Sanctuary Line Read online

  By the time of my tenth or eleventh summer, Teo and I had developed an unspoken, intermittent alliance and sometimes broke away from the others in order to be on our own. I see now, that even in the midst of a gang of children, there was an undefined yet quietly understood apartness about us. We were the same age, which united us in a way. But there was more to it than that. Arriving each summer as we did from somewhere else, and then departing again at the end of the season, we were migratory in nature, the differences in our migrations being those of direction and distance and the fact that while I was away from “home,” I was still in what could be called my natural habitat. Teo, on the other hand, had landed in unfamiliar territory, a temporary and artificial location, one where, in the not too distant future, he would be required to join the adults working in the fields and orchards, rather than continue to play with me. And yet, in spite of his obvious dislocation, to my mind he was so firmly planted on that summer farm, I simply couldn’t imagine him in any other place. He never joined us in the car when my mother took us into town for ice cream or pop, or when Aunt Sadie went to my other uncle’s auctions. It was only my uncle who would invite him to come along on expeditions, and those were infrequent because Uncle Stanley was fully occupied by this place in summer and hardly ever went shopping in any season.

  Because Teo’s English was not yet fluent (and because it had never been suggested that it would be a good thing if I learned Spanish), most of our games involved elaborate gesture, and I came to love both the silences and the signals he and I sent each other. I was an only child and, when in the city, a bit of a loner as well. I could play quietly for hours and with great concentration, and there were times when I would be, at least mentally, quite absent from my surroundings. And although I also loved the sense of belonging that blossomed in the company of my cousins, bouts of mute, episodic imaginings were something I could ease into without appearing to entirely break away from the world. Sometimes when Teo and I played together, he was almost like an imaginary friend.

  Now and then there would be a silent agreement between us to withdraw well back of the orchards (where, toward the end of summer, his mother could be seen working with the other Mexicans) to the forested acreage my grandfather and great-grandfather would have called the wood lot. Those former patriarchs had both timbered and maintained the trees on that property but, by the time Teo and I were exploring it, my uncle had pretty much let it go back to bush. Had it not been for those three Holsteins it might have been impossible to enter without hacking out some sort of trail. But, as it had been opened up by grazing cattle, Teo and I were able to look for things there, a jack-in-the-pulpit, mushrooms, tree fungi, puff balls. Earlier in the summer we searched the remaining abandoned meadows for the monarchs’ cocoons, which hung from the milkweed plants in those ignored acreages.

  On occasion we played on the edges of the stream, which we called our river and which meandered through the wood lot toward the lake. One whole summer, I remember, we occupied ourselves by making islands – miniature feats of engineering that required us to cart boulders and branches into the water, then to cement them together with quantities of dripping mud dug out of the creek bed. We worked silently, side by side, on these projects, then toward the end of the afternoon sat on the mossy bank admiring our creations. To stop the paper boats we had made from escaping too quickly, dams were built in roughly the same manner, as wharfs were at various points upstream. The water always reclaimed the results of our efforts but sometimes not until a day or two had passed. Then, undiscouraged, we would either reconstruct the frail, ruined remains or begin something new.

  The whole process became an unstoppable fascination for us. The materials were always close at hand, as were the curious small brown trout, nosing around the obstacles we placed in their path in an unconcerned fashion, as if appreciative of the reorganization of their waterway. Paper boats were folded and launched from one of the miniature islands. There was something strangely compelling about all this attention to arteries of water that lived in such close proximity to a lake so huge in proportion. We both knew the streams we played in were fatally drawn to the lake and would shortly be engulfed by it. Making the dams and islands that prevented or at least slowed down this process, both for the water and our boats, I sometimes felt like a benign giant engaged in a doomed rescue mission.

