Lake People Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2013 by Abi Maxwell

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Maxwell, Abi.

  Lake people : a novel / Abi Maxwell. – 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “This is a Borzoi book.”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-96166-2

  I. Title.

  PS3613.A898L35 2012

  813′.6—dc23 2012013948

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket photograph © by Lauren Burke/Iconica/Getty Images

  Jacket design by Kelly Blair

  v3.1_r2

  This book is dedicated to my grandmother

  Eleanor Pearson Keller.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  My Heavenly Days

  Hush

  Free

  Part Two

  Crossing

  Secret

  Lake People

  Part Three

  Hill Country

  The Village

  The Island

  Polite

  The Old Factory

  Return

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  1982

  IN THE COLD and windy days after I was born, I was deposited into an old canoe on the big lake. I have recently discovered this. I like to think my birth parents believed that this lake would hold me, keep me safe, but I don’t see how that could possibly be true, for it turns out I come from a long line of people swallowed by these waters. My name is Alice, and by the time I was born, unwanted, the belief that there were places in the lake where the floor of the world either dropped out or was never put in had settled itself deep into my blood.

  But the canoe wasn’t floating freely. It was tied up in the boathouse where it would be found, just east of the Kettleborough Pier. Even in the days before I knew the story of my birth, I would stand on that pier in the evening, when the sky and the lake become indecipherable from each other, and look out three miles across the water to Bear Island, that fated place that I now know drew my ancestors in. In that light, it looks as though the island just floats, not within this life and not without it, but unattached, and free.

  Eleonora was the first in our line to settle out on that island. She would be my great-great-grandmother. I always knew of her—if you live in our town you know her story—but I never did know I had some special connection to her. She came alone from Sweden as a teenager, and by the time she arrived she had faced some terrible trouble, and by the end of her life her trouble had not stopped. Because of this, people in Kettleborough like to believe she committed some significant amount of wrong.

  The lake was frozen when Eleonora and her four children crossed from mainland to the island. Her husband had just died. On cold, gray days I can imagine her family walking across the ice in a single-file line, their suitcases in hand. They would have worn long wool coats, and the youngest child’s would have been a hand-me-down, and still too long for him, so as he walked at the back of the line the fabric would have brushed upon the thin layer of snow, marking a temporary trail of the family’s journey to their end.

  In all, there were between twenty and thirty families who settled out on that island. All of them were Swedes, and all of them had taken the four-hour train ride from Boston to our pier and then crossed over. Eleonora’s first winter out on Bear was a truly frozen one, so cold she felt she could grab handfuls of air and put them in her pocket. Despite this she began to build a cabin, which is what the newly arrived always did. However, my great-great-grandmother differed from the others in that she was a single woman and she neither asked for nor accepted help from anyone. While she worked she and her family stayed with the man who had first settled the island, sleeping in a row on his floor. It took only one week. When she brought her children to see the cabin, they were shocked to find that in their short time on Bear Island their mother not only had built a sturdy home for them, but had hunted and carved deer meat and hung the skins to dry; had cut and stacked enough wood to last through winter; had brought a woodstove from mainland; had built beds for them all; and had stocked the kitchen with flour, sugar, oats, salt, coffee, and everything else they might need. Such skills of survival were all new to Eleonora. They had risen up in her suddenly, as though straight from the island itself, and their arrival filled the children with what I can only see as a cruel sense of security.

  But for some reason the lake gave them ten good years. Maybe that time was intended to earn their trust, or to build Eleonora’s strength. Perhaps in the tenth year their family committed some offense against the water. More likely, there is no sense to be made of why, that year, their family’s luck ended as a dark, cold winter streaked across the lake with a wind so sharp it bit at their naked cheeks. Most of the islanders wanted to pack up and head for mainland, for comfort and safety. Not Eleonora.

  One morning that winter Eleonora’s elder daughter, Ida, said she had to go to shore. She left her husband and infant daughter—my grandmother Sophie—and she went to be swallowed by the lake. The story told in Kettleborough is that on that morning Ida was drawn out upon the frozen water by the most beautiful of calls. The ice was as thick as an old maple, yet Ida had scarcely walked twenty steps upon it when the lake opened its mouth. First her feet dropped under, and then her hips came forward in one slow, consenting wave. Her arms swept upward and then, without sound, Ida dropped into the winter of the lake.

  There is no question about the exact spot where this took place, for immediately after she dropped below, one pointed black rock rose up from the depths, and continued rising until it stood as high as Ida had. After that, other pointed rocks rose in its wake. Today a forest of these black rocks stands out there, marking the place where my ancestors first discovered that our lake is boundless as the sky.

