Eye Lake by Tristan Hughes

listen that he was planning to make a living off all the pelts he was going to get, but he’d never even seen a wolf, Jim said, and he wasn’t going to neither in that getup. People had funny ideas about the north woods back then, he said. All sorts of funny ideas. Jim was just a boy himself and used to follow him into the woods and do wolf howls and make him run in circles through the bush holding his axe up ready, with sweat pouring down his face and mosquitoes buzzing around his head and his hands full of holes where he’d tried to swat them and hit the nails on his suit instead.
    The circus guy arrived on a night train two days before the picnic. Jim said he’d seen him step out of the caboose, wearing a sharp suit and a hat, followed by a woman who was wearing a fur coat, even though it was summer. They walked together down the street to Clarence’s hotel and Jim ran over to where the caboose man was leaning against his caboose, smoking a cigarette and waiting for the train to be loaded with coal and water.
    â€˜Where they from?’ Jim asked. They weren’t used to men in sharp suits getting off in Crooked River.
    â€˜From Chicago,’ the caboose man replied.
    â€˜Is he a gangster?’ Jim asked excitedly. The caboose man chuckled to himself.
    â€˜Well, sonny, if he’s a gangster he ain’t been too forthcoming about it. He says he owns a circus. But then again,’ he said with a wink, ‘he says that there woman is his sister, too.’
    The first good look anybody got at them was the next day at lunch, in the dining room of the hotel. The man was still wearing his suit but the woman had changed out of her fur coat and was wearing a white silk blouse and a long black skirt and a black hat. There were pearls hanging from her ears, almost as white as her skin, and her lips were redder than any woman’s in town. Usually all the people who stayed in the hotel sat together at one long wooden table for lunch and helped themselves from two big bowls that sat on either end of it. (Mostly it was rabbit stew, said Jim; Clarence used to pay him a few dollars a week to snare them.) But on that day Clarence had had a separate table set for the man and his sister. ‘Because there’s a lady present,’ he informed the dining room when all of them at the long table saw the separate table. And he cooked a chicken for them too, said Jim – so he must have reckoned it was a real special occasion.
    All through lunch Clarence made a fuss of them. He didn’t have much in the hotel kitchen – just what would do for the rail and lumber men – but what he did have he brought out. ‘Perhaps you’d like a few oranges for dessert?’ he asked, and over at the long table the men’s eyes popped out some. He sure kept them hid, a few of them mumbled.
    The man in the suit talked loudly all through his lunch, as if he were speaking to an audience. He told Clarence how they’d come from Europe with the circus as children, him and his sister. He hinted that they’d come from high-born blood but tragic circumstances had led to their father and mother’s early death and they’d been cheated out of their inheritance. He stopped for a minute when he got to the part about the tragic circumstances and pulled a white handkerchief from his breast pocket and began dabbing his eyes with it. His sister put her hand across the table and clasped his. ‘What a bucket of moonshine he was selling,’ Jim said. ‘And nobody in the Pioneer Hotel was buying a drop of it.’
    â€˜Except my father,’ Virgil said.
    â€˜I don’t think he was buying into it either,’ Jim said. ‘With respect to you and your mother, Virgil, I think it was her he was buying into. Or not even that. It was the idea of her – if you get my meaning right. Crooked River was a rough-and-ready place the wrong side of nowhere and we didn’t get so