A Gift of Echoes

By Robert Harlow

There is a timeless quality about this powerful, complex novel which is impossible to pin down in a few words. British Book News

His comments on the way that people behave toward each other are savagely effective. The Toronto Star

After the Second World War John Grandy returns to the village of Onion Lake where he once taught school, and to a job at the Acton lumber mill in northern British Columbia. Old Henry Acton is ill. Son, Nairn, and family have come to learn about the enterprise they will inherit. The destructive element is Velma, a former student of Grandys, whose struggle against her apparent destiny damages everyone. Innocent of intent but guilty of involvement of events, she and Grandy become centra

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 5, 2002
• ISBN: 9781465315700

Robert Harlow

SHORT BIO The author, most recently of Necessary Dark, a novel based largely on his experiences in WWll, Robert Harlow was born in Northern British Columbia in 1923, worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation from 1951 ro 1965, and was between 1965 and 1977 Head of the Department of Creative Writing at The University of British Columbia. He was short listed in 1972 for the Governor General's Award for Literature, and in 2001 he received the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award for an outstanding literary career. Since 1990, he has lived with writer and artist Sally Ireland on one of the Gulf Islands that lie between B.C.'s Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island. When Tomorrow Dies

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Copyright © 2002 by Robert Harlow.

First Published by Macmillan & Co. of Canada, 1965

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing

from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to

any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

NOVELS BY

ROBERT HARLOW

Royal Murdoch

Scann

Making Arrangements

Paul Nolan

Felice: A Travelogue

The Saxophone Winter

Necessary Dark

The village of Onion Lake and the town of Linden are fictitious, and their inhabitants and situations are products of the author’s imagination, not intended to portray real people or real situations

Chapter 1

Now, more than half a generation later, on the south side of Onion Lake there is a simple black scar between the railway and the shore. Trains run by it daily; they coast down the easy slope of the western grade and grunt swiftly but gently toward the east, giving the impression they are consciously skirting bedeviled ground where flames might stir again and smoke might rise as sudden as a memory if an importunate engine somehow forgot and stopped at the siding where the Acton Lumber Company once demanded service.

It is odd, this urge to ignore the sight, whether passing by rail or road, to look up and away, whistle softly to oneself, talk suddenly into the middle of a traveller’s silence. There is nothing to frighten or disturb or embarrass. On the lake side of the tracks the old burner sits like a giant overturned thimble; it is rusty and leans a little into the marshy ground, but it did that even when the mill was there and running. Abandoned burners are a common thing in the broad valley of the Linden.

Perhaps the urge begins when one’s view is startled by the remains of the house where the Actons used to live. It stands half-burned on the rise above the lake, the tracks, and the road, facing north toward the water and surrounded by almost an acre of fireweed and poplar saplings, where the bunk-houses and cook-shack once were that housed and fed the sixty loggers who worked the mill. The house leans too, toward its fire-gutted side, and each year a timber cracks or a rafter falls or a patch of the old hand-cut shakes is ripped away from the roof by the winter winds. It is a crazy, grotesque thing and it stands shattered against a rising evergreen line of spruce, as if it were trying to make fun of sickening, dying, decaying. There is a bizarre, skeletal comedy about the place.

It balances there with the involuted concentration of a urinating drunk in an abandoned graveyard; and those who knew the Actons and felt their importance before the fire try to go past it as if it were just another clearing in the forest.

But if the feeling about the scarred remains is mainly inexplicable, the miracle of the half-burned house must be taken on faith, because that was where the fire began, in the east wing where Henry’s bedroom was. It glowed, brightened, crackled, billowed, and then, fanned and blown toward the other buildings by a backing westerly sucked up from the narrow end of the lake, it jumped from bunk-house to bunk-house and on to the cookshack until, finally, with the fire making its own wind, the tar-paper roofs lifted, became airborne on the still-backing storm, and, flapping like pterodactyls, they descended on the drying-yards and the mill itself. Like boxes of wooden matches the buildings flared and flared again, burned to twisted blackness in the diminishing wind, and gradually perished in a quick mountain deluge. And yet the house, except for the east wing, staggered up out of the heat and smoke as if it were meant to stay, to make those who happened by remember or pause to wonder.

