Swamp Angel (13 page)

“And then,” said Maggie, “maybe Vera’d get me a room in town. My job doesn’t begin till the first.”

“You don’t need a room! You’d come in with us,” said Haldar blindly.

“No,” said Maggie quickly. “I want a room somewhere by myself.” She smiled. “You understand that, don’t you, Vera?”

Vera remained silent. This was too much. Haldar inviting her to live with them, right there! Without even saying!

“Mr. Gunnarsen, Mr. Gunnarsen!” called a voice from one of the cabins.

“Coming!” called Haldar. He turned and hobbled off.

Vera Gunnarsen looked at Maggie with open hostility.

“What is it, Vera?” asked Maggie. She knew that Vera had changed toward her, and she had divined the causes. If words had to be spoken, let them be spoken now. Haldar had vanished into the cabin with the fisherman.

“You think you pretty well run this place now, don’t you. Just about own it,” said Vera in a low voice that she could not control.

Maggie looked steadily at her.

The words came tumbling from Vera Gunnarsen, and Maggie listened.

You little damn fool, she thought, you little damn fool. Everything could be perfect. She felt slow anger growing within her.

When Mrs. Gunnarsen stopped talking and was about to turn away, Maggie spoke slowly.

“You little damn fool. You should go down on your knees and be thankful. You
still
have your husband and your child, haven’t you?”

Maggie turned and walked down to the dock. The little damn fool, she thought, and she did not know whether she said the words aloud or not.

“Still.”

The word hit Vera Gunnarsen. Her passion recoiled on herself. She stepped forward to touch Maggie, but Maggie was on her way down the slope, and her back was uncompromising.

From a window of the lodge Vera Gunnarsen watched Maggie repel Alan who had jumped up at her approach. Alan stood, bewildered. Maggie sat on the edge of the dock, looking down into the water. Alan, kicking the float as he walked, left slowly and then ran up the slope to the lodge. Vera saw Maggie feel in her pockets and feel in vain, and she saw her wipe her eyes with the back of her hand. What did I say, what have I done, Vera asked herself in panic. Festering flesh does not heal at once; but sometimes it does heal. Jealousy had rejoiced cruelly for an instant at hurting the unhurtable Maggie. And then “You
still have
your husband and your child, haven’t you?” How shall I meet her. Oh, how shall I meet her. What have I done to her.

Maggie took a boat and pulled out into the lake. She did not want to go back to the lodge. She rowed out some distance
and then let her oars trail. She put her hands into the water which felt cool and pleasant. She bathed her face. Then she rowed on, rounded the dog’s leg, and was out of sight of the lodge. She shipped her oars. She was deeply hurt and she was angry, but she knew that she was stronger – and she thought she was wiser, too – than Vera, and that it rested with her to re-establish and maintain relations on which they could all live together. If she could not, her days at Three Loon Lake were over. But, she thought rather bitterly, life is like that – if it’s not one thing, it’s another, I have not come to a lagoon for my life; one does not stay, ever in a lagoon. Her attachment was strong to Three Loon Lake. Her future was there, and there she could live. Poor Vera. She is accustomed, now, thought Maggie, to being Poor Vera. And she shall, God helping me, be Poor Vera if she wants to. I shall stay out here, she thought, glancing at her watch, for another hour. The food is there. They can manage supper without me tonight. She looked up and, watching a circling osprey, she witnessed a strange sight. She had often wished to see this sight of which she had heard. It now happened.

The osprey cruised above the lake. Maggie, following the osprey with her eyes, was removed from her own thoughts. The big bird suddenly dropped. It hit the lake like a stone. There was a splash, a spray of waters. Then the osprey, free of the water, shook itself like a dog and the spray flew again. The osprey rose, carrying in its claws, pontoon-wise, a silver fish. Now, having risen far above the lake, it turned and with rapid wing motions, flew toward the end of the lake. From invisibility came an eagle. The eagle, with great sweeps and stillnesses of wings, descended upon the osprey. It beat about the osprey with its great wings. The osprey turned, this way, that way. The dark eagle was with him, above him, beating him
with great wings. Perhaps the eagle attacked the osprey with his beak. Maggie could not see. She thought not. The battering continued – how long, Maggie could not, afterward, say. The osprey still tried to escape. Then, as if suddenly accepting his defeat, he dropped his fish. Down swooped the eagle. He caught the fish in mid-air and rose. His wings beat slowly and calmly, all crisis over. Maggie looked for the osprey, but the sky was empty. Did a bird’s rage or a bird’s acceptance possess him? There was nothing he could do. The eagle disappeared into the blue which at the horizon was veil-like, mist-like, carrying the fish, pontoon-wise. Maggie returned to her reality. She had been lifted by this battle of birds with its defeat and its victory. She took the oars and rowed slowly down the lake. Fish rose, and fell, splashing, far and near, and the loon, swimming almost beside her, uttered cries.

