Living as he did with his father, Mike could never have a dog of his own. But Mike was fond of him and always addressed him kindly and by name, telling him our plans and waiting for him when he took off on one of his dog-projects, chasing a groundhog or a rabbit. I took Ranger for granted, I was used to having him follow me around and sometimes for no good reason I would order him to stay home, go off to the barn, leave me alone. Also of damp long-haired dog, because we had taken Ranger in with us. The smell was of men-their work clothes and tools and tobacco and mucky boots and sour-cheese socks.
DIBUJO GRAB COPIO WINDOWS
Rain washed down the windows of the cab and made a racket like stones on the roof. I don’t remember whether his father went into our kitchen then, for a smoke and a cup of tea, or stood under a tree, or went right on working. Mike and I climbed into the cab when it rained. His father drove a dark-red truck that was always muddy or dusty. The summer holidays were well under way when he arrived at our house with his father. I know exactly how old he was because that is something children establish immediately, it is one of the essential matters on which they negotiate whether to be friends or not. This boy lived with his father in hotel rooms or boardinghouses, wherever his father was working, and he went to whatever school was at hand. Mike McCallum was a younger man than my father, but he had a son who was a year and two months older than I was. He lived in the Clark Hotel-he had come there in the spring, and he would stay until he finished up whatever work he found to do in this part of the country. He lived in the town close by our farm but he did not have a house there. The well driller-he was sometimes called the well digger, as if nobody could be bothered to be precise about what he did and the older description was the more comfortable-was a man named Mike McCallum. There was a tin mug hanging on the pump, and when I drank from it on a burning day, I thought of black rocks where the water ran sparkling like diamonds. From that time on we could pump out pure, cold water no matter what the time of year and no matter how dry the weather. Our well was a deeper hole than most, but we needed a good supply of water for our penned animals-my father raised silver foxes and mink-so one day the well driller arrived with impressive equipment, and the hole was extended down, down, deep into the earth until it found the water in the rock. These wells were holes dug in the ground. This happened once in about every five or six years, when there was not enough rain. In the countryside where I lived as a child, wells would go dry in the summer. I have found the golf course-I think it the right one, though the ragged verges have been cleaned up and there is a fancier clubhouse. And there was too much upkeep work for Johnston-Sunny’s husband-who liked to spend his weekends golfing. Their children, as they became teenagers, balked at going there. It was too far from Ottawa, where they lived, to serve as a convenient summer place. Sunny and her husband sold it a few years after I visited them. I have driven around in the hills northeast of Toronto, with my husband-my second husband, not the one I had left behind that summer-and I have looked for the house, in an idly persistent way, I have tried to locate the road it was on, but I have never succeeded.
In the summer of 1979, I walked into the kitchen of my friend Sunny’s house near Uxbridge, Ontario, and saw a man standing at the counter, making himself a ketchup sandwich.
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