Pa disagreed. It was not the way of woods, he argued, but the way of scientists, far from the shores and forests and creatures, far from reality. He argued that wolves had devastated the caribou population and, without control, would lead to their disappearance from the forests of the Great Lakes. But I noticed, even as he argued, a twinkle in his eye. He enjoyed this debate. And I don’t imagine that Alfred, when he and Millie set off in search of elusive orchids, had anticipated finding such insightful and lively scientific deliberations from a lighthouse keeper on a remote island. I sat silently at my father’s feet, listening and learning.
My mother did not stop and sit with us. She didn’t like Millie’s pants and wild hair, or the way she entered into conversation with her husband and Pa, often disagreeing with one or the other. She scoffed when the young woman praised Emily’s talent, when she suggested that she had a future with her sketches and paintings. I knew Mother had little tolerance for idle hands and idle minds. Emily had not learned to cook or skin rabbits, to clean or mend clothes, to knit socks or chop wood. Emily did not have the skills Mother saw as necessary for a future.
A red fox made Porphyry home that year, likely having wandered over on the ice the previous spring, her belly already swelling with a litter of kits. Emily and I spotted her many times over May and June, prowling around the perimeter of our yard, her teats long and black, her eyes sharp and darting, ears pricked as she hunted food for her young.
Eventually Emily came across her den, a well-concealed entrance behind a pile of rocks, and brought me there to show me. We spent several lazy midsummer days watching the fox’s offspring, four of them, tussle with each other in a little clearing within safe distance of their burrow. Emily could approach them, moving slowly, clicking her tongue and lulling them with her gray eyes into calm curiosity, so that they touched their sharp black noses to her fingertips.
Millie could spend hours as we did, simply watching the antics of the growing kits, marveling when they wandered close enough to tug on Emily’s skirt. My mother was always busy, washing or mending or weeding. And while she was quite capable, I never saw her read for pleasure. Never saw her stop to consider the shape of the clouds scudding across the sky or pick a bouquet of wildflowers. I wanted to have Millie’s untamed red hair. I wanted to wear pants that made it easy to crawl through the woods. I wanted to engage in deep, meaningful conversations. I wanted to laugh often and freely.
The James Whalen returned on schedule to collect Alfred and Millie, who loaded up their green canoe, securing it to the deck for the journey across Thunder Bay to Port Arthur, and stashed their tent and crates below. They took with them samples of plants, in little bags painstakingly marked with dates and locations and the names of genus and species and family.
We did not see Millie and Alfred again on the island. We kept in touch, an intermittent correspondence connecting the wilds of northern Ontario, the academic institutions of British Columbia, and the battle-weary towns of England. But when I needed them, when I had to fight for Emily like I had never fought before, they were there.
32
Elizabeth
Peter did not come out to the island that year, not once. He had plans to become a doctor, a dream the meager salary of a lightkeeper could not provide for. But my brother was determined. At the height of the Great Depression, he was able to secure a job in a government-sponsored work camp, earning a meager wage along with room and board, enough to keep him out of the soup lines and still have a few coins left over to tuck away. I was proud of him; I admired his dreams to go to school and how hard he worked toward achieving them. He was much older than I, and so I regarded him with a measure of awe. He was handsome, tall, and dark, with the heart of a poet, a little mysterious and very smart. Charlie, on the other hand, was fair-haired, like Pa. He was more at home with the water and the wind, full of noise and chatting conversation and always spoiling for a fight. My brothers were as different as ravens and gulls, and I loved them both dearly.
Mr. Niemi had been kind enough to let out a room to Peter when the government program ended. Perhaps, Charlie hinted to us as he prepared to return to Port Arthur at the end of summer, it was because of their daughter, Maijlis, who was just a year younger than Peter. Maijlis was plump and blond, with round blue eyes, and could gut a fish as fast as any of the men. But she stayed back from their fishing camp that year, taking a job in the kitchen of the Hoito in the basement of the Finnish Labour Temple, where she served hot home-cooked meals to members of the Finnish community and brewed pots of strong black coffee in the evening for Peter to drink while he studied by the light of an oil lamp.
By late summer, there was only one fox kit left. I named it Heathcliff, only to discover later that she was female. She was big and dark and sinewy, beginning to outgrow the clumsiness of youth, but still not yet an adult. Emily was like another of her littermates, and she bounded along at her heels with teenage exuberance or curled up in the shade of a tree while Emily drew and I read. I like to think Heathcliff’s mother and siblings left the island swimming nose to tail across Walker’s Channel, relocating to the much larger foraging grounds of Edward Island. I like to think that, but I know they began to disappear right after our chickens did, when Pa walked off in the early morning with his shotgun.
Labor Day crept up on us, the hours of sunlight slowly shrinking, the air becoming cooler because of it, bringing some reprieve to the oppressive heat. For the cottagers at Silver Islet who escaped city life to enjoy weekends and holidays in their summer homes in the old mining community, it marked the end of the season. It was an opportunity for one last adventure, one last thrilling boat ride across the cold green water of the Lake, one last afternoon playing hide-and-seek in the woods and lying on the warm black beach while the seagulls rode the breeze overhead. They spilled onto the shores of Porphyry with their baskets full of ham sandwiches and potato salad, carrying woolen blankets to spread on the ground.
With Charlie already back in Port Arthur, it was just Emily and I who greeted their boats as they floated into the harbor, catching their ropes and fastening them to the cleats on the sagging wooden dock. The adults set to work building a fire on the shore, heating up water for coffee as the children scattered into the woods and across the short trail to the east shore of the island. There were two boys in the group that I hadn’t met before, Everett and his brother Jake, cousins of Arnie Richardson, visiting from Toronto. They were new to us, and unlike the others, who made the trip out to the island many times over the years, they were new to Emily, and Emily to them. Emily did not look at them—but then, she did not look at anyone. She followed along some distance behind the rest of us, part of the group and yet not, Heathcliff having disappeared into the cover of trees and shrubs before the animated crew arrived.