  The rocks are shaped as witch hats, so naturally the people of the island named them the Witches, and they knew to stay away. But on that first night after Ida vanished a bear appeared on the shore nearest to those rocks. It had been killed, its heart removed in one clean slice. Eleonora believed it to be a sign—of what, we never knew—and wanted the bear put in the place where her daughter had vanished. The people agreed. They found an old plank of wood and rolled the bear atop it, and then they pushed the vessel toward that tallest rock. It soared forward as though pulled by some invisible cord, yet when it stopped at the base of the rock, where the ice was now so thin that water bubbled upward, it did not sink. That was on the longest, darkest night of the year. A group of men kept watch through the night. They were waiting for the bear to be taken in, but they must have also been waiting for Ida to rise once more. Neither happened until spring, when the bear finally dropped below without witness. By then the people had come to say that though the site of the Witches was a place to be swallowed, it was also a place where a being might float. Still, they knew to take no risks. Their sharp warnings passed down through the generations, and until this year, so far as anyone knows, no one and no thing had ventured into that forest of rocks since the days of tho
se lake people.

  Sometimes I try to think of Eleonora’s life before the island, to see her as a woman who presses her clothes and attends church, who bargains sensibly in her broken English with the vegetable man down at the market. Yet the Eleonora who remains in my mind is one whose skin has turned to leather. She dresses in the hides and furs of bear and deer, she eats raw fish, and she howls alone at night. But this can’t possibly be the woman she was, either. At least not before she was left alone on the island.

  After Ida vanished, Eleonora was left with one daughter, two sons, a widowed son-in-law, a granddaughter, and a fear of the living lake. When the ice melted, she began to drop offerings into the water—a serving of meat, an apple they had gotten on mainland. She sent prayers into the water, too, and the stories in town say that those prayers begged for forgiveness, though for what it was never said. Anyway, it did no good. The following winter, on a seamless blue day, her two sons and her son-in-law crossed the ice with a sled full of deer meat to trade for a good, sturdy new window for Eleonora’s cabin. By now they had learned that the ice was not to be trusted, so at their side they towed a canoe, which they could jump into if the ice should break. But on the walk back to the island, only Eleonora’s sons held on to the canoe, for their brother-in-law carried the window. They crossed in front of the Witches just as a great wind swept forward. Instinctively the boys jumped into that boat. When they looked back, they saw that rather than turning from the Witches, Ida’s widower was headed straight for them, saying he heard the most beautiful of calls. The boys watched as the mouth of the lake split open at the rocks and traveled toward them. Their brother-in-law held that window high in front of his body and he looked through it, straight at the boys, as he dropped below.

  When the boys turned back to face toward home they realized that they, too, had fallen into the open path of water. They unfastened the paddles from the sides of their boat and tried to push their way back onto the ice, but they could not do it. Finally, when they had expended all of their energy, that call came into them, too. They paddled up the path toward its source, straight to the center of the Witches. Here they let go of their paddles. Their boat began to slowly spin. With each turn it sank a little deeper, until finally the boat and its boys were underwater. They reached out to grasp each other, and there today those boys remain, their arms stretched above their heads and their hands braided into each other’s, their bodies spinning slowly, as a net.

  Winter was harsh, the Witches were cruel, and the people no longer trusted the lake. They decided to pack their belongings and return to the lives they had left behind. Eleonora’s one remaining child, Signe, packed their family’s belongings. Yet when she took her mother’s arm to lead her to shore, Eleonora would not go. Instead she placed a kiss upon the head of her granddaughter, and she told Signe to go to Kettleborough and raise Ida’s baby as her own.

  Signe followed her mother’s instructions. What else was she to do? Perhaps she protested, but she must have known she would be no match for her fierce mother. She left, and my great-great-grandmother went wild on that wild island. She took to killing bear with a jackknife, slicing into their fur and pulling forth their hearts. She kept a lantern lit on each end of the island, a beacon for travelers, and when they stopped for rest she offered a roof and a bed in trade for liquor, wool, and grains. And, for the rest of her days, Eleonora dropped offerings into the lake that had stolen her family. She dropped an ax and a bottle of whiskey, a pair of shoes, an old silver ring, the heart of a bear.

  Meanwhile, on shore, people told stories of the beautiful call that had drawn Eleonora’s family into the lake. I used to imagine it in the way so many in Kettleborough do, as the clear call of one of our lake’s loons.

  But now I have heard the call, and I know that is not accurate. It does indeed sound like a loon, but the sound is apart from all else, carried across the water and delivered to the listener in the softest of hands. As it travels it splits the air open, so that only that call remains—stark and final and brilliant—and its listener can do nothing but float toward it.

  My Heavenly Days

  1910–1962

  MY AUNT SIGNE kept a marvelous supply of canned goods. These she ordered from S.S. Pierce & Company, a place down in Boston. She simply called them up and placed her order, and in another week or so the cans were delivered to her doorstep. Immediately Signe dated those cans. She had a walk-in cupboard built in the kitchen, with a wooden pullout step at the base of the wall. The cans dated, Signe pulled out that step and stood upon it to sweep the older cans to the front and place the new ones at the back. In these years since her death, this is what I have said of her: that she kept a marvelous supply of canned goods; that she never did find a suitor; and that she remains the bright pivot of my life.

