Surface Rights

Verna Macoun Woodcock drove north. It was ten o'clock on a Tuesday morning - a workday, or what would have been a workday had she not retired from the Ministry of Agriculture the previous Friday. After twenty-eight long years in a cubicle overlooking Bay Street, Verna could no longer be described as 'a worker ant'. That was what her twin sister Fern had insisted on calling people who, unlike herself, got up every morning and punched in at some soul-eroding job.  Not that Fern's liberated lifestyle and free spirit had done her much good -- dead four years come October. Verna sniffed and shifted in the seat and peered through the windshield at the 400 unrolling before her through sleet the consistency of a Slushy.

And it wasn't just Fern who was dead. Everyone was dead – her mother long since, then, a little over two years ago, her husband, most recently, her father, whom a massive coronary had taken out in the Keele Street TCC station six weeks earlier. Everyone but Verna and the dog, a black lab by the name of Jude. After the Beatles song. Her father's dog, hers now, she supposed. 
Speaking of which, "Hey, Jude! Starting to look familiar?" The black lab perched on the back seat must have made this particular journey with her father a dozen or more times. Whenever they hit a curve in the road, he banked like a pro.  She pointed the Volvo towards Barrie and hunkered down for weather.

It was the Tuesday before the long Victoria Day weekend -- May Two Four. According to Canadians this celebration of a dead Queen's birthday marks the beginning of summer. More often than not, the weather fails to support this contention; indeed, sleet, hail and frost are more typical of the long weekend than sun and warm breezes. Nevertheless, this perception -- that Victoria Day serves as some kind of magic portal through which summer's blessings flow -- provides an occasion for binge drinking while scantily clothed, for the reckless commitment to the earth of surely doomed annuals, and for opening cottages. The latter activity, when multiplied by a factor of thousands, routinely results in bumper to bumper traffic stretching along the 400 from Toronto to Huntsville and, now that the Muskokas have become so expensive, points north.  That was why Verna was traveling on the Tuesday -- to beat the traffic -- and what she was headed north to do -- to open her father's cottage. But that's where the whole cottage thing ended.  As soon as it was prepped for sale, she planned to engage the services of a real estate agent in nearby Greater Gammage who billed herself as 'Carmen the Cottage Lady' to list the property for sale.  Verna had found her on the Internet.

In the event of his death, her father had given her somewhat sketchy instructions on how to open the cottage and the name and phone number of the Ojibway handyman from the nearby reserve -- Lionel Madahbee – with whom she was to contract to affect any needed repairs.  "You keep an eye on Lionel," her father had warned her. "He's melancholy."

Melancholy?  What had he meant by that?

"Is Lionel melancholy?" she asked Jude. "Does it interfere with his work?"

The dog looked wary. She changed the subject. "Hey, Jude!" she sang slyly.

The dog opened his mouth and panted lightly.   

"Don't be afraid!"  

The dog yelped.

"Take a sad song. . . ."

Bark!

"And make it better!"

Ruff! Ruff!

It was a routine that her father had worked out with the dog, their schtick. Donald Macoun would sing a line and Jude would bark and everyone would clap and laugh.

"There.  Feel better?"   

Certainly the interchange seemed to have raised the lab's spirits.  He fluffed up to the extent a short-haired dog can, sat up straighter and, opening his mouth, beamed at her.  At least he looked like he was beaming. 

“What am I going to do with a dog?" she wondered aloud.

 

 

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2008/Melissa Hardy