Chapter 5
Sarah was almost driven back by the stench of cheap beer and crushed cigarettes as she gazed down at the Wendigo Pub’s sandwich board that invited guests to seat themselves. Instinct, and few alternatives other than this hotel bar, pushed her forward. Food for the kids was the focus right now, and she couldn’t let herself fail; if she failed, she would fall and never get up. She waited a minute, to let her eyes adjust to the shadows of the room, and dove in.
A dozen customers sat in small groups or nursed solitary thoughts. The place had seen better days. An infantry of dusty bottles sat vigil behind the bar, while round tables, banged up by years of plates and pints, littered the room. Oldies rock music streamed from unseen speakers. Sarah found it hard to process the ordinariness of the scene.
The young man behind the bar had tattoos under rolled-up sleeves. Sarah briefly wondered about the hieroglyphic life story unfolding across his flesh as he glided around the room delivering food and drink and a noncommittal smile. He was back behind the counter as she approached the bar and asked him for a menu, which he skidded to a sticky stop in front of her. Words warbled on the plasticized page. Worries about Bella and Charlie—alone in the room upstairs, a screen serving as an electronic babysitter—jittered in her head.
“What’s good?” she finally asked the bartender.
“Not much but the burgers are tolerable. Cook can’t mess up a burger too much,” he said with a wink.
Still, the words on the page refused to come together. “I can’t decide. Which one’s easiest?”
“I don’t know about easy, but the Wendigo’s my favorite. It’s got cheddar and bacon. Can’t go wrong with fat and salt.”
“Sounds good. Three of those, please. One with salad instead of fries. And can you wrap them up? To take upstairs?”
“Sure thing.” The bartender opened a door to the kitchen, which Sarah hadn’t noticed before, and called, “Three Wendigos, Jimmy, one with greens, and put ’em in a blanket.”
Sarah dropped onto a barstool to wait. She rested her head on her hands and pressed chilled fingertips into her aching eyes. It had been almost twelve hours since she had stepped out of the tent into some other woman’s life. She wanted nothing more than to close her eyes and wake up somewhere else. Instead, she watched the bartender pull glasses from a tucked-away dishwasher. He gave them a practiced swipe before stacking them like translucent Jenga blocks on a counter beneath the bar.
“You look like you’ve had a day,” he said.
“You can say that.”
“Up for the weekend?”
“I was.”
“Not a great display under this weather, I imagine.”
Sarah could see he wasn’t going to stop asking questions, and she was in no mood to share her story.
“What does wendigo mean, anyway? I keep seeing that word,” she said, hoping to distract the conversation. Her question lingered on a silence that slithered through the room, one she might have dismissed as a random hush over a chattering crowd but for the bartender’s stutter in drying the glass in his hand. A quirk of a smile passed his eyes.
“Ah, now there’s a question.” He went back to wiping the glass. “It’s actually what brought me here.”
“To the bar?”
“Naw,” he said, and pulled in a breath that announced he had an audience. “To Patricia Bay. I’m a grad student, working on a master’s in sociology. I’ve spent summers up here ever since I was a kid. My folks have a cottage on Old Coach Road, along Bark Lake. I’m hanging around up here through the fall to do some research and have a quiet place to write.”
The background hum in the room returned to normal. Sarah felt foolish. Fatigue and the strain of the day were obviously taking their toll. The bartender interpreted her silence as an invitation.
“I study myth and language. My thesis is on Indigenous mythology and how it’s been incorporated into colonial history. The wendigo is a well-known myth around here, part of Algonquin lore. Some say it’s real, some say it’s a ghost story. I say it’s a great thesis topic.”
Despite the warm chatter of the room, a chill nestled on Sarah’s shoulders. Unable to stop herself, she asked, “What do you mean?”
“It’s a creepy legend, actually.” The bartender set his elbows on the bar top to lean toward Sarah. “They say the wendigo is a forest-dwelling spirit with the body of an oversize emaciated man and the skull of a stag. It’s not good or evil, though it does have a rather gruesome habit of hunting people. They say no matter how much it eats, it’s never satisfied, and so it’s always hunting. But the most fascinating bit of the legend is that the wendigo’s victims are cursed to become wendigo themselves, doomed to hunt the forests claiming more victims.”
The bartender nudged closer and lowered his voice. His eyes scanned the room as he spoke.
“Some of the old-timers”—he nodded toward a small group in the far corner of the room—“say they’ve seen it themselves. There was a time when most of the people around here worked in the woods. Timber was big, and most of the locals worked for one company or another, either cutting or stripping trees to send downriver. Men lived out there for weeks at a time, and there were always stories. Indigenous myths, Irish yarns, Polish ghost stories. Everyone had a story passed down from their elders or brought with them from the old country. The woods around here are thick with myths and stories.”
Sarah’s spine quivered with the uneasy feeling of being watched. She turned on her stool and saw a handful of people, all drinking and chatting, caught up in their own lives. And yet she couldn’t shake the feeling.
“Ol’ Joseph over there, he’s a regular.”
Sarah turned back to the bartender, whose voice became husky.
