A pileated woodpecker haunts the grove, the beat of its beak against the rotting oak marking time. As the morning mist rises, the heron appears, stalking the shore out by the island. A flip and a splash, then a great flapping noise as he rises and resettles, seeking more. Out of the pearly haze comes a quavering tremolo as a family of loons slip by like iron filings on the bay’s surface. If we close our eyes we can hear the moss sing and we’re certain the gray granite, so young, so old, bears stories if only we hold silence and listen.
The Dean emerges from his room, leaving behind his medicines, sheeted and sheltered. Every day, he says, a blessed day, for he’s free. He won’t let it go to waste. He never does. The Dean is busy as hell, Googie says to the five of us as we roost scrunched together on the verandah swing. Like birds on a wire. Hell, we whisper. A delicious naughty word. From our perch we catch the flash of the Dean’s denims as he slips his feet in his boots and heads down the steps to the workshop.
We stop him. Tell us, we beg, tell us again about the beginning.
Too early, he says. Go get your chocolate and toast.
We care about the beginning, but it’s really the chocolate and toast we want. It’s why we’re here. We are, all of us girls, age eight and independent. We’ve paddled over to the Dean’s cottage in our canoes, which are lined up on the smooth granite shore. Chocolate, we murmur. How the Dean knows us and the Dean knows everything. He is the Dean, our tutor and mentor. Here he is ours, but during the winter he is Dean of a University, one we all hope to attend one day. We will be doctors, lawyers, professors, artists. We will run the world. Chocolate for everyone. We want to be as the Dean is, strong in our ability to name every living thing, strong enough to lift us, one on each arm, strong enough to bear sorrow. What we see dead in front of us we do not understand, but we will one day. Our faith is sure as our tartan, our plaid.
The way the Dean tells it we’re different clans and over there that distinction mattered. Here in Canada we’ve come together, Highlanders, Scots, all the same, never mind the centuries holding us away from what the British took, haunted always by our Bonnie Prince.
The Dean’s Christian name is Charles. Our Bonnie Prince. We know we can’t but still, we are going to marry him, all of us, all at once, and we will have chocolate and toast every morning and then we will build boats. Tiny one-person boats that skim across the water. Shaped like a pointed or digger shovel, whatever and however we fancy. Seafleas with Johnson 40s so we can hydroplane. So many we can hold our own FleaFest. All colors of the world. All ours.
For now the Dean is building one Seaflea. For us, we’re sure. We promise to share. We know we won’t. We’re certain it will go to whoever’s the biggest suckup, whoever makes nicest to the Dean’s ugly son. We do not like Finn, which is supposed to mean fair, but in Finn’s case it should mean dark and evil. He pinches our bottoms when no one is looking. He spits in the Dean’s beer and winks at us and one of us always makes clumsy and spills the beer so the Dean won’t get poison. Finn is trouble, we are not. Finn, at twelve, is four years our senior, and steals.
Broke into the neighbor’s house, he told us at the beginning of the summer. Stole the silver, sold it, bought some, and he sneered, drugs.
We wondered why he bought aspirin, but we said nothing, except Ellie, who said, That’s a sin and God will punish you.
What a clot you are, Finn replied. Monkeyface. He mimed eating a banana, and Ellie turned her back on him as we circled her.
You leave her alone, we said in unison. Ellie didn’t need our protection, not really. Small she was, but fierce, and we feared she’d set off and kick the living shit out of Finn in front of the Dean. She’d done it once before, which was when Googie expressed our admiration and said living shit, a phrase that fascinated us. Even Ellie approved.
But we know we must be nice to Finn, so when he appears in the kitchen we smile, angel-like and say How are you now?
He ignores us and looks out the window at the sound coming from the workshop. I see Da’s working on my boat.
We stare at one another. He is so dumb.
It’s to be red with a black stripe. He waves his toast at us. Go on now. The boat won’t make itself.
A cloud of fury descends and we hold back swears. We rinse our mugs and leave them on the counter for morning wash-up. Trooping out the door, we stop and catch Finn’s sideways gleam. Monkeybutt, Finn says to Ellie.
