Indian Crescent home. It was Verna who had taken matters into her own hands and decided to make of Fern’s ashes her own “offering to Gaia.”

  As for Bob, he had requested that his ashes be scattered from a prop plane over the Space Coast. Too bad, Verna thought, feeling steely. Maybe if you’d been nicer. Maybe if you’d been true.

  They careened past the exit to Highway 9 that led to Schomberg, Arthur, and Orangeville to the west and Newmarket to the east. The exit to 89 came and went — Alliston, Rosemont, Violet Hill. Then the exit to Wasaga Beach. Barrie unfolded to their right in new subdivisions emanating from boulevards lined with fast-food outlets. Verna ignored the ramp and got on Highway 11.

  Her father would have been eighty-four had he lived another month. Verna had been down in Florida when he died. She had just gotten around to putting the condo her husband had insisted on buying in Cocoa Beach on the market. It was Bob who had liked Florida, not Verna. Too hot, too far away, and altogether too much weather.

  “So, here we are, Jude,” Verna told the dog, “all that’s left of the Macouns. A menopausal woman and a ravenous dog. The end of the line. Well, not really, I suppose.” After all, there were Fern’s kids: Parsley, Sage, Rosemary or Thyme. That was how Donald and Verna referred to Fern’s lot. In fact, it was Paisley, Romy, and Tai, pronounced tie — ridiculous hippie names. As near as Verna could reckon, Paisley would be closing in on thirty by now, while Tai (a boy) must be in his late twenties. As for the baby, Romy, she would be in her late teens or early twenties.

  They slid past the exit to Atherly on the way to Gravenhurst.

  Fern had been all over the place in her child-bearing years — the Kootenays, Arizona, Brazil for a time. Verna and her father hadn’t seen her for years at a time, never mind the children. All Verna could remember of those few, brief visits with her sister and nieces and nephew was spilt apple juice, a constant flow of mucous and hot, salty tears, and cacophony — something pitched squarely between bedlam and mayhem and punctured by the occasional high-pitched, eardrum-splitting scream.

  “It was enough to put you off children altogether,” Verna told Jude. “And they smelled worse than you.”

  Over the years, one by one, the fathers of Fern’s various children had parachuted in to whisk their offspring away to one of the earth’s four corners. Fern, they said, was an unfit mother. The children were not safe with her. And, indeed, as far as Verna could tell, Fern hadn’t seemed to mind overmuch. Time passed, efforts
to reconnect failed, everyone lost touch. Neither Verna nor her father had heard from any of them in years.

  So her father’s house in the High Park area of Toronto — not a bad red brick Victorian semi-detached on Indian Road Crescent — became Verna’s. The cottage up north became Verna’s. The 2004 Volvo, not even a year old with scarcely a kilometre on it became Verna’s. Jude became Verna’s. Everything became Verna’s.

  She glanced back at the Lab. “You miss him, don’t you? Dad?”

  Jude looked confused.

  “Of course, you do.” Turning back to the road, she squared her shoulders and peered through the veil of sleet at the road ahead. “You miss him more than I do. He was your everything, whereas for me, he had become a burden. I’m a cold, unfeeling person, Jude. Really I am. He was a wonderful father and a lovely, gentle man, but to me he had become a burden. How selfish is that? What a terrible daughter.” Yet in another way, she reflected, both Donald and Fern seemed more real to her now than while they had been alive. It was as though their loss were an amputation that had not healed so much as scarred over; so that, every time she went to stretch, there was this tightness, this sense of restriction to remind her where they had once been connected to her. Bob, not so much.

  Bracebridge came and went. Then Huntsville and Sundridge and South River. She stopped for gas in Callandar and to walk Jude, who took a huge dump in a parking lot behind a stack of shaggy firewood and then proceeded to gleefully consume someone’s discarded hotdog. They stopped again in North Bay to refill Verna’s thermos of coffee and to pick up a bag of ice and two big bottles of Russian Prince at the LCBO before continuing on 11 toward Temagami and Cobalt.

