Excerpt from The Chalk Canoe
From Chapter 1
“I’d laugh, if laughing didn’t quicken my death.
I’m belly-deep in muck under all the waters of Little Rose Lake with a thousand crayfish nibbling at my buried parts and a jumbo snapping turtle about to bite off my face. The snapper’s sharp jaws are open, his angry eyes are closed, and even if they could find me in these murky depths, none of the neighbor kids could pull me from this muck-hole.
You know that feeling like you’re dying when you’re really only just waking up? That pain in your pumper like your insides are about to turn inside out and the dams of your arteries are about to give way, and all that you’ve been holding in is about to explode into the unknown? Death has a taste. It bubbles up from the inside, black and green, thick and sour, a grainy mush. I almost drowned once before, when the bratty twins who couldn’t swim used me as a ladder, so I know how death-by-drowning feels. The white circle of water closing over, your last look at sky, that delicious fishy smell and the silent scream that brings in more water. And I’ve tasted death in my dreams, in the back of my throat while cleaning out the endlessly overflowing public toilets of Sleepland. But this is real life I’m talking about. In real life when death spills out of you in a pudding mush, then you know you were carrying death around inside you all that time. You were letting death walk upright inside you.
I used to think death was on the outside waiting for me. I used to think death was waiting around the corner as I toddled from our bedroom and my sister Holly jumped out and yelled BOO! I’d jump as high as a toddler could then Holly ran to the next corner and BOO and to the next and BOO! At every corner Holly waited like death trying to scare me out of my rubber pants…
One, two, three, four, five dead kittens. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten living kids. When you’re the baby of ten in a house full of life you better learn fast how to disappear because death is waiting around every corner. Death in the pinchers of the spiders in our step crack silently weaving their eggs sacs, death behind the basement bathroom tiles, atop my big sisters’ dresser, and in the stillness of the milk glasses on the supper table before Dad’s explosion turned our stomachs upside-down.
To get away from all that death I’d sit down by the lake and make wishes. Let me fly like in my dreams. Let me turn into a real-live mermaid. Let the cute boy love me. Let the bratty twins dry up and die if they sass me one more time! And let the waters of Little Rose Lake be sucked up in a giant whirlwind so the bottom is laid bare. LET THE BOTTOM BE LAID BARE! I imagined all the waters drawn up in a maelstrom. Stringbean Tomboy shared my wish. We ached to wade through the newly-exposed muck and explore the lake’s history. The lake was clean, because it was spring-fed, but greenish-black muck clouded everything.
When we bellied down on Andersons’ dock and peered in, or dove off our raft and looked up, all we saw was sunlight shooting through yellow-green. What else, we wondered, besides my big sisters’ wedding rings, Stringbean’s lost hockey pucks, and the Blakes’ sunken Evinrude lay hidden in the muck? Were there peat-blackened pig bones from the old stockyards and rocks round as skulls from the crumbling ice house? Were there rusted trucks like the old Ford haunting Highlook Meadow? Or were there deeper relics hidden in that muck? Were there dinosaur bones big as the bulldozers digging up our vacant lots? Or curled bodies of ancient people? Or dangers from another time waiting to unfurl evil curses? I imagined myself in Mr. Anderson’s waders, slogging through the empty lake-bed, pulling up grotesque treasures, a baby-doll, a rusty stroller, a screaming skull—
This summer my wish came true and it’s about to kill me, with a huge snapping turtle inches from my face.”
From Chapter 4
“Falling leaves, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, the canoes broke in my hands, the blade slipped, tiny cuts opened. While all the other kids were out skating and sledding, I was inside trying to carve a perfect chalk canoe. A pile of brokens rose in the dining room, chalk dust filled the air, I was a chalk ghost, and no matter how carefully, no matter how skillfully, no matter how tenderly I carved, they always broke. Cracked in half. In my hands. On the verge of perfection. But I never gave up trying to carve a perfect canoe.
Then came Dee-dee Morton.”
From Chapter 7
“We should have listened to what those hollowed eyes were telling us. We should have listened to those hard faces. But we didn’t listen, and we had no idea what we were getting into as we lay down at the lake covered in Coppertone with our stacks of history books, no idea what we were stirring up with our peeks into the past, and no idea what else was brewing that summer with the Poison Pen.”
From Chapter 18
“So Cat, what’re you gonna be?”
Stringbean was hovering over me chomping Hubba Bubba as I sat carving at the dining room table.
“Huh, Cat?”
I wasn’t going to be anything. When you’ve lain beside a genuine Egyptian mummy and held a naked girl in your arms and seen the back of a head blown off, what did you care about plastic masks, fake blood, and Butterfingers?”