As she returned to the shore and reality, Maggie felt like a swimmer who will dive in, and will swim strongly, this way, that way straight ahead, as he shall choose. But he will swim.

“Where were you?” asked Haldar.

“I felt queer. I went on the lake. I’m all right now.”

And to Vera, as she passed, “I felt queer, Vera, so I went on the lake. I’m all right now.”

“Where’s Alan? Alan, I’m sorry. I felt queer. We’ll go on the lake tomorrow.”

“Okay, Mrs. Lloyd, okay.”

There is a beautiful action. It has an operative grace. It is when one, seeing some uneasy sleeper cold and without a cover, goes away, finds and fetches a blanket, bends down, and covers the sleeper because the sleeper is a living being and is cold. He then returns to his work, forgetting that he has performed this small act of compassion. He will receive neither praise nor thanks. It does not matter who the sleeper may be.
That is a beautiful action which is divine and human in posture and intention and self-forgetfulness. Maggie was compassionate and perhaps she would be able to serve Vera Gunnarsen in this way, forgetting that she did so, and expecting neither praise nor thanks … or perhaps she would not.

E
ach year the idea had been that Alan’s father and mother would go up to Three Loon Lake in May before the fishing season opened and that they would take Alan with them. His father might go earlier, because however cold and difficult life might be on that hilltop beside the lake before the ice had gone, Haldar could hardly keep away from his lake, even when it was not possible for him to get much work done alone. There was always work waiting to be done, and while he remained in Kamloops the thought of work waiting there possessed him. There was wood, always wood, to cut; ice to cut and store if possible; repairs to be made; an attempt at new building.

Now that Alan was going to school, controversy arose about taking him out of school and letting him go up with his father, or even taking him out of school later when his father came down and returned with his mother to open up the lodge ready for the fishing at the end of May when business came with a rush. Nothing is more potent and insidious than unanimity about an only child or division about an only child. Alan was used to an accompaniment of this kind of
controversy. He was old enough now to be a little useful. Not very useful, but undoubtedly Alan was able to do some little chores that saved his mother’s steps, and his father’s too, especially now that Haldar (to whom work had formerly been so easy) should be spared steps and movements. One of the things to which Vera awoke none too soon was that this saving of Haldar, which dominated everything, must not be brought home to him by words or even by actions, or he became unwontedly surly and life was uncomfortable for everyone. Haldar’s crippled condition and his fluctuating pain had a restrictive effect upon him. This might not have been so if his passion for his property had not been so strong. It was ridiculously strong, and so disproportionate that Haldar began to live in a world of disproportion, where people and events did not exist in and for themselves, but were only adjuncts to his operations at Three Loon Lake and to his inability to perform these operations. Vera had until now been the party in his marriage whose likes and dislikes had been considered or pleasantly ignored, and whose small and frequent complaints had passed unnoticed by her husband, formerly an agreeable man. Thus do our weaknesses betray us. Vera found the whole readjustment difficult to accept and apply. She had an assumption that Haldar’s happiness came first with her and that she was the most unselfish of women. It was a good assumption but it was not true. It was easiest for her at the end of a half-done day to say fretfully to Haldar, “Why can’t you leave those boats! It’s too heavy for you and I’m dog tired working in these cabins. Leave the boats till Rob Rogers comes up. What are we going to do if you strain that hip worse than it is! You look worn out! You’re crazy!” She did not seem to know that it was better that Haldar should suffer, and that she should suffer too, if necessary, self-contained and in wisdom. Suffer indeed!
They might have been almost happy together if life, not Vera, had been allowed to prove to Haldar that some of his dreams were vain. At first, that was the way Vera spoke to her husband from morning until night, because of her anxiety and imperception, and the old habit of speaking as she felt. At last, necessity restrained her and removed even that small satisfaction. Restraint was forced on her by Haldar who became more silent, then morose, and then turned on her.