  In the District of Temiskaming, northwest of Kenogami Lake, Highway 11 crosses the Arctic Watershed. There is a rest area there, with porta-potties and a sign and a plaque. Whenever they had made the long drive north as children, her father would always stop at the rest area, and, because the high school history teacher that he was could never resist a good plaque, he would make them wait, dancing from foot to foot and holding their crotches, until he had read the words aloud. Only then would he release the two little girls from their agony, calling after them, “From here on out, as long as we are north of this place, your pee will drain north, not south!”

  For old times’ sake Verna pulled over at the rest area, got out of the Volvo, put Jude on his leash and walked him over to the plaque.

  The height of land known as the Arctic Watershed crosses Highway 11 at this point. North of here, water drains into Hudson Bay; rivers, lakes and streams to the south flow into the Great Lakes. As the northern wilderness came under development, the erratic line of the watershed defined territorial boundaries. It marked the southern limit of Rupert’s Land, the vast territory granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670. Two centuries later, it formed the northern boundary of lands ceded to the Crown by the First Nation Ojibwa in the Robinson-Superior Treaties of 1850.

  “Signed,” she concluded, “‘Ontario Heritage Foundation, Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation.’” She looked down at Jude, who returned her gaze expectantly and Verna suddenly realized that, long after she and Fern had ceased to accompany their father to the cottage, he had probably continued to stop at the Arctic Watershed rest area every time he went north. Indeed, he had probably made a point of reading the plaque aloud to the dog of the day — whichever of that succession of canines at whose side he had walked through life and of which Jude was only the latest and last. “Okay, go on,” she told him.

  Jude wagged his tail, then dragged her over to a pile of rocks. After circumnavigating it several times, nose twitching, he hiked up his leg.

  The cottage had come down from her paternal grandfather, George Dewey Macoun, an eminent geologist and cartographer who had died when the twins were seven. Verna remembered a tall, stooped man with liver-spotted skin, who smelled of Black Cavandish pipe tobacco and was always patting about his person for his pouch. A quiet, abstracted man, he was genial, but vague.

  It was George who had bought up all the parcels of the land around the lake in the early twenties; by 1925, he had built the cottage, the boathouse, and the dock. An old photo of him hung in the hallway of the house on Indian Crescent. It had been taken in Golden City, northern Ontario, around the time of his marriage to Verna’s grandmother — Miss Frieda Ekhert of Kingston — and preserved the grainy image of a lanky and somewhat awkward-looking young man, long-faced, hollow-cheeked, and sporting the paramilitary uniform favoured by surveyors of the time: khaki, a kerchief, and Stetson hat. He would have looked almost like a white hunter on safari had it not been for the black-and-white cow chewing her cud beside him. Betty was the Holstein’s name and she had belonged to Mrs. Flowers, the woman who ran the boarding house where George stayed when he was up north. Betty played a pivotal role in the Macoun family mythology — it was upon the bovine that George pinned the blame for his long absences from home.

  “She kept eating your grandfather’s journals,” Donald explained to Fern and Verna. “The notes he took for the Bureau of Mines. And then he would have to stay up north longer, because he had to start over again.”

  “Why did he let her eat his journals?” the girls wanted to know.

  “I think he did it on purpose,” their father replied. At that he had fallen conspicuously silent, as if to imply that there might be more to that story than anyone knew. What had been up with that, Verna wondered. Had her grandfather had a secret? Did that explain why he had always seemed faintly perturbed to her — as though he was expecting someone who had yet to arrive, someone whose appearance, when it finally happened, would cause him to beam and say in his scratchy voice, “Why, there you are! I’d almost given up on you!” Verna shook her head. Whatever that secret had been — if there had even been one — it would have died with Donald. That’s how it is with family secrets, she thought. We haul them along with us everywhere we go like some tiresome, but vital pieces of luggage that we are afraid others might steal or open; we guard them with our very lives. Then one day we die and they are buried with us. What had seemed to us so shocking turns out to be of no concern to anyone else. How could we have known that shame has an expiry date?

