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The time has come to chop down that silly and out-of-place totem pole that stands on the shore of the lake where Tom Thomson drowned.

Better, surely, to replace it with one of those number-churning signs like they have for lotteries.

Up another $3,088,500 over the last few days alone.

Ka-ching! Up $1,463,500 Tuesday night.

Ka-ching! Up $1,150,000 Friday evening.

Ka-ching! Up a "bonus" $475,000 late Friday for a painting that didn't have a name - and wasn't even signed by the artist.

The mind boggles to think that Tom Thomson didn't have the 50 bucks back in 1917 that might have saved his life. And boggles again to think that he didn't even own a suit that might have let him in to the fancy Toronto ballroom where the rich buyers came to throw their millions at tiny postcard-size sketches he sometimes couldn't give away.

There was a time he was so broke he wrote a friend, who was brokering a painting for him, that he was hoping for $10 or $15 but was willing to "let it go for what they will give."

This is not the first time I have written about what-seemed-at-the-moment breathtaking prices paid for a Thomson painting. Back in 2003, a small sketch fetched a record $194,500 at a Vancouver auction. Two years later, that record fell in Toronto when another sketch went for $370,000.

Last Tuesday's brand-new record of $1,463,500 may stand until the ice goes out on Canoe Lake - but don't bet on it.

What caught the eye this record-smashing week was something said by the young Ottawa woman, Kaileigh Richter, who inherited the little unsigned and untitled sketch from her grandmother and refused to believe family legend that it was a Thomson. But when experts were brought in to evaluate other family heirlooms, the little painting was noticed and later decreed by art expert Joan Murray to be indeed an original. It was given a title (Woodland Interior, Algonquin Park) and is now a cheque for nearly half a million dollars.

"We're going to invest in our kids' futures," a happy Ms. Richter announced.

We are pleased for her kids, of course, but it still brings to mind another child who may or may not have existed and, if existed, may or may not have lived.

That would be Tom Thomson's child.

This is a sensitive subject. I know this firsthand, as the possible mother of Tom Thomson's child, Miss Winifred Trainor, once lived just down the street and was tied to the family as her sister had married an uncle.

All the other mysteries concerning Tom Thomson are the stuff of Canadian legend: the empty canoe found floating that July day in 1917, the missing paddle, the body that rose to the surface showing a blow to the temple and with fishing line wrapped around the ankle. Not to forget the continuing dispute over where he is buried: in the little cemetery overlooking Canoe Lake, or in the Thomson family plot at Leith, Ont.

The mystery is impossible to deal with now in anything but theory, the guesses ranging from the ridiculous - he lost his balance in the canoe while taking a pee, hitting his head as he fell, the fishing line serving as support for a sprained ankle -to a continuing debate over suicide or murder. If murder, was it the German-American cottager he quarrelled with or the lodge owner who owed him money?

Though there were some local whispers that Thomson had to get married, as it was said in those days - he had booked a honeymoon cabin nearby - the first formal mention of a possible child came 35 years ago when an elderly man who had been a pallbearer stepped forward to suggest Thomson might have killed himself rather than go through with the marriage.

Then, 30 years ago, Daphne Crombie, ninetyish and likely the last survivor from that famous spring and summer at Canoe Lake, decided she should speak out before it was too late. She said that Annie Fraser, the wife of lodge owner Shannon Fraser, had confided in her that Tom had come to her husband - a large man known for his temper - to demand the money he was owed so he could buy a suit. They scrapped, Thomson hit his head on the fire grate when he fell, and Fraser had forced his wife to help make it look like a drowning, including the tying of weights to an ankle before dumping Thomson and his paddleless canoe.

There were letters from Winnie left on Tom's dresser, Mrs. Crombie swore. "Please, Tom," one had begged, "you must get a new suit because we'll have to get married."

But if there was a baby on the way, what happened? All we know, courtesy of the "local news" carried in the Huntsville Forester, is that, after Tom's death, Winnie left immediately on a long journey with her mother that eventually took them to Philadelphia and they did not return until the next Easter.

Do the math.

If there was a child, what became of it?

No one knows.

And no one ever said life was fair.

It stings, however, to think that death isn't, either.

rmacgregor@globeandmail.com