“He was one of the last lumber barons, at least in his own mind. Worked these forests right up until a decade or so ago, when the last of the mills finally pulled up shop. He’ll happily tell you he’s seen a wendigo, in the flesh.”
“Ain’t no claim, boy. I seen it all right.”
“Joseph, man! You have ears like a hawk.”
Sarah turned on her stool to see a man stooped over from age and hard labor. His straggly hair and weathered skin looked like they’d been dipped in birch resin. The hand resting on the bar top carried ragged scars. He offered a gruff nod.
“Give me a Molson.” The man took an uninvited stool near Sarah. “Every bit of it’s true.” He took a slug from the bottle placed in front of him.
“I was up the old Jones Road, near the Devine concession. That was before I sold my stake to Walker’s. Must have been sixty-three or sixty-four.” The old man’s voice carried a faint Irish lilt and scratches of hard living. “Was out there looking to shore up some extra meat for the winter. Thom’s grocer was still buying game meat back then, so I would freeze half the catch for me and bring the rest to Thom. He paid a good price since he sold some of it to some fancy market in Toronto. I’d just set up camp and was tucking into a little Irish stew, when I heard a baby crying.”
The bartender interrupted by tipping his hand to his mouth with a mock bottle.
“Now, don’t you be judging me none, you little snip. I been logging these woods long before your da was so much as a tickle in your granda’s loins. I heard a child, no doubt. I thought there may have been others nearby, maybe a family camping deeper in the woods, and was grateful. Man likes a bit of company with his stew. Thought I might share a nip or two. When I went looking, that’s when I seen it in a clearing. Clear as day, I saw it. Tall as them trees, and I could see through where its stomach shoulda been. It was wendigo, all right, making a God-curdling sound like a babe crying. I won’t forget that sight for as long as he lets me walk this earth.”
The bartender went back to wiping down the bar. Sarah sat, frozen. Images tumbled around in her head, coming into focus then fading beneath the next like a twisted slideshow: Charlie and Bella standing by the water, Matthew in the firelight, the whitecaps snarling across the lake, the woods closing in.
“I think,” the bartender said, “it was too much liquor and creepy-looking trees. I’ve spent enough nights in the wild to know the games your mind can play. The wendigo’s just a story to scare kids and stop them from wandering away in the forest.”
Joseph huffed and flicked a hand at them as he shuffled away, his beer firmly gripped in the other hand.
“I will tell you this,” the bartender said, cocking an eyebrow toward Sarah. “There’s still enough superstition around here that you won’t find a lake or a street named wendigo. Too many believers to risk it. Hey, you okay?” His expression told Sarah she must look the way she felt—like her insides had been twisted by an invisible hand.
“Order’s up!” a voice said. Sarah jumped to her feet.
“Ah, that’ll be your burgers,” said the bartender, and he walked through the kitchen door.
Sarah stood in the center of the hotel room.
Artsy nature photographs on the walls did nothing to draw the eye away from the well-trodden dirt-brown carpet in the hotel room. The disinfectant smell was only partially masked by the fake-lavender bathroom soap and abandoned take-out food congealing in the clamshell containers.
Sarah tucked the kids into bed and turned out all the lights. She left on the muted TV like a night-light. Exhausted and comforted by the ordinariness of the bedtime routine, Charlie had fallen asleep quickly beside Bella. His small body seemed to vanish beneath the large burgundy flowers printed on the blanket.
Bella lingered. “Mom, I can’t sleep,” she said into the dancing shadows. In the muted light, Sarah could just make out the outline of her daughter beyond Charlie’s sleeping form.
“Come here, little bit.”
Sarah saw a rare glimpse of her little girl as Bella shuffled across the floor and crawled onto the bed beside her. She tentatively wrapped an arm around Bella, who relented by letting her body slacken. The two of them stared at the soundless images on the TV screen. After a time, Bella rolled onto her side, turning her back to Sarah.
“It’s my fault,” Bella said.
The words opened a gash in both of them.
“Oh, honey, it’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault. It’s okay. We’ll be okay. It’ll be okay,” Sarah said, as the girl sobbed against Sarah’s chest.
Bella, her beautiful, difficult, and independent child, had just shared her fears with her mother, and Sarah silently vowed to do everything she could to protect her children from pain, though a part of her knew it was a parent’s empty promise. It was impossible to protect children from the random wantonness of the world.
After Bella had fallen asleep, Sarah sat cross legged on the hotel bed with Bella snoring beside her and Charlie on the opposite bed. Undulating light from the muted TV screen warped the striped wallpaper. In Sarah’s hand, an artist’s pixilated rendering of the wendigo—its teeth bared and eyes staring at its hapless viewer—filled the iPhone screen. The creature had the shape of a man, but its rib bones poked through decayed flesh and the too-long arms ended in red-spattered talons. Sarah rose from the bed, making it to the toilet just in time. She vomited, dregs slopping like milk from an expired carton. The sight of undigested beef on the white porcelain brought about another round, until her body shivered with emptiness. Sarah sat back on the cold bathroom tiles, her quiet sobs echoing off the tiles.
“Matthew,” she whispered. “What have you done?”