  Temagami. Then Latchford. Cobalt to New Liskeard. Then Englehart to Kenogami Lake. Bourkes and Ramore and Beverley, where they would finally leave Highway 11 on the ten-mile jog of county road that began in Beverley and just as abruptly ended in Greater Gammage. Verna glanced at the Volvo’s clock. They would be there by five — five! That special time, that portal to ease: the cocktail hour. According to Verna’s private rule book, drinking before five was verboten. It was a good rule, essential if she wished to remain functional. Were she ever to start drinking before five, she was quite certain that all hell would break loose or freeze over or do whatever it was that hell did. Nearly five. Nearly there. Thank God.

  Verna had just pulled off 11 into Beverley when it occurred to her that she wasn’t entirely sure where the cottage actually was relative to Greater Gammage. Was it north … or south? Or maybe west? Or northwest? She could bring to mind her father’s old Mercury Comet bumping down a pitted gravel road to get from the cottage to Greater Gammage, but which road was it?

  Exasperated with herself, she thumped the steering wheel hard with the heel of her hand. Damn it! What had she been thinking? That the magnetic pull exerted by Lake Marguerite on Macouns was so strong that it defied time and space? That the lake’s coordinates were somehow hardwired into her brain and tangled up in her DNA? How on earth could she have thought that she could climb into a car, drive north, and seven hours later find herself at a cottage she hadn’t seen in thirty-eight years?

  There was nothing else for it. “I can’t remember how to get to the cottage,” she told the dog. “We’ll have to stop in Greater Gammage and ask.”

  Ten minutes out of Beverley, she rounded a bend, and, sure enough, there was Greater Gammage, clinging to the riverbank like a stubborn stain. Greater Gammage
could hardly be said to look like a town so much as the weathered, rusted-out remains of a head-on collision that had taken place long ago at a crossroad. Born in hopes and dreams, a convergence of strangers who had come together for no other reason than to get rich off the gold and silver discovered in the region, who stayed because they were too poor to leave, Greater Gammage lived out its days in disappointment. Verna remembered how that particular, local brand of disappointment had smelled — of mould and wood smoke. She braked to take the old timber trestle bridge across the Black River. As a child she had had nightmares about that bridge; it had never seemed entirely reliable. Now it creaked ominously, like an old tree swing in the wind.

  Coming up was the Maple Leaf Bar and Grill (or bar, at any rate; the word Grill had a big black X through it) — Verna remembered this from her childhood — and the Pump and Munch, some sort of hybrid born of a gas station and a convenience store — this was new. There was something else new, as well. “Look!” she told Jude, pointing to a sign that read BLACK RIVER REALTY, CARMEN BEAUSÉJOUR, BROKER. “That must be Carmen the Cottage Lady. Realtors usually know where things are. In any case, I might as well check her out if I’m thinking about giving her the listing.”

  Parking in Greater Gammage had never been a problem. Verna pulled into the space in front of the real- estate office next to a glossy Buick LaSabre the colour of an eggplant. “Guard the car!” she instructed Jude and, turning, crossed the sidewalk to peer for a moment at smudged feature sheets taped to the inside of the storefront’s window. These depicted various alleged cottages listed by Carmen the Cottage Lady — from Norembega to the north, Holtyre to the east, and Barber’s Bay to the west. They appeared dodgy for the most part — hastily thrown together from salvage, then dug out each spring to be repaired and added onto as families expanded. Often a property had two or more buildings on it. In addition to the main house, there would be a vintage Airstream that some uncle from down south had parked on the property decades before and then laid paving stones in front for a patio or a ramshackle one-room sleeping cabin for the noisy overflow of teenagers. There were a few proper cottages, as well; wooden, stained a dark and intractable brown, with sloping wraparound decks or A-frames, pitched like tents on the marshy edges of still lakes. By comparison with these, George Macoun’s cottage would appear grand. There was no doubt in Verna’s mind that the woman would kill for this listing.