  None of the other children was as interested in the wood lot as Teo and I were, and because we were among the youngest of the group, they were likely just as happy not to have us around all the time. And, besides, the boys had not yet become comfortable with Teo’s presence among us – a presence my uncle insisted upon and put emphatically in place. I remember him saying angrily to Don and Shane that Teo was a kid, just like the rest of us. When the language issue was brought up, my uncle yelled at the boys, “Who cares about Spanish or English. Just start running! That’s what kids do, for God’s sake, they run! They don’t sit around having intellectual discussions.”

  Unknown to my uncle, there had been one particularly cruel incident during the first summer that Teo and I had begun to explore the wood lot. A complicated game of hide-and-seek had been developing all day among the boys: my cousins and a couple of their friends. It had already lasted for hours and seemed to be driven by that very compulsion to run that my uncle had referred to. There was no need for explanation. The assumption that this childhood activity based on hunting, camouflage, and stealth would be instinctively and universally known proved to be true, at least in Teo’s case, and he joined joyfully in the searches.

  Mandy and I were on the porch, washing our dolls’ clothes in an old galvanized tub loaned to us by my aunt in advance of her painting it white and filling it with geraniums. We had also strung a clothesline from a porch pillar to a nearby tree and several miniature dresses flapped like pennants in the breeze coming in from the lake. Mandy was fully absorbed by suds and cotton, but I was distracted by the boys who had come from neighbouring farms to join my cousins. Not having brothers of my own, it was always in me during those summers to wonder what those boys were thinking, how they arranged their days among themselves, what led to their ability to co-operate, to be of one mind, moving in a group from one part of the yard to another like a small army, with Teo hovering nearby, just out of range. That particular morning I saw Teo’s face become alert with pleasure when it was explained to him, through single words and various hand signals, that it was his turn to hide. He must have liked the notion that he would be looked for, that he would have a turn at being the centre of things. Hiding would make him dynamic and essential.

  I watched him slip between two cedars and disappear into the woods we knew so well while Don and Shane and the other boys faced one another and counted to one hundred, then two hundred, then three, chanting the numbers aloud, “two hundred and one, two hundred and two …” Finally they broke ranks, turned away, and walked quite casually around to the other side of the house where I couldn’t see them. Soon, however, I heard the crack of a ball hitting a bat, then shouting and laughter.

  The anxiety I began to experience mounted in intensity each time I heard the smack of the wood connecting with the skin of the ball. There was no yellow cotton doll’s dress, edged in blue piping and floating in warm suds, that could remove me from the suspicion moving like a finger up my spine. Maybe they were just giving him a better chance, I thought, more time to find the perfect hiding place, an opportunity to win the game. But then once again the brutal sound of an oaken bat smacking leather, and laughter and even clapping reached me. Why were they not looking for him? “Aren’t they going to look for him?” I asked Mandy. “Shouldn’t they look for him now?”

  “Who?” she said, her hands twisting damp cloth, and then remembering, “Oh … I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” The boys she lived with every day apparently didn’t interest her. Neither did their friends. “Stupid boys,” she said absently.

  He’ll come back, I thought. He’ll come back and try to reach home
base before being tagged. But a boy I didn’t know, one slightly older than the rest, was sitting at the foot of the designated tree reading a comic book. He was there, I realized, for the purpose of preventing that small victory from ever taking place.

  An hour or so after lunch I finally went out alone to look for him. The boys and Mandy were swimming and the neighbouring boys had ridden their bicycles home to various chores. Shane shouted my name from the lake and my mother turned in her deck chair to look at me, confusion on her face. “Raspberries,” I called to her as I walked away, forgetting that I had no pail. If she noticed this, she made no indication of it and waved me away with her hand.