“For God’s sake, quit nagging or get out of here and go if you can’t take it!”

Once Vera said “You love this place better’n you love me. You don’t care what happens to me – nor Alan either – if you can just swing this place.” Haldar closed his mind to her and with constant physical difficulty went doggedly on. Perhaps what she said was true. Alan, always near, breathed this air.

A child is still one with reality. Nothing intervenes. The light that falls on each day is the first light that ever fell. It has not even a name but it is part of the world of his bright senses. Sounds, objects, air are all his own. They are himself, an extension of himself. And so the grudgingness and disharmony between his father and his mother were accepted into Alan, too, and became an extension of himself. He did not like something in the air. It had no name, but it made him uneasy. He often seemed to be wrong, or to blame, and he began to feel vaguely guilty – of what? Because the stove had gone out; because the stores had not come; because the day was wet. He often slid away, into the woods perhaps, or down to the water’s edge where he crouched as by animal nature over the moving water, or over an arrangement of pine cones and a beetle, or over moss into which he poked his fingers, or over a nest of small writhing baby snakes, or he looked up at a chattering chipmunk or up at nothing but a maze of branches and the
sky. All these things were part of himself, not very different from himself and he was welcome with them. Sometimes he was cruel, as when he dismembered a fly heavy with summer heat. I’m a bear, he would say, G-r-r-rr-r, and a squirrel would look at him brightly, with suspicion. Over everything the sun shone, and there was no passing of time, world without end. Then he would hear his mother’s voice “A-lan!” Time would return, and he would be drawn back into another place.

Alan slept in a lean-to on a lean-to. His little room, pinned to the side of his parents’ room, was like an outsized cupboard. He slept on the kind of thin straw mattress that seems to be comfortable to little boys. He slept a sleep sometimes peopled with sliding images, strange yet natural, and sometimes dreamless and deep. He woke, and became one with a shaft of light that lighted the unpainted wooden wall, first as a gleam, then as an expanding brightness. The light showed him the same cobwebs as yesterday, hanging lightly heavy, gray, floating a little, left over from last year. Nail marks in the boards became peculiarly his. Each had its own different being on the rough plank wall, and was important in its difference, being part of himself. It was nice to stay in bed with the gray blankets pulled up to his chin, watching the boards and the disclosing light. It was nice to get up. He got up. He did not wash, unless his mother, remembering, told him. In the summer he bathed, he swam like a frog. Sometimes, for some reason connected with his father, his mother, or himself, his hair was brushed. The loose skin of his clothes was pulled on. He ate. Talk and silence, all irrelevant, went on above him. He vanished, and then the call came, “A-lan!”

The year that the lady – Mrs. Lloyd – came, Alan’s father had brought a cat and her kitten and a dog to the lake and things were better in a way. But the dog who was elderly
seemed to prefer Haldar’s companionship and was really a comfort to Haldar. The dog neither complained nor criticized and did not seem to find in Haldar’s gait or his difficulties a matter for question or comment. He loved and admired Haldar and how solacing that is. The cat, behaving like a dog, sometimes followed Alan into his places, all her mystery in her eyes, but she was really indifferent to him. Sometimes she could not be found because – ranging far and near – she was occupied in her cat world, of all existences most secret and, no doubt, delightful. As a companion she was unreliable and so was her fugitive kitten.

When Mrs. Lloyd came to the lake, she brought with her a source of fresh happiness which flowed from her and reached and encompassed the little boy. It reached Haldar and his wife, too, and, insensibly, life was relaxed and easy for a time. Alan had come to feel that his mother had corners on, but Mrs. Lloyd had no corners. She did not say much. Her gray eyes looked at him, at his very self, in kindness; she did not need to reproach anyone; she had a shining softness, even if she did not touch him. I think she likes me! She does like me! Then the cry came “A-lan!”