‘That bird was summer itself’
It was perfectly calm and indescribably beautiful.
I whistled. Uncle had taught me how and my whistle was much louder than Rob’s. I didn’t really expect Popeye to come to me but from all the gulls floating on the lake, just one took to the air and glided to a landing on the shore where it stared straight at me. Even though it looked just like all the other herring gulls I knew it was Popeye.
I sat in my uncle’s favourite lawn chair, rested my plate on my lap and threw a bread crust into the lush green, deep and dewy grass. I’d fed Popeye like that before, when Popeye landed on the dock. I would walk towards the dock in a measured and deliberate way, as if life was in slow motion, then with an unhurried underhand throw, toss a crust towards the bird. I always turned and looked away but out of the corner of my eye would see Popeye walk over to the crust, pick it up and fly off to the lake where he wetted it and swallowed it. I thought I was quite clever to train the bird — such a wild thing. Now, on the grass and much closer to me than the bird ever was on the dock, Popeye waddled over on his enormous pink gull feet, grabbed the crust and flew back to the lake where he ate it.
I ate my crunchy breakfast and soon Popeye was back, standing once more on the sandy shore, looking straight at me. Just staring. I threw him another crust and again Popeye lifted himself off the shoreline, flew over but instead of landing on the grass he continued straight to me and then suddenly I felt an enormous weight on my head. I had never felt anything so heavy in my whole life, ever, and was almost overcome by excitement. I stayed perfectly still, feeling the huge webbed feet trying to get a purchase, wondering what would happen next. I kept silent and still. I had an impulse to reach up and clutch the bird’s silken white body, but before I could Popeye’s big yellow bill was right in front of my eyes. There was a red spot on the bottom bill I had never noticed before. Popeye grabbed the remaining bagel from the plate and flew off to the lake with it, taking off with such ease that I felt only lightness.
For the next week I got up extra early each morning, toasted a bagel and went out hoping to experience the joy I felt once more. I tried spreading strawberry jam, peanut butter, cream cheese and honey on my breakfast but the gulls languidly floated in the lake. If Popeye was amongst them he didn’t let on to me that he was. I wondered what I had done to upset the bird.
Then one late morning, as the sun wandered towards noon, he was back, standing on the dock, looking like he was hungry. Steven and Perry were visiting. It was now late summer but the air was still hanging with heat and while I went into the cottage to toast a bagel, the boys decided they would all go for a swim. Sometimes we waded into the lake from the shore, sometimes we rowed out to the raft and swam there and sometimes we did what they did today, ran down the dock and belly flopped into the shallow water.
Steve was first. He ran down the dock and as he did so Popeye gently lifted himself into the air while Steve did a perfect belly flop. Perry raced after his brother and almost landed on top of him, landing on the lake like a seaplane. “That hurt,” he screamed with a smile. When I returned Popeye was floating on the water beside the dock and (my older brother) Rob was racing as fast as he could across the lawn, down the dock and into the air, launching himself onto the water with his arms out like wings.
“I hit the bottom!” he said to no one in particular when he stood up, and the lake water running down his face was pink and he was holding the top of his head. I ran back inside the cottage. “Uncle Reub, you’d better come,” I said and by the time my uncle and my mother were outside, Rob, Steve and Perry had left the lake and Rob was holding a towel over his head.
Uncle examined Rob’s head then told him to keep the towel tight on it, then talked quietly to Mum.
“Bruce, tell Grace’s mother there’s been an accident and she’s going to drive us to Civic Hospital,” Mum told me.
When they returned several hours later, Robert looked embarrassed, with a face mask over the top of his head. It was tied under his chin.
The following day, Uncle Reub examined Robert’s shaved patch under the face mask.
“I don’t like the way they clamped it,” I heard my uncle say. “There should be a drain. There’s sand in that serum. We’d better go to Mount Sinai and have this done properly.”
Mum was not herself all day. She walked up to Mrs. Nichols’ and telephoned Dad. She drove over to Cedar Bay with Grace’s mother and arranged that I would stay with Steven and Perry. She made lunch for Robert but forgot to do so for me or my uncle or herself.
In the afternoon Dad arrived and drove me to Cedar Bay.
“Do what you’re told,” Mum told me before we left. “Don’t go off daydreaming like you do. They’ll worry about you. We’ll be back on Saturday.” And she gave me a kiss and a tight squeeze that almost hurt.