  The forest floor was punctuated with small boulders, likely left there when the larger, older great lake had pulled inward to become the stable basin on the edges of which our family lived and farmed and played. I knew the wood lot so well by then the bark of several trees was as familiar to me as houses on a residential street. I followed the paths the Holsteins had made from one part of the forest to another, calling Teo’s name. I looked under juniper and sumac bushes. There was no answer, no sound at all except that of the wind in the tops of the few remaining big hardwood trees and the soft noise of branches brushing my sleeves. Occasionally, these branches were connected to the wild raspberry bushes I was supposed to be looking for and I would have to disentangle my clothing from their barbs. This impeded my progress and made me anxious. It occurred to me that I might die if I didn’t find Teo, if he were lost. Not that he would die from being lost, but that I would die from losing him, and even then, at ten or eleven years of age, I recall thinking how strange, inappropriate, and desperate that feeling was. Then, instinctively, I knew he was nearby.

  He was hidden in a spot I had passed three times without noticing, leaning against the trunk of a Jack pine whose lower branches almost touched the ground and provided concealment. His arms were folded one atop the other and were placed on his knees, which he had drawn up toward his chest. His dark head was resting on his arms and, at first, I thought he was asleep. But he wasn’t asleep, and when I crawled under the branches to reach him he lifted his head and looked at me with such innocence and such sorrow. Never again would I see such a pure expression of either of these states. His small brown hands were clenched, and a line of dried tears on each cheek made it clear that he had been crying. Even his boots, side by side on the ochre-coloured pine needles, looked sorrow-laden to me.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, quoting Mandy. Drops of sunlight fell like rain through the trees and onto his shoulders. The breeze shook the branches over his head.

  “Abandonado,” he said.

  I knew the word abandoned. My mother had used it quite recently in relation to three kittens we had found in a ditch when we were walking down the Sanctuary Line looking for wildflowers. Until this moment I had thought those kittens were the unhappiest things I could imagine. And I knew the word humane because that was the name of the society to which we had taken the kittens. There was nothing humane on that particular day about my boy cousins and their friends.

  “I think they forgot,” I said, wishing it were true, knowing it wasn’t.

  He wouldn’t look at me. His humiliation was palpable. “Me aparté,” he said.

  “No,” I said. And when he didn’t reply, “Okay then, me too. Me aparté too.”

  Why is it that everything freezes right there and I can’t remember how we got out of the wood lot and back into our lives? I would have been called in to supper on the sun porch of the house, and Teo would have veered off in the direction of the bunkhouses, it had to have been so, but I remember nothing of our return. When I think of that day, there exists in my mind the insane belief that if I walked out the door right now and over to the wood lot, and if I searched hard enough and long enough in those woods, if I followed the paths made by the Holsteins, I would find those two children crouching under that Jack pine, and that when I found them I would be able to make everything turn out differently. Mandy would still be splashing in the lake with her brothers, her blonde hair a nimbus around her head. Teo and I would be building dams in our river, and he would be free from the notion that no one wanted him. My uncle would have been planning the harvest of peaches, or walking through the grassy orchard examining the growth of McIntosh apples. But it is almost impossible to get into those woods now. The Holsteins have been gone for years, and scrub brush has obscured the paths. Are the creeks still being pulled toward the lake? Do the small brown trout still twitch in the watery shadows? And the children, if they are still there, are they able to go home?

  As I’ve told you, my uncle loved to talk about the bifurcating lighthouse-keepers of our family, those who kept the “lights” of Ireland, as well as the later nineteenth-century American Butler keepers, as he called them, in spite of the fact that the most significant member of their ranks had ultimately migrated to Canada and settled not at all far from the farm on which the tales were told. “Born American,” he would say, if anyone dared to correct this detail, “came here only in defeat.” My mother, having sat beside her brother while the previous generation’s adults told these stories during the course of her own childhood, still maintains the belief that American lighthouses were bigger and better than their Canadian counterparts, whiter, brighter, their lamps travelling farther into a storm, more successful, and the keepers, except for one notable exception, more dependable. The Irish-American Butler farmers had similar gifts, apparently. They were taller, stronger, had better horses, more sons, endured fewer crop failures, built more attractive houses, and stuck to their guns, literally and figuratively. They had a prosperous and rewarding nineteenth century, their lives unfolding near calmer waters or on richer soil, already well established while their brothers, the Upper Canadian Butlers, chopped wood and dug wells and threw up hastily built dwellings. “Except for our beautiful stone house,” she would add, “built by my great-great-grandfather, who, though foolish in his allegiances,” meaning his loyalty to the Crown, “at least had some sense when it came to housing his family.”

