Bud shouted something. He pointed. A curtain of falling snow was sweeping across the whitecaps. They could see it closing in.
Lee lifted and threw as quickly as he could, feeling the strain in his forearms. Something pulled in his midsection. Half a dozen bags remained and then the snowfall was on them. It blanked out the shore in all directions, leaving them in a white netherworld. Lee threw the second-last and then the last bags overboard and stood mute until the barge lurched and he was thrown against the mixer. His shoulder blades smashed painfully into the rim of the drum.
A light resolved out of the snowfall to their front. Bud was bent at the console, his lips pulled back from his teeth and his hands clamped on the steering wheel. He angled the barge towards the light. The silhouettes of conifers began to take shape. It was Echo Point and they were coming up on it fast, no longer so weighted. The west face of the point was bare rock where the waves smashed up and sprayed apart.
Bud heaved the wheel hard right and Lee fell back into the cement mixer, feeling it shift against the tethers they’d tied it down with. Neither of them had seen the marker bouncing in the waves, marking a shoal. Bud had turned them right on top of it. The propeller and hull barked against rock, and the impact was tremendous. Lee cartwheeled overboard. The cold of the water struck his head like a hammer blow and there was water in his nose and his mouth and he was looking stupidly into the black. He could not determine up from down but his boots were drawing him in one particular direction. He pulled the opposite way.
When he broke through the surface of the lake there was no feeling in his hands or in his face. He could hear the motor revving some distance away through the eddying snow. He thrashed about, calling for Bud. Lee’s boots were touching the shoal below. He saw a grey beach south of the point, not far away at all, where the water was sheltered almost to stillness. The barge was raking towards the sand, propelled at an oblique angle by the damaged motor. He couldn’t see Bud.
Lee swam for it, clawing the water until he struck on sand. He hauled himself up onto the beach. He was shaking all over. He got to his knees, fell sideways, got back up. Up on the point was the profile of a building. A single window-light. Lee heard a dog barking. Sixty feet away in the other direction was the barge, resting partway out of the water. He could make out one upthrust leg of the mixer.
He moved haltingly down the sand, holding his hands in his armpits. He was frigid to the core. He called Bud’s name. He sloshed back out into the water to the depth of his knees and laid his unfeeling hands on the gunnels.
— Oh, Bud. Oh come on, man.
There were eight inches of water in the bottom of the barge. Bud was face down beside the console, pinned beneath the drum of the mixer.
— Bud, you dumb motherfucker.
The dog barked again. Lee looked back and saw a man and a dog resolving out of the snowfall. Lee leaned over the gunnels and jabbed the kill-switch on the console. He reached down and took hold of one of the legs of the mixer. He could not feel it and it wouldn’t move and Bud did not move beneath it.
Emily was napping in her grandfather’s house when the storm came up. She had come out in the early afternoon to help him stack firewood. For the last week there’d been some tension at home, something that had happened between Grandpa and her dad, but nobody was talking about it. In any case, the old man needed help around the house and was being too headstrong to ask, so Emily had come out on her own.
They’d stacked wood all morning. After a late lunch, with a fire in the woodstove and the house warm and dry, she’d gone into the front room, closed the door and lain down on the couch and fallen asleep. When she woke, it was near dark through the windows and the snow was blowing sideways on the wind.
Something had woken her. Maybe the dog barking. She sat up and stretched. There were photographs of her grandmother’s cousins, Margaret, Bette, Ida. She could remember her grandmother naming them. Telling their histories. Next to the cousins was a photograph of Great-aunt Rose, who was still alive, whom Emily and her mother would visit this year before Christmas.
The piano was in the front room. Emily remembered her grandmother placing her hands-she wasn’t yet five years old. C chord, D major, E major. Doesn’t that go together nice? The foot tapped along. Grandmother smelled like lavender. In her absence, the room smelled like dust.
There were books of music stacked on top of the piano. One was a United Church hymnal. On top of the stack was Erik Satie. Grandmother had liked Satie best. She said how he didn’t have so much to say in his music and what he did say was pretty simple. When you thought about that, wasn’t that good? More with less.
Emily held her hands above the keys for a moment and then she began to play. She played Satie and the snow fell against the window.
The piano music came from somewhere in the old man’s house, muted through the walls but plainly audible. Before the piano, there had been the sound of the old man’s voice speaking on the telephone on the other side of the kitchen. Then the old man had gone back outside.
Lee was hunched in front of the woodstove, clad in dry clothes the old man had given him. They were too big for his frame but too short for his arms and legs. He was wrapped in a wool blanket and the old man had had him put on a dry toque and clean wool socks. Lee listened to the piano. The tune was not anything he’d ever heard.
Stan came back into the kitchen, Cassius following. The dog was agitated and whiny until Stan stayed him with a gentle hand on his head. Stan took off his jacket and his gloves. Then he paused, listening to the music. He spoke quietly: She’s awake, then. My granddaughter was having a nap. If she’s up, I’d just as soon let her be. I don’t want to upset her.
Stan had brewed a pot of tea before he’d made the telephone call and gone back outside. He filled two mugs. He mixed three spoonfuls of sugar into the one he brought over to Lee. Stan sat down.
— There’s an ambulance on the way. It may take a little time to get out here. There’ve been a couple car accidents in town with the snow … I brought your friend up and covered him. There’s nothing more I can do. I am sorry.
Lee nodded. He couldn’t stop shaking.
— I told him we should leave the job site. I wanted to go before it got dark.
— Never mind that, said Stan. This isn’t anything you can hold yourself to.
— It was my idea to leave.
— Maybe, said Stan. And there’s nothing I can say but it was an accident. My name is Stan Maitland, by the way.
— I’m Lee.
Stan nodded. Even if Lee had been paying attention, Stan gave nothing away just then.
— What were you boys doing? said Stan.
— We were working. Bud was under the house making it level. I was in the kitchen doing the carpentry.
— Carpentry, said Stan.
— Doors, windows, joining. Cabinets. It’s my trade.
— I was never much of a carpenter myself. About every time I swing a hammer it’s my thumb I hit.
— What do you do? said Lee.
— Not much of anything any more. I try to keep this place from falling down.
— How long have you lived here?
— On and off my whole life. It was my brother’s house for awhile. My dad built it. That’s almost a hundred years ago. I lived here with my wife until she passed on.
Lee lifted his tea and drank. For once he did not want a cigarette at all.
— It’s real sugary, he said.
— You’ll need the extra kick to help you get warmed up.
Stan guessed Lee was at least mildly hypothermic, as well as in shock. Cassius lay down under the table. Neither Stan nor Lee took conscious note that the piano music had quit.
— It’s a business about getting old, said Stan. You start to wonder how long anything you leave behind will last after you’re gone. Like a house, say. Probably not all that long.
— It doesn’t matter. You go when you go and nothing you leave behind matters no more.
