A lot on Palmerston Lake

Jack Benjamin | Aug 25, 2011

Summer fiction by Jack Benjamin

I still remember finding our lot on Palmerston Lake. It was in 1957, the day after we left the hunt camp back of Schooner Lake and had made our way down the mountain.

Instead of heading back to Toronto, Bernie and I stayed overnight at the hotel. We started drinking when we got to the hotel, and when the other guys in our party were setting off for Toronto, Bernie and I were already half cut, so we kept on drinking. Bernie said he didn't want to go back; his first kid was on the way and he wasn't too keen on getting back to his life.

One of the local guys we were drinking with said he could show us some land in the morning.

To tell you the truth I don't remember meeting the guy that night, but there he was the next morning, bright as anything when we trudged down for breakfast. I could barely see, and I felt like there was something pressing down on my head. I remember ordering tea, which I never drank in those days, but I couldn't face coffee, or anything else.

I can still see his smiling, red face. His name was John Tully. He was older than we were; we were in our 20s, late twenties - 28 I guess, and he must have been about 50, or 45 at least. And he wasn't the least bit hung over, and was he ever loud.

“You ready to come out and see your future?” he asked, leaning in too closely to my face, and I could smell his breath. He still smelled of whiskey, and it almost set me right off.

The tea helped a bit. Fifteen minutes later we were bombing down a rough logging road, and John Tully was not only driving and talking non-stop, he was passing a flask full of cheap rye in our faces.

The whiskey helped a bit.

We rounded a long corner and I felt I was going to be thrown out of the car. Tully hit the brakes and the car screeched and stopped, sending us reeling forward. The look Bernie gave me told me he was feeling about as woozy as I was. The whiskey wasn't really helping at all now.

“There it is,” he said, “that wasn't so bad.”

All I could see was a rock outcropping rising towards a grey sky. It looked cold and there was light snow falling.

“Come on out,” he said, bounding out of the car, “it's just ahead over that little hill. There's a great view from the top.”

“This better be something. I said I'd be back in Toronto by this afternoon,” Bernie said. “You shouldn't have made me drink so much last night.”

After a week of hearing about Bernie's problems with his wife, with his job, with his father in-law, it was now all my fault we were horribly hung over, a little bit drunk on top of that, and faced with climbing up a 100 foot hill that was covered in loose rock.

“I told you last night that I have to get back,” he continued on. I don’t remember what he said then but I do remember it was all lies. He seemed to be saying that I had been dragging him down all week; that I had made him drink all the time, and it was all lies. He had been doing all that to me.

I could see that John Tully was waving his hands madly at us from the top, and next to me stood Bernie, getting uglier and uglier.

It was more than I could take. Bernie was over 6 feet tall and 220 pounds and I might have been 5ft. 6 at the most back then. So I did the only thing I could do, the same thing I had always done when I lost my temper. I lowered my head and leapt straight at his belly, straight at his solar plexus. He went flying and landed heavily on the pink granite. As he struggled to get up, I did what I always did after delivering a head butt; I took off as fast as I could in the opposite direction, which happened to be up the rock hill towards John Tully. I think I would have head butted him as well, but the hill was a bit steeper than I had thought it was and the adrenalin rush that fuelled my attack on Bernie began to run out. The next think I can remember is hitting the rocks, nose first.

I felt a stabbing pain in my face, and tasted blood as it oozed out of my nose into my mouth. I tried to jump up, still thinking that Bernie would be on me any second, but as I jumped up I saw he was still stumbling at the bottom of the hill.

“Woah, what's wrong over there?” said John Tully, and as I turned to him, all of the jumping and running and falling caught up with me and I fell to my knees. I began to throw up.

It took a few minutes for me to finish once I'd started, and by then Bernie was standing a few feet above me.

“You ok now?” he asked. To this day he has never asked me why I went at him like that.

Tully was sitting at the top of the hill. He was turned away from us, once in while taking a sip of whiskey from his flask.

“We might as well go up,” I said, “we've already shot half the day.”

Bernie helped me up, and we trudged to the top.

From the top you could see the lake below. There was a drop to a shoreline of rounded rocks, green moss and stunted bushes forming a deep curve around the glass-still water in the bay. The bay opened up to the lake, and even from a distance we could see the majestic pines on the opposite shoreline. Light snow was falling from the slate grey sky and melting away as it hit the water.

I can still picture the way the lake looked that day.

“Pretty nice spot, huh, worth the climb I'd say. What do you think, boys?”

He was looking at us. We were looking at the lake

“I can sell you each a lot with 500 feet of shoreline, you can split the bay if you like. What do you think? This is a pretty good spot to build, or down there by the lake, and there's a couple of good spots on the other lot. Or one of you can buy them both; it's up to you. It's Crown land on the other side; you can hunt there. A thousand will do it for both, $500 each if you're still friends. What do you think?”

That was his sales line, 'What do you think?'

I didn't have $500 or the prospect of $500 at that time, and Bernie knew that. But Bernie did, or rather, his father in-law did.

“We'll give you $750 for both,” Bernie said. “Will you take $750?”

“Let's drink on it,” said John Tully, offering his flask to Bernie.”

“You take this lot,” Bernie said to me after taking a tentative drink, “since you were in such a hurry to get here first. Pay me back when you can. Johnny boy, show me that other lot, would you.”

I nodded to Bernie. I brought the flask to my lips but didn't drink. I couldn't. I handed it back and sat down while they went off to look at what would become Bernie's lot. I stared at the lake while waiting. I remember thinking I just wanted to lie down in a warm bed.

To this day I regret head butting Bernie.

But I'll never forget how the lake looked that day. It still looks that way now sometimes.