Still, in the long run the burning of the mill itself was no tragedy. There was no profitable reason to rebuild it, and no one, least of all the younger Actons, struggled to find one. Over the years it had been gradually becoming a marginal operation, one that would have to change its ways if it were to meet the new competition from portable mills run by a few men who truck their equipment to where the spruce is thickest and then pick up and leave when their legal cut is completed. So the fire was a kind of release. The mill had lived for nearly a generation, and some millions of feet of timber had been pushed up its jackladder, through the machinery of its mainsaws, edger, trimsaws, and planer, and the shores of Onion Lake were nearly spent of spruce. Henry Acton had built the mill to his own specifications and it had suited him fine. It lasted as long as he did and, in a sense, even a few years beyond. The black scar spells out Henry to some (those who knew and worked with him) and to others it recalls his son Nairn and his family; or perhaps Max, who is remembered, too, apocryphally, some say, for having sparred once with Jack Dempsey; or John Grandy, who was oddly close to the centre of what was happening up at the Acton house on the hill.

Almost from the beginning, the elder Actons used the Onion Lake operation as if it were a summer resort, coming each May and going again at the end of October just before the snow began to fall. The winter logging was left to Buck Dirksen while they retreated for the season to Toronto, leaving the impression that they were rich and powerful in that quiet way Easterners have of simply understanding that they are Somebody. They went to a house in Rosedale which they refused to give up even when the district around them became less than fashionable and the old homes were broken up into flats for business couples and bachelor boys and girls, whose lives must have seemed less than circumspect to old Mrs. Acton. The summers were for Henry, and the winters for his wife and Nairn, their son, who went to Ridley and visited them when he was allowed, on week-ends in the winter, and who, in summer, usually went to camps for boys which invariably had Indian names and concentrated, they said, on building character.

A mile west of the mill was another clearing in the forest. There was the village and the station with its black and white signboard hung at each end (Onion Lake: Elevation 3704; Winnipeg 1853 miles: Prince Rupert 507.9 miles). Across the tracks was a speeder shed, a section house, and, a hundred yards farther west, a standpipe where locomotives sometimes paused for water. The gravelled road that ran east from the town of Linden until it unceremoniously stopped among the first peaks of the Rockies, served as the main street. A trail wide enough to drive a truck down crossed the road and the railway just west of the station and made a corner of sorts where Claude Dickenson’s combination store, gas station, and cafe stood, and clustered near by were a couple of dozen houses and shacks. West and north of the station there were farms (small, haphazardly cleared, and known locally as stump ranches) and close to the border of Will Danvers’s property was the school.

John Grandy taught here in the 1938-39 school year (and for a short time before the mill burned after the war) and in that year he had the usual eighteen or twenty pupils, ranging in age from six to fifteen, who sat in the one room and studied under his casual but not easy eye. He taught grades one to eight and supposed, if he stayed on, that his graduates would go from there to dormitory life at the consolidated school at Linden. But through the schoolroom window the lazy, mindless smoke from the mill’s burner could be seen, and in fact most of the boys, if not all of them, worked eventually for Henry Acton.

He tried not to think of the girls at all. They grew quickly, usually failed a year or two, and wound up in grade eight at fourteen or fifteen, as knowledgeable as single-bedroom homes and mating farm animals could make them. The problem with them was that they were, he imagined, available to him. But he managed not to test the sexual breezes that blew strong after the long winter. He saw the noon-hour and after-school aggressions that seemed to come to nothing and he remained tolerant, knowing he had not come to Onion Lake either to judge the people or to become one of them. His stay was for him an easy, gentle separateness, a moment in which to find himself, between the end of his training and the beginning of a career. He was too busy supervising himself to do more than observe the children or the villagers. Involvement seemed out of the question, and he tried for mere existence among them, a neutral thing that would neither attract them nor cause them to speculate. He lived in the little teacherage the school district supplied him, tramped the woods, swam in the lake at night, or perhaps before breakfast in the warm months, and allowed himself two drinks before bed. It seemed a reasonable routine, designed to achieve a minimum of conflict at a time in his life when checks and balances were difficult to apply and his purpose and direction were manifest only in that simple piece of paper which allowed him to practice his profession.

