We pull up in our Honda Odyssey, park beside the barrage of half-ton, one-ton, two-ton trucks at Lake Byrne. Not a lake found on any map but a trout-stocked irrigation pond on Byrne’s back forty near Caroline; Byrne, the brother of my girlfriend’s husband. We go despite the flat white on the horizon, the glittering ice crystals in the still, sunless air, the hard cold of a minus-20 day, frost clinging to the looped barbwire around the perimeter of the lake to keep the cows or the RCMP out, we don’t know which, the pungent odour of pot lingering in the air as my husband unsnaps Jaxen and Chase from their car seats, the large bonfire on the edge of a mapless lake, the smash of white strangers around the fire we don’t know save for my girlfriend Ella and her husband, and barely-the-brother Byrne. Nary the hint of colour beneath their skin, third-generation yellow beneath ours.
We pass a running Plymouth, the windows dressed in rime. Inside: two steamy, half-dressed teenagers ravaging one another. My husband raises a brow at me. Avert, avert, I want to say to my boys: Chase, who is two, Jaxen, four. Avert your eyes; turn away, this knowledge not yet for you. Instead I point toward the frozen lake where a group of boys are ice fishing, a crack-the-whip line of girl skaters fishtail by us, some older boys playing hockey.
“We should have brought our skates,” I say, lifting Chase in my arms because the snow is two-feet deep and he’s three-feet small. Jaxen in his orange fluorescent parka and Buzz Lightyear boots stomps the ground in anticipation of ice and augers, metal hooks and cutthroat trout.
“Mind if we fish?” my husband asks Byrne, locating him in the crowd around the bonfire by the Daliesque handlebar moustache that is his moniker, a cattle buyer by trade, man of few words in his off time.
“Have at ’er,” Bill says, sweeping his fleshy hand over the frozen vista. “Mind the other end.”
He points to the far end of the lake: black open water, the chug chug chug of a pump. Faint trace of alcohol about him, the sharp scent of pot on Byrne’s mackinaw too, and him some fifty years old.
“Busted for dealing,” Ella told me years back. “He spent some time away.”
“Hmm,” I said, having stopped all that nonsense decades ago. “Makes you kinda thick, don’t you think?”
Ella didn’t reply. She still smokes pot with her husband who doesn’t drink anymore because he’s a recovering alcoholic. Recovering from what? I’d like to ask but don’t. Life likely.
Ella wanders down to the ice with us, a beer bottle hanging loosely from her left thumb. Byrne’s two razor-eared Dobermans run sideways along the shore, zigzagging up and down the bank and around to the far end of the lake where the pump is – black open water.
“Stay away from there,” I point, pinpointing danger’s exact location. Chase pushes his cold nose into my cheek, tightens his Winnie-the-Pooh mittens around my neck. Jaxen is pulling at the canvas bag with the hand auger that my husband brought along.
“Slow going,” my husband says after fifteen minutes work, his breath corporeal, a pallid cloud expanding around his head. He turns it over to Jaxen who turns turns turns the red-handled auger on the white waxy ice in his blue mittens with all his four-year-old might – the surface barely scratched.
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