  There is hardly anything left of the nineteenth century now on the north side of the lake. The remaining barns in our township have been reduced to skeletons; you can see their graceful beams and rafters, the gaping spaces that would have been their wide entrance doors, and sometimes a last load of hay in a sagging mow, placed there years ago by a farmer who either lost heart or died or both. Occasionally an oxen yoke can be seen fastened between two upright boards, or a harness hanging from a nail on what would have been a stall. These old essentials, of no use now except as objects of curiosity, seem almost to have become part of the decaying structure simply because they have not been moved or touched for so long. Most of the old frame houses have been replaced by newer models, or torn down and not replaced at all, their foundations ploughed under the huge fields of factory farms. Other, smaller fields go back to bush if they are of no use to the agri-industry, or if they have not caught the eye of a developer. And in the villages, shops and stores, still vital in my own childhood, have either become boutiques or pizza outlets or have no life at all, their windows boarded, the signs above their doors fading.

  What remains is a network of roads brought into being two hundred years ago by the land baron Colonel Talbot and a surveyor called Mahon Burwell, whom Talbot hired to complete the task. Burwell tramped through the bush with his crew and his instruments and provided the territory then known as the Essex-Kent District with three distinct roads and hundreds of more or less well-ordered plots for settlers, who, in return for the deed to their land, were required to build the concession roads that fronted their farms. The concessions, which run in an east-west direction, are – like the frontage of the plots they define — 1.25 miles apart, moving inland from the north shore of Lake Erie, or the front as it was then called (as if it were an unsettled weather pattern, which, indeed, it sometimes is). Moving at right angles to the concessions are the lines, named for the places to which they
lead or after the early settlers who farmed the original acreages and who fill the graveyards scattered here and there at intersections. The road running two fields back of this farm is called Concession One, but the one heading toward the lake is called Butler’s Line or Butler’s Sideroad, depending on who you are talking to. It wasn’t until 1930, when the birdlife on the Point, five miles to the east, was deemed worthy of preservation that the name of the old Point Road was changed to Sanctuary Line.

  My great-great-uncle Gerald Butler, having left the southern States in what my uncle called “a paroxysm of shame,” would have ridden down old Point Road to reach his new post, and there were some interesting tales associated with his tenure there. But it was the story of why he chose to leave America that my uncle told, more than once, probably because, as he once stated, the Butlers were in love with both irony and tragedy.

  The two remaining sons of Butler the Eye, discouraged, apparently, by the poverty and misery of the sparsely populated post-famine world of County Kerry, had set out from Tralee to seek their fortunes in the New World. The crossing had been difficult enough that by the time they landed in New York, they had survived homesickness, near starvation, ship cholera, and a series of such wicked storms on the open sea, their fear of weather, originally engendered by the knowledge of the fate of their siblings, was increased a hundredfold. One of the brothers, my great-great-grandfather, would eventually depart for Upper Canada, where he had heard there was good land to be had on the shores of Lake Erie. Another, a great-great-uncle who, like my cousin, was called Shane, had stayed on similar and as it turned out better land on the south shore of the same lake, where he settled and established the American Butler line. The third, Gerald, had decided to pursue his father’s calling. Knowing the south of the continent was warm, he believed it must also be calm, and so, in spite of his reluctance to face the fury of the elements, he accepted a post as assistant keeper of the light at Mosquito Inlet in Florida. He was not to be principal keeper (that position was held by a fellow Irishman with an increasing wealth of children) but a keeper nonetheless who would, on occasion, be fully responsible for maintaining the light while the principal keeper took time off to deal with the demands of family life.