So it was a memorable time, when he had interfered and had come close to judgment. One day in the late spring of the year Velma Cootes had arrived late for classes trailing two boys, one her own age and the other a little older, like spent party-balloons behind her. He was waiting. He had seen her across the fence in Danvers’s meadow, lying in the timothy, clutching first one boy and then quickly the other. He had stood on tiptoes in the window of his small office, his breathing choked, unable to take his eyes off the half-hidden acts nearly screened by the long grass, and stared, he knew, like a demented voyeur through a giant keyhole. He had called her into his office not, he hoped, to scold or threaten or teach, but to save himself, to look at her closely and see her tartared teeth, her stumpy breasts, and to smell the acrid stench of unwashed pubescence, all of which had been transformed into curves and cleanliness and woman-musk when he had seen her at that little distance through the window. He stared at her again, knowing unexpectedly that he was going to have to speak and sound like a teacher.

You know why you’re here?

Yes. She denied nothing. They was both there, she said, as if explaining, in a flat husky voice that for all its clearness barely made sense or penetrated below the surface of what he knew in that moment to be his grinning, taboo-laden mind. He tried desperately for anger or outrage or even righteousness, but all his brain would produce was an unspeakable, irrelevant truth: You need a man. He aborted the words by coughing into his hand.

She sat modestly enough, healthy and untainted in her own young way, but she was suddenly too real for him, and wholly improper. He could find her neither human nor animal. She simply lived. There was nothing peripheral about her; she was central, fashioned out of some basic and unshatterably elementary substance.

Go, he said suddenly, please.

She stood up, nearly a woman. Is that all you want?

Yes. And then, unable to stop himself, he blurted out a truth about himself. But do this thing, whatever it is, outside of school hours from now on.

You don’t mind?

He felt a glimmer of hope that the canoe he was in had another potential paddler. But he closed his eyes and knew that he could ruin her by touching her in any way. After a moment he said, You’re failing in arithmetic. I’m going to give you some extra problems to do over the week-end. You could be a bright student if you tried.

I like school, she said, and he thought she might not consider herself dismissed, but she went out of the office, leaving the door a little open behind her. One of the boys said, What did he want?

He waited, listening. Now she held his ruin as he had held hers a moment before. The truth would reduce him from mentor to disciplinarian, and the altitude and distance he had carefully built up during his time at Onion Lake would be destroyed.

He says I got to do more arithmetic if I want to get through in June.

He went into the schoolroom, glancing at her when he dared. He began again to tutor his classes as they worked out the assignments he had given them. But what had happened had been too intimate not to disturb them both. The boys were only an experience; but in the office she had given away something important and had received nothing in return. What they had shared was discretion. It changed neither of them, but it was a possession jointly owned and carried away intact when they parted in June. In the summer he worked at Acton’s mill. It was 1939. In September he joined the army.

When Grandy left Onion Lake, the war suddenly ended the depression, and the mill, like all of the others in the valley, flourished; Henry Acton was at the end of his middle years and still vigorous; his wife was alive; Nairn lived with his wife, Cora, in Toronto, and his daughter, Jenny, was fifteen; Velma Cootes was fourteen. In 1945 when Grandy was discharged from the forces he could not return. He floated free, realizing the war was a barely personal experience and not at all unique. He drifted uneasily, wondering why he did not begin again to be what he had started to become in 1939. He went back to England and then to France. The little settlement in his soul had been destroyed by a flood of experience, and he wanted to build another better one. But gradually the waters receded and familiar ground appeared: Onion Lake. At first it amused him. He was twenty-nine, a veteran who had learned French and a great many other things. He was uneasy now that he was at last returning, and he ridiculed it. He joked about it with friends, and one night, in Paris, he began to explain Onion Lake and, for example, told the story of Velma. It was a great success, but he found that he had not meant to tell it. A confidence had been violated. But then, too, a revelation occurred. The people at Onion Lake and what was there seemed much more real than anything he knew or saw in that other hemisphere.