  It was Signe who raised me. At night, when she tucked me into bed in our house at 36 Highland Street, she would tell me the story of our family. They came over in the boat, she would say, with water for their blood. In my bedroom, a lightbulb with a circular shade made of birch bark hung from the ceiling. It turned slowly in the breeze and sent shards of dim light around the room. That refracted light made it seem as though Aunt Signe and I were together under the lake. On weekends we would walk there, to the lake, and from the pier Signe would point across to Bear Island. “Sophie, we two come from out there,” she would say. “Your mother and father dropped beneath the ice and your grandmother turned wild on that wild island.” It was a sad story, yet because I had no memory of anyone in it, the story was beautiful. It was the legend of my very own being, and it made me know that I belonged in this place.

  I always believed that Signe, too, belonged in Kettleborough, though now I sometimes think she may have been better suited for city life. When I was a girl, she liked to take the train down to Boston. There we would go to the old Swedish church, where they still held an evening service in what Signe called the old language. And there was a man there. His name was Hjalmar, and his family had been close to Aunt Signe’s father’s family back in Sweden. They didn’t say “Sweden,” however; they referred to that place by sending an unspecific wave over their shoulder. The motion said that their country was not in fact a place, but something tucked away into time. In that gone-by time, Hjalmar had made a living as a tailor, yet here in America he was destitute. Signe would bring him bread wrapped in wax paper, and always a savory pie.

  After church we three would walk together, and I vividly remember one of those walks. Night had fallen, and big, heavenly snowflakes fell down upon us. There must have been streetlamps, yet to me it seemed the snow itself illuminated the world. Hjalmar was a tall man, and he walked between us, his elbows hooked into ours. I felt wonderful with his arm in mine, protected and involved. When we passed a homeless man on the street, Hjalmar stopped and removed his wool coat. He gave it one firm shake. A wave passed slowly through the wool, and, once it was clean of snowflakes, Hjalmar draped that coat over the cold man.

  “Hjalmar, your coat,” my aunt said as we walked on.

  “I can sew another,” he said.

  “You can’t afford the wool for another,” Signe said. It was a reprimand.

  “That’s right, too,” Hjalmar said. His voice held no concern.

  “Will you ask him to live with us?” I asked Signe that night, on the train ride home. She seemed astonished by my question. Yet if Hjalmar couldn’t afford a coat, I didn’t understand how he could afford to live at all.

  “Don’t you love him?” I asked. I must have said more. I knew that it was only when we traveled to see Hjalmar that Signe wore her pearl necklace and a bit of rouge on her cheeks. I must have made my meaning clear: Can’t he be a husband to you?

  “I cannot love Hjalmar as a woman loves a man,” my aunt Signe said firmly. She kept her vision fixed on the dark night. I took her statement to mean that Hjalmar would not have her. And I understood to never suggest such a thing again.

  My aunt was a teacher at the Kettleborough scho
olhouse, and just across the street from that school, in the triangle made by the town’s three roads intersecting, sat the Kettleborough Memorial Library. It was small. But it was also wonderful, made of brick, the south side a wall of buttresses and stained glass. Through that glass the sun shone in singular strands. The rest of the library was dark and musty, like an old stone castle, so those rays of colored light were striking. Signe, who loved nothing more than to stand in the sun with her eyes closed, used to enter the library, run her eyes over the small place, then walk with purpose to the book upon which the light directly fell. In this way she would decide what next to read.

  “They never led to anything, those books,” Signe said once, when I was grown. It wasn’t until then that I understood that she had been on a search.

  After school, Signe would cross the street to that library to visit the librarian. I didn’t know the depth of their friendship, but it was clear to me that the librarian was my aunt’s only friend in the area. It was a love of fashion that initially drew the two women together. Both were expert seamstresses, and their drooped necklines and high, fitted waistbands made them stand out in our small town. Though my aunt preferred muted tones, the librarian draped herself in vibrant colors, which certainly matched her personality. She was a joyful, unabashed woman whose husband stayed home to raise the children.

  Not long after I asked Signe if she loved Hjalmar, the librarian gave my aunt a book. Signe came to my room with it in her hand. I was fourteen, and not a prude in matters of love. I don’t know how Signe saw this, yet she was right; I had kissed and been groped by a few boys, and it was not something I felt any shame about. In fact, I enjoyed meeting boys in the dark of the boathouses that lined the lake. “This is my duty,” Signe said, and sat at the edge of my bed. Nervousness had splotched her neck. After placing the book on my lap, she stood. Her straight back faced me. Her head was tilted slightly upward, so that her long rope of sandy hair reached her hips. Her hands, hanging awkwardly at her sides, continuously clenched and released. It wasn’t the sort of motion my aunt typically made. She was a sure, firm woman.