“Do what you’re told,” Dad said as he left.
My parents, brother and Angus (our dog) left for the city that afternoon and for the next three days I lived at Steve and Perry’s and was unhappy. I wasn’t unhappy because my parents were away or because Rob had hurt himself or because I was staying with Perry. I was unhappy because I wanted Popeye to land on my head again.
Perry’s mother made delicious breakfasts. Eggs sunny side up with crispy bacon and toasted Wonder Bread. Mum never fried bacon and told me that white sliced bread had no goodness in it.
I told my friends I couldn’t stay at Grace’s because I was a boy. Steve said it was Grace’s father’s decision. Her mother didn’t mind.
Steve wouldn’t go to the fort with Perry and me although he did go swimming when we did. On the second day, on our way to the fort, we found a raccoon sitting beside a shallow pond in the woods. It didn’t run away and as we cautiously and quietly approached it we saw it fall over on its side. “It’s sick,” Perry said. “It needs a vet,” I replied. We watched the raccoon’s eyes close and open and then it fell on its side once more and it had to use all its strength to sit up again.
I was the first to touch it, gently and tentatively on the top of its neck, then with a little more firmness on the top of its head, then on its body. The animal offered no resistance or resentment.
We were on our haunches on both sides of the raccoon when I said, “We’ll take it to Dr. Sweeting.” I put my left hand under the animal’s chest and my right hand under its rump and needed all my strength to stand up with it.
The only way I was strong enough to carry the sick raccoon was by holding it tight against my chest, leaning back. Even so I had to hand the heavy animal to Perry and we passed it back and forth many times until we emerged from the woods and walked down the point to Dr. Sweeting’s.
Mrs. Sweeting looked alarmed when she answered the door and Dr. Sweeting was angry and annoyed when he saw us with the sick animal.
“Boys, take it over there and put it down,” he said, pointing towards his tool shed.
Dr. Sweeting went into the shed, put on overalls then walked over to the raccoon and told us to go back to the cottage veranda. When we were there, he put leather gardening gloves on his hands then with the blade of the shovel smashed it with such force on the raccoon’s head that we heard the animal’s skull crack open like a hard-boiled egg. “You can come back now,” he said. I didn’t move. The animal had needed help. It was beautiful. It was soft. It hadn’t harmed anyone. And Dr. Sweeting killed it.
“Doctors are supposed to make things better!” I screamed at the man. “My uncle says you take an oath to make everyone better!” I fought to look straight at Dr. Sweeting without blinking but my tears wouldn’t let me.
Dr. Sweeting looked sternly at us. “Don’t you ever touch an animal like that again, you hear? They’re goddam dangerous. Don’t you know that coon had rabies? It might be the one that gave rabies to the Nichols’ milking cow. Now go into the house and Mrs. Sweeting will give the two of you a good scrub!”
Somehow, seeing that innocent animal die made me more anxious than ever to see Popeye once more. Everything about that bird was perfect. His feet were as pink and clean as a little baby. His feathers were as grey as my father’s best wool suit, as black as a moonless sky, as white as early morning clouds. His beak was yellow like the sun, his red spot as shiny bright as a traffic light. That bird was summer itself.
On Saturday, Dad arrived with flowers and a cake for Steve and Perry’s parents and silently drove me back to our cottage.
“What did they do to you?” I asked my brother when I saw him but all Rob said was, “I hate hospitals!” and I knew not to ask any more. “I’m not allowed in the lake for two weeks,” he continued.
I walked to the front lawn but there were no gulls anywhere. For the next three days the lake was rough and the rain relentless. My family went to see a movie at Mr. Yudin’s theatre in Peterborough on one day, over to Steve and Perry’s on another. On the fourth day I knew before I got out of bed that the sun had returned. The air was fresher when I went outside. A cormorant was paddling past the cottage, only its black head and the top of its long neck visible in the water. Offshore there were at least a hundred gulls, too far away to see easily.
And then I saw it. Amongst the foot-deep seaweed the wind had dumped on the shore was Popeye’s wing. I felt a shiver start in my jaws, move to my shoulders then down my back. I tore seaweed away, strand by strand, revealing the gull’s plump body and finally its head. There was fishing line going into the bird’s beak. The line was knotted in the seaweed and I dug it all out. It was twice as long as the dock. Then I noticed. There was no red dot on the lower beak. It wasn’t Popeye, and I felt like dancing.