Spring in the valley of the Linden is a long, heart-breaking promise that hints at its arrival when the ice becomes rubbery in the lake toward the end of March, and then continues to whisper of elegant things until finally in May, like a woman who has preened for hours at her mirror, it sweeps in, full of surprise that it has kept anyone waiting. Leaves become more than a possibility, the sun rises as golden and nourishing and warm as new bread, the air’s edge is dulled and its texture thickens, odours return as if the working earth were sweating, and the evenings suddenly recall the day rather than abet the night. The world quietly becomes again.

Humans, those grand anomalies cursed with memories and some knowledge, hold spring to be another year gone by and imagine they grow more ambitious for time. Each minute must soon yield more, and the longer days seem to some a promise of this. In the easier air designs are precise, desires are grails, rebellions are necessary, goals are all in the direction of the Kingdom; but still each retreats a little into himself as if the winter’s waiting had made him for a moment unsure of dreams. But spring is savage, real. It demands action. The weak cannot resist it; the strong must take it. In a while, when the season is mature, both will rise up

and do what they can with this new time. But now the water is calm, the wind slack. Among the three on the porch above the lake there is mostly silence broken only by the clink of ice in glasses and, from the distance to the east, a train-whistle.

She’ll be five minutes late tonight, Nairn said, looking at his watch. Neither Cora nor Jenny answered. They raised their glasses together, involuntary gestures that excused them from commenting. Across the lake a loon called once, and hearing an echo called again before the first echo had died. Soon it had created a dozen loons and was desperately answering them all.

If we were all as simple-minded as that bird we’d never be lonely, Jenny said.

That’s the problem, Nairn said.

The problem?

Its problem, then.

The train whistled again and distracted the laughing loon. The sounds across the lake merged and faded. Down the hill, men lounged at the doorways of the bunk-houses, waiting for Waldo, the cook, to play his triangle and signal supper. At the top of the row of huts the bullcook leaned into the pigpen and scratched the boar behind the ear. It backed away and stared, expecting food.

Is he really going to kill it? Jenny asked. He plays with it like a pet.

When it’s time, her father said. Be a good girl and go in and get me another drink.

It’ll be dinner-time soon, Cora said. She watched her husband get up and go into the house.

You should have let me go, Jenny said. Two drinks aren’t going to hurt him.

Cora drew her legs up under her skirt. Jen, it was good of you to come. I’ve needed your company.

I’ve wanted to. It’s been a long time.

Cora finished her drink, looking at her daughter over the rim of the glass. A palomino, except for the Acton grey eyes; a beauty. She seemed such a success now, and, with all of the small concerns drifted away, Cora wished for others, younger perhaps and even more comforting to be with.

The gay young Actons. Jenny laughed. The war and then, whoosh! . . . out here.

Safe and sound. You’re glad, aren’t you?

It was a bit of a strain. If I have ever to grow up again I want it not to be during a war.

I wouldn’t choose it for you again either.

All that traipsing around.

Cora, holding her knees, swayed back and forth as if she were facing a private wailing-wall. You mustn’t blame me.

The train was at the cut east of the mill where the tracks swung around the south arm of the lake. Nairn came back out onto the porch and stood by the railing to see it go by. But it began to slow its pace and at the siding it stopped. A porter emerged, swung to the ground, and helped a man off. He held out his hand, received a tip, and boarded his car again. The train began to move. The man stood watching it go.

That’s no logger, Cora said.

Salesman, Nairn explained. Suits, watches. He laughed suddenly. And then a little game of poker while he waits for the night freight. He came and sat with them again, drink in hand.

I think he’s coming up here, Jenny said.

He wore a turtle-necked sweater under a tweed sports jacket and from his army duffel-bag dangled new caulked boots. He came steadily up the hill, not looking at them, his eyes on the mill and the lake.

