By: Joseph Macchiusi

The power had been out at our cottage for five days when Chaz Remco’s generator exploded. Finally exploded, I should say, because Chaz had kept that thing running constantly after the storm killed the electricity.

The radio people called that storm a microburst, but it seemed ridiculous using the prefix ‘micro’ to describe the phenomenon we’d witnessed. The wind didn’t just roar. It howled an ancient language, ferocious and guttural.

Right away -- I mean, even before the rain stopped falling -- Chaz Remco had the old Briggs and Stratton running. The racket of that thing! Like a huge motorbike, the kind ridden by guys in leather chaps and German army helmets. But sharper, more biting, a metallic rattle echoing across the lake.

Not white noise, no. Black noise. Black as in the endless nights spent achingly consciousness, wanting only to sleep, our heads saturated by the incessant machine-gunning engine. Black as in evil.

I’d just decided to haul some water up from the lake when the machine blew. Very loud, a whip-cracking concussion, a clap I felt in my chest. I saw blue smoke spew over the bay from the Remco place.

“Oh my God,” mom yelped. She stopped fussing with the slushy icepacks long enough to peer out the kitchen window.

“I knew it,” my great uncle Gene said. I saw him suppress a self-satisfied smile as he settled into his chair.

Tired from his afternoon constitutional, the explosion buoyed his wizened frame. He liked getting down the road, away from the noise, but he’d be eighty-five next September, so he never got too far.

Chaz’s generator seemed to bother Gene more than the rest of us. He couldn‘t resist repeating his mantra one last time. “No need for that bloke to keep the thing running day and night. Watching the telly, that’s all he was up to.”

“And keeping his fridge cold,” I added. Gene was right, though. Chaz only needed the generator on for a few hours a day to do that.

“Chaz is a good neighbour,” my mother said, still staring out the window.

“I said it would overheat,” Gene persisted. “I said it, and it did. I’m telling you, that bloody generator was new when God was still a lad.”

I smiled. Gene had lived in Canada for almost 50 years, but his Scouse was as strong as the day he got off the boat. Maybe even stronger.

“Rich, where’s your father?” mom asked, her voice tense.

“Outside,” I said vaguely. I found myself pacing, not knowing what to do in the sudden, blissful silence. The air seemed oddly empty, thinner somehow. I’d become attuned to clamour.

“Well what’s he doing?” mom spat.

“No doubt getting away from you,” Gene murmured, picking up a 30-year-old edition of Popular Mechanics.

I cringed for one of my mother’s diatribes, but she didn’t hear the comment. Or, more likely, pretended not to hear.

Gene snapped open the magazine, working his tongue around the margins of his seamed mouth like a hungry predator. He winked at me, crossing his legs.

I returned to the op-ed page of last week’s Globe, and mom got back on her hands and knees, rummaging through the big Coleman cooler. Obsessing over our perishables. I lost track of time, but it seemed to be hours before dad came in. Even before I looked up from the paper, I saw him shaking.

“Somebody sugared the oil in Remco’s generator,” he said, breathless.

“Sabotaged her, eh? There’s sugar all around the goddamn nozzle. Can you imagine somebody doing that?”

I found this hard to believe, but I have to admit I wasn’t sorry. The quiet was like a salve for raw skin.

“Gene thinks it broke down,” mom said, sounding like a kid tattling on a friend.

“Okay, Gene, right.” Dad patted his shoulder. Fortunately, he was distracted by my mother, so I was freed from the obligation of reciprocating his insipid ‘you know how Gene can be’ expression. “If we had a generator, we’d of had it running too. Eh, honey? Eh Martha?”

“Frank,” my mother drawled, rolling her eyes, “if we had a generator we wouldn’t be in this boat.” With a determined flick of the wrist, she tossed something into the kitchen sink.

Dad scuttled to her, rubbing his tumescent belly as if it were a talisman. “What is it, sweetie?”