Now I wanted to know why the gull had a fishing line in its mouth. I finished separating the bird from its seaweed wrapping, washed it off in the lake, took it from the shore, placed it under the tree house and went to the bunkhouse to get my uncle.
“There’s a seagull that died and I want to know why. It’s not Popeye,” I shouted to my uncle through the bunkhouse screen door. “Bring your things. It’s under the tree house.”
Angus was sniffing the bird when I returned to it and soon we were joined by my uncle, still in his striped pyjamas.
“Let’s move into the sunshine,” he said. “It’s warmer there.”
I carried the solid bird to the middle of the front lawn. “It’s not Popeye,” I said again. “You can tell?” Uncle asked. “Popeye had a red spot on his beak chin. This seagull doesn’t.”
“Why is it important to you it’s not Popeye?” Uncle asked as he tugged on the fishing line coming from its beak.
“Because Popeye’s my friend and this is any old seagull,” I answered.
“So we should be sad if one gull dies but not another?” he asked.
“Yes, because I fed Popeye and he once landed on my head,” I replied.
“I understand. You made a connection with Popeye, and if he was so relaxed he was willing to stand on your head, I think he also made a connection with you. There’s a lesson there, Brucie. You see the world a different way when you make connections. Now then, I think we can ascertain the cause of death without needing to do a post-mortem. This bird is heavy so it hasn’t starved to death. It swallowed a fishing hook so it died from an infection caused by the hook.” “How can you tell?” I asked. “That’s what happens without penicillin.” “Shouldn’t it know not to eat fishing hooks?” I asked.
“I’m sure it did know not to eat hooks, but it didn’t know it was eating one. It thought it was eating a frog or a minnow. Looks like the gull took a fisherman’s bait by mistake and the fisherman cut his line when he saw what happened.”
“But that’s not fair,” I continued. “The bird didn’t do anything wrong. If God decides each year who lives and who dies, why did he decide the seagull should die now the way it did?”
Uncle answered, “Bruce, I simply don’t know why. Perhaps one day I will but I agree with you, how can a benevolent God, a good God, do such things to innocent creatures?”
“If you’re a grown-up and you don’t believe in God then why should I?” I asked and my uncle said, “Bruce, I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone else. In 1929, three years after I graduated in medicine, I was working at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. I developed a new way to remove tonsils from children, a safer way. That method saved hundreds, maybe thousands of lives. I was front-page news all over the United States and Canada. Then my mother, your grandmother, pricked her finger on a darning needle while repairing a hole in one of my father’s socks, and two weeks later she died in front of me. I was this famous young doctor and there was nothing I could do to save her. That’s when I stopped believing in God.”
“But you’re still religious. You say the prayer over wine on Friday.”
“Yes, but that’s not the same as believing in God. That’s respect for our traditions. I say the prayer because your mother feels better when I do. I’ve never told her I don’t believe in an intervening God. But I tell you this, Bruce. When I look at the beauty of the natural world I can’t help but think that once upon a time there was a benevolent force — call it God if you like — that created such splendour. Even the inside of that seagull is exquisite in its perfection although I can’t say I’m much good at bird anatomy. Or sewing them up afterwards.”
“OK then. You don’t need to cut it open,” I said, and carried the bird to the back of the cottage, beyond the vegetable patch and buried it there. As I dug the soft earth I wondered whether the fisherman who killed the seagull was sad. Or even that he knew it died. You’re not sad when you kill fish because you eat them. But no one kills seagulls to eat. I wondered why I was so upset when Dr. Sweeting killed the raccoon and decided I was troubled by the cruel way he killed it. Then I thought maybe it’s better to die fast a cruel way, than to die slow the way the seagull must have. Then I thought it must be lunchtime and wondered whether Dad brought fresh bagels back with him from Toronto.
Popeye returned a few days later and took crusts that I gave him, but never landed on my head again.
“As I dug the soft earth I wondered whether the fisherman who killed the seagull was sad. Or even that he knew it died.”
Excerpted from Barefoot at the Lake: A Boyhood Summer in Cottage Country, by Bruce Fogle, © 2015. Published by Greystone Books. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.