He doesn’t play poker with a face like that, Cora said.

He heard her and smiled, stopping in front of them at the bottom of the steps. My name’s John Grandy, he said. I need a job. He looked at Cora. I promise not to play poker.

Where you from? Nairn asked.

Paris.

Paris. Nairn put his drink down beside him on the step. Texas or Ontario?

France.

He’s telling the truth, Nairn.

I flew to Edmonton a couple of days ago.

Flew? Nairn said. Why? Just to come here?

That’s how much money I had.

Seems a damn fool way to spend it.

I didn’t want to be tempted to go back.

Most loggers don’t get as far as Paris for the winter, Cora said.

I could have asked Buck, he said, not altogether ignoring her. He might remember me from before the war. I worked here then for a summer.

You’re right, Nairn said, drinking again. He’s the man to see.

Do you need someone?

There’s the jackladder job, Nairn. You fired that one without Buck’s consent, surely . . .

Cora, mind your own business. He took his drink and stood

up.

I worked on the pond before, Grandy said.

At the door Nairn said, Then go see Buck.

Cora smiled charmingly. There, it’s nearly set.

He picked up his duffel-bag, but didn’t turn. I really came up here to see if Henry was still . . . He paused, uncertain for the first time.

Oh yes. He’s fine. We’re his family. I suppose you knew him well before.

Jenny got up now, too. I think we’d better get ready to go down. It’s dinner-time.

Have you had dinner? Cora asked, rising.

On the train. He smiled again. One last fling at the good life.

The screen door banged behind Jenny.

I know how you feel. She stood with him like a hostess lingering with a departing guest. Father’s down there somewhere among his boys. I’m sure you’ll see him. You’ll find him older. He had a little stroke right after the war, but he’s coming along famously now.

He began to leave. Thanks, Mrs. Acton.

Good night, Mister . . . ?

Grandy.

That’s right, John Grandy, of Paris, France.

Do you think I’ll live it down?

Don’t try. I think it rather suits you. She turned from him, still smiling, and went into the house.

Always the gracious hostess, Nairn said from his father’s wing-chair in the living-room.

Don’t nag, Nairn, he seemed like a nice young man. What was the harm in being as pleasant as he was?

None. None at all. Let’s crack out the silver and crystal and have a dinner-party for him. Mrs. Nairn Acton entertained at her hill-top home the prominent Parisite, Mr. John Pander. Her daughter looked lovely, mentally undressed . . .

Shut up, Nairn, must you do this every night on three drinks? Where’s Jenny?

In the bathroom fixing her face.

Darling, you would have told him about the jackladder job, anyway.

In my own time.

Then I’m sorry I said anything.

What day is it?

Thursday.

Thank God.

You’re not going into Linden again this week-end? I thought we could drive up to Smalley’s place and see about that horse for Jenny.

Well, I thought I’d go into town and do a little selling.

Nairn, I can’t put up with this forever.

Then don’t. He got up and went to the door. Look, you’ve got Jenny here. Enjoy her. Now, shall we go down to supper?

They waited separately and silently on the porch for Jenny to join them. Waldo rang his triangle. The hills across the lake echoed.

A mill the size of the one at Onion Lake requires no formal hierarchy or charted organization. Most of its intricacies and complexities can be carried in the head of one man. Buck Dirksen was technically the millwright, but he also bossed winter logging and, when Henry became old quite suddenly at the end of the war after five years of double shifts, Buck began issuing more orders than he had in the past. He had been with Henry from the beginning; he simply began to act in his stead, and it hardly seemed odd to him, or anyone else, that he didn’t have a managerial title. The mill must continue to run. A little while after Nairn arrived, Buck made a comment that had rather the same effect that a high-level policy statement might have at Imperial Oil: He’s a logger like I’m a French count. He continued to give orders and hire men. There didn’t seem to be any friction. Junior, he said, naming him, is learning the business.

Grandy found him after dinner, and they stood together in the casual May air and listened to one another talk, each of them feeling small interest in the conversation.