“What is it?” mom replied, jutting her hands at him. “Frank, what do you think I’ve been doing here?” Her hands, white with cold. As white as the anger in her wide face. “Look at this.” She lifted a dripping plastic bag of cheese from the sink. “Look at this mess, Frank.”

“The cheese is fine, Martha.” Stroking her back, dad kept his tone as upturned as his wee triangle of a nose. His voice lay still and quiet in the no man’s land between stating and questioning.

“It’s all wet,” she said, voice quaking. She shrugged away from his restive hand. “It’s ruined.”

“Mom,” I said, trying to sound patient, “if you’d left the cooler closed, the ice would’ve lasted longer.”

“Well, we need more.” She swung the bag of cheese at my father. It looked like a giant, pendulous testicle sheathed in transparent skin.

“Sweetie,” dad cooed, “there’s no more ice to get. There’s been a run on ice for days, okay? The man at the shop said there wouldn’t be any more till at least Tuesday.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m the village idiot, Frank!” News of no ice for another forty-eight hours was enough to make mom bare her teeth like a feral child.

“Aw, sweets.”

“All our food is drowning in this clammy mess. Our toilet smells like something died in there.”

Gene re-crossed his legs, studying whatever obsolete marvels lay within Popular Mechanics. I saw him bite his lip, and the wrinkles on his forehead deepened. I guessed that for someone who remembered his childhood home obliterated by a German bomb, the problem of wet cheese didn’t assume the overwhelming importance it did for my mother.

“I told you: we should have gone home.” She smacked an errant strand of her hair and darted away from my father’s feeble attempt at a hug.

Such is the choreography of my folks at each other’s throats.

“Do what you like,” mom blurted. She dropped the cheese in the garbage like a piece of medical waste and made a show of filling the kettle from the potable water jug.

This was dad’s cue to deflect attention from himself. “Rich,” he said, grinning to hide his embarrassment. Laying it on the way he liked his sandwiches: nice and thick. “Come on, buddy. Bring up a few buckets, dump ‘em down the toilet, would you?”

Like most cottages, we relied on a pump to keep the water flowing from the lake to the taps. And to the toilet. The blackout required us to haul the water fifty feet up a steep flight  of railroad ties. As far as that went, I agreed with my mother: life would have been easier at home.

Gene insisted on helping. Probably to get away from the bickering. No point in arguing: once Gene decided on something, he persisted at it like the soldier he’d been at my age. He trudged up that hill until his ruddy face went purple. The hike made my thighs ache, and I was a quarter of his age. I kept watching his bent hand clutching the bucket handle, wondering how the apparatus of bone, veins and skin could support the weight. Hoping his cane would hold firm in the mat of pine needles.

We stopped halfway. Gene put the bucket down to catch his breath. He and I sat on the steps, looking out at the lake, enjoying the sound of the breeze in the pines, the water licking the dock.

“The noise really bothered you, huh?” I asked after a long while.

“Ah well,” Gene rasped. He palmed away a trickle of sweat between his bushy white eyebrows. “Reminded me of my army days. Out in camp. Used them to keep the lights up, see. It’s the noise of war, see. Strife, like.” He inhaled slowly, deeply  through his long nose, savoring the air. “Let’s get this job done, Rich.”

Reluctantly, we stood and picked up our buckets.

As we crested the hill, the kettle on the gas grill started whistling. Mom came out to retrieve it, her brow still hiding her eyes in angry shadows.

Dad had gone off somewhere to lick his wounds, maybe back to Chaz’s.

I dumped a bucket down the toilet. When I came back into the main room, I saw mom emptying the cupboard over the stove. Her busy hands crowded the kitchen counter with Mason jars of flour, rice and pasta.

“All I want is a cup of tea!” she shouted, really losing it. “Now I can’t find the buggery sugar!”

Supremely calm, Gene picked up a battered copy of Cottage Life. This time he was unable to suppress his smile.

Joseph Macchiusi lives in Newmarket. He enjoys the beautiful serenity of the Haliburton highlands, where he spends the majority of his summers with his family.

© Copyright 2008