Crow Lake Read Online Free PDF Page A

wife, every mother, every maiden aunt in the community must have set her lips and started cooking as soon as she heard the news. Potato salad figured largely. And cooked hams. Also nourishing stews, though it was far too hot to eat them. Every time you went out the front door, you tripped over a quart basket of peas or a vat of stewed rhubarb.
    And Luke holding Bo. Did he really carry her for every waking moment of those first days? Because that’s how I remember it. I suppose she was affected by the atmosphere in the house and was missing our mother and cried if he put her down.
    And myself clinging to Matt. I held on to his hand or his sleeve or the pocket of his jeans, anything that I could get hold of. I was seven, I should have been beyond such behaviour, but I couldn’t help myself. I remember him gently disengaging my fingers when he needed to go to the toilet, saying, “Just wait, Katie. Just give me a minute.” And myself standing at the closed bathroom door, asking, “Have you finished yet?” with a shaking voice.
    I cannot imagine what those first days must have been like for Luke and Matt; the funeral arrangements and the phone calls, the visits of neighbours and the kindly meant offers of help, the practicalities of looking after Bo and me. The confusion and anxiety, to say nothing of the grief. And of course, nothing was said of the grief. We were our parents’ children, after all.
    A number of the phone calls were from the Gaspé or Labrador, from various branches of the family. Those with no phone of their own called from a call-box in the nearest town, and you could hear the coins clanging into the box and then heavy breathing while whoever it was, unused to phones and certainly unused to long-distance calls in times of crisis, tried to work out what to say.
    “It’s Uncle Jamie.” A windy bellow from the wastes of Labrador.
    “Oh. Yes. Hello.” From Luke.
    “I’m calling about your father and mother.” He had great lungs, Uncle Jamie. Luke was forced to hold the phone out from his ear and Matt and I could hear him from the other side of the room.
    “Yes. Thank you.”
    Painful whistling silence.
    “Is that Luke I’m speaking to? The oldest one?”
    “Yes. It’s Luke.”
    More silence.
    Luke, sounding more tired than embarrassed. “It’s nice of you to call, Uncle Jamie.”
    “Aye. Well. Terrible thing, lad. Terrible thing.”
    The main message seemed to be that we were not to worry about the future. The family was sorting things out and everything would be looked after. We weren’t to worry. Aunt Annie, one of my father’s three sisters, was coming and would be there as soon as she could, though it was unlikely to be in time for the funeral. Would we be all right on our own for a few days?
    I was fortunate in being too young to understand the implications of those calls. All I knew was that they worried Luke and Matt; whichever one of them had taken the call would stand staring at the phone afterwards. Luke had the habit of running his hands through his hair when he was anxious, and in the days and weeks following the accident his hair looked like a well-ploughed field.
    I remember being struck, suddenly, while watching him search through the chest of drawers in the room Bo and I shared, looking for something clean for Bo to wear, by the notion that I didn’t know Luke any more. He wasn’t the same person he had been a few days ago— the half-defiant, half-embarrassed boy who had scraped into teachers’ college—and I wasn’t sure who he was. I hadn’t been aware that people could change. But then, I hadn’t been aware that people could die. At least not people you loved and needed. Death in principle I had known about; death in practice—no. I hadn’t known that could happen.
    The funeral service was held in the churchyard. Chairs had been brought out from the Sunday school and placed in neat rows beside the two open graves. We four children sat in the front row and tried