Crow Lake by Mary Lawson Page A

it panted in the heat like a dog. I remember how amazed by it Bo was. Luke was carrying her, and she kept taking his face in her hands and turning his head to look at it, insisting that he be amazed too.
    Aunt Annie didn’t say goodbye. When the time came to board she said for the second time that she was appointing me letter-writer-in-chief and for the third time that we were to phone if there were problems, and then she climbed quite nimbly onto the box-step the conductor had put down for her and up into the train. We watched her make her way down inside the car, the conductor behind her carrying her bag. She sat down in a seat by the window and waved to us. It was a cheerful, childish wave, a folding and unfolding of the fingers. I remember it because both it and her smile contrasted oddly with the fact that there were tears running down her cheeks. Take no notice of the tears, her smile and her fingers said. So we took no notice of them, as if they were nothing to do with Aunt Annie, and waved gravely back.
    I remember the drive home; all four of us sat in the front, Matt driving, Luke holding Bo on his lap, myself between them. No one said a word. When we turned into the driveway Luke looked across at Matt and said, “Here we are then.”
    Matt said, “Yeah.”
    “You okay about everything?”
    “Sure.”
    He looked worried though and not very happy.
    And Luke? Luke looked fiercely happy. Luke looked like a man going gloriously into battle, knowing that God was on his side.
    One other thing occurred that day; an incident unconnected to Aunt Annie’s departure. At the time none of us thought anything of it, and in fact it was a long time before I even thought of it again and longer still before I realized that it might have had some significance.
    It took place in the evening, after supper, while Matt and I were doing the dishes and Luke was getting Bo ready for bed.
    Aunt Annie had left the house in almost painfully good order. In the final days before her departure she had scoured every surface, washed every window, and laundered every scrap of material in the house from the curtains on down. No doubt she knew Luke well enough by then to know that this was the last contact with soap and water many of the items would ever have, but I imagine in her concern over us she was also making a bargain with God: if she did everything in her power to get us off to a good start, He would be obliged to do everything in His to make sure that we came to no harm. A bargain is a bargain.
    So Matt and I were standing in our gleaming kitchen, washing our shining saucepans and drying them with tea towels which had been washed, boiled, starched, and ironed until they looked and felt like sheets of polished paper. Bo and Luke came in, Bo wearing preternaturally clean pyjamas and demanding a drink. Luke got her a glass of juice from the refrigerator, waited for her to drink it, and then picked her up and instructed her to say goodnight. He was being firm, letting her know right from the word go that now he was the boss, and Bo was in such good spirits at having—as she saw it—vanquished Aunt Annie that she let him think he was getting away with it.
    “Say goodnight to the galley slaves,” Luke said.
    Bo was looking out of the window. She turned her head and beamed obediently at Matt and me, but then she pointed out into the dusk and said, “Dat man!”
    It was just getting dark. We had the lights on in the kitchen, but you could still make out the shapes of individual trees. And if you looked hard you could also see a dark shape standing far enough back that it almost merged into the woods which seemed to draw in around the house at night. We all looked out and the shadow moved, slid a little farther back.
    Matt frowned. “Looks like Laurie Pye.”
    Luke nodded. He went to the door and opened it and called, “Hey, Laurie!”
    The shadow hesitated, and then came slowly forward. Luke shifted Bo to his other arm and held the door