Down at the workshop the Dean stands on the stone step, beckoning us. Is the boy coming down? We don’t answer. He hands each of us a sandpaper block and we get to work, our angry tears mixing with sawdust. Ellie lets out of shuddering gulp, and the Dean drops his block and lifts her up. Oh, Ellie wails, why ever…Finn?
He pecks her on the forehead and sets her down. Buck up, he says.
But he’s so mean, Ellie whispers, so low we almost don’t hear.
Is he now? the Dean replies thoughtfully. You just hold your own with him.
I will kick the living shit out of him, Ellie says. Aghast, we stare at her, waiting for the boom to fall.
I imagine you will, the Dean replies. Now let’s do right by this boat. Which is when he tells us about the beginning, a long tale shortened by time and memory, so bereft of what we come to know as the truth that it might be a fairy tale or myth. A hundred years ago. A story of men who came to these bays on the Sixth Great Lake and camped, fished and hunted, foraged. A group of men like the Dean, university men determined to map the territory, name the flora and fauna of this new world. A group of men who left behind the city, wives and children, to tame the wild.
But after a few summers of abandonment, the long-suffering wives said Enough, we’re coming with you. The children, too.
This is our favorite part.
And we built a clubhouse with twelve bedrooms and just one big kitchen. Didn’t suit the wives now, did it?
No! we clamor.
So what did we do?
We set off and spread out.
Just then the pileated woodpecker kites above us, black with bold white stripes up to the neck and a flashing red crest, like a cartoon character. It lands on the half-dead oak on the slope and whacks on the rotting wood in search of prey, working on widening the rectangular hole. The whacking stops and the bird lets out a whinny and the hair on our arms rises. Picidae, we whisper. Dryocopus pileatus.
That’s right, the Dean says. And the bird lifts and flaps away as a BB shocks the air, Finn yanking at the lever to get off another shot, but the woodpecker is gone. The Dean’s long strides reach Finn faster than river rapids in a high wind and with far more force. Stripping the gun from Finn, the Dean heads up the path, stopping by the big rock. He slams the gun against the boulder, cracking the stock and barrel, and Finn yells, That’s mine.
Too bad, murmurs Ellie. We nod like bobbing birds, dipping our beaks in the waters of satisfaction. And satisfied we are. Happy, too, that the woodpecker got away.
That afternoon we head to the osprey nest, looping our canoes around the island that’s home to the fish hawk, Pandion haliaetus. The mother screeches at us as the chicks, new to danger of any sort, peep and poke their heads above the stick and twig nest. Taking flight, the mother soars the inner bay’s perimeter, and spotting something, hits the water talons first like a water skier, skids, then rises up with a fish that she takes back to the nest. The later afternoon sun steams hot and yellow, so we paddle to our homes. Tomorrow we paint the Seaflea, all yellow we hope, with a bold blue stripe. Of the true color, the Dean says, A surprise, yes? Itchy with anticipation, we sleep little as the water hums beneath the stars.
Like so many things in life, what we hope for fails to materialize. But we were new to disappointment and heartache so the pain of the splintered boat pierced us like a poison arrow. Hacked to bits by Finn it was and had we less heart we’d have used Finn as bait. They’d waited for us, the Dean and Finn, and the Dean cupped our chins, one after the other, and told us to Buck up. Finn sat like stone, eyes blank and cloudy, green heat all around him.
Finn, he took to the city soon after that, young as he was. Never went past grade eight although lessons learned on the streets stayed with him. Drugs, of course. Marriage, divorces, children, and then, broke and broken, he came back to the bays. If we were suspicious, and we were, we hid it. But Finn proved a diligent caregiver to the Dean in his juddering illness and for that we let go childish bitterness. As Ellie said, life kicked the living shit out of Finn, and when we scattered the Dean’s ashes in the bay, Finn wept great tears of remorse as sundered love etched his face.
Pulling back to his dock, we heard it, the metronomic beat of the pileated woodpecker whacking away at the rotting remains of the Seaflea, carefully stacked those many years ago by the Dean. In the wavy shimmer of the mid-morning sun our Bonnie Prince appeared in his worn denims and boots, hands of praise held out to us, and we reach for one another.
But Ellie catches Finn’s hand and brings him to us. This, she says to him, is our beginning.