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x + y = O
“On the map of history, perhaps the water stain is memory” – Anne Michaels
The bay obliges with its gradual incline, subtle cleft in Meech’s bank. In the
summer, milfoil crowds the lake, twisting ornaments around waders’ ankles. In spring,
water covers the beach and up the lawn to where the boat is tarped beside the birches
along the property line. Ian moves through the water in slow, suctioned steps until the
rims of his rain boots hover just above the surface. Dad pushes the dock in towards him
and he guides it as it passes until he can hook it into the anchored dock just barely in his
reach. Then, reaching into his coat for a cigarette, he makes the laboured walk back to the
lawn. Facing the lake, it is theirs—that place, that moment.
They are young when I imagine them this way—my father and Ian. They lived on
the farm then and argued over who would buy the next cord of wood and carry it in from
the verandah. I guess they might have muttered under their breath putting out the dock
like that; maybe dad pushed too fast, maybe Ian didn’t double-check the hooks before
turning for the shore. This was long before either of them married, before me, but
something in my father’s voice told me that it was something. Was it youth? Was it the
land or the bay? The space inside or out, or both. The lake or the way the snow fell on it.
The point along the line at which we know emphatically who and where we are.
It is like this, aware in time and space, that I see these old friends maybe in the
spring putting out the dock or maybe at night they’ve had too much to drink and clear the
bay for hockey but are distracted by the stars. I’ve had these moments in my own life, been in a place just when the sky reveals itself in storm, standing just so when the light
hooks a room in presence and you are alive, right there, dishtowel in hand. It is easy to
know when you have arrived.
When I was very young, our husky, Kaya, who lived on the farm most of her life,
ran the 18 kilometers from our new home back to the bay. Late-December afternoon, the
new owners of the farm called to say that she had come to sit beside the lake. We pulled
up at just dark and my father walked out across the snow, headlights reflecting. He stood,
arms at his side like mine in my snowsuit, stood there in this place he knew. How many
moments are we given in one life? How many points along the line map our
intersections?
Three divorces between them, my father and Ian live together again in a small
semi-urban house with a small backyard they hardly use except when Ian paints outside
in the summer and dad drags a plastic lawn chair across the lawn to watch. Facing an
untrimmed cedar hedge and the tarped boat, rotting from years of freeze and thaw, Ian
paints sublime ocean scenes. Waves in all their violent detail surface over the deck of
some sloop-of-war or sometimes just a great body of seething current, green and heavy
on the canvas. Wide open, raw spaces; more frightening for lack of life in the frame, the
absent variable.
I’m home for some holiday, or another. They stay up way past my bedtime and I
lie awake to listen. The timeless quarrel suspending now: dad says he bought the last
cord, left it for the new owners even and anyway he always bought the weed, so on, so
on. Silence. I wonder, are they here or there and does it matter even anymore. How many
points in time and space may we claim?
Here I am, that light casts shadows in the hallway and these two old friends,
claiming now.
Claire Farley is from the beautiful Outaouais region in Quebec but is currently living in Toronto and working on a MA in the Literatures of Modernity program at Ryerson University. Though she has loved and written poetry, fiction and publication are recent endeavours. She is interested in the poetics of space and loves reading and writing out-of-doors.
Email: Claire Farley
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