by Hubert Furey
He was feeling rather shamefaced when Aunt Nora, awakened by the sound, appeared in her nightgown and housecoat, but she said nothing, understanding fully the toll the events were taking on her husband.
“Give me the light, Charlie, if ’tis any length of time, I knows you’re goin’ to be dozin’ off again . . .”
She gently removed the flashlight from his hands, drew up a chair beside him, and sat to await the second part of the night’s performance, much the same as if she were following an intermission in a famous opera house in some European capital.
They weren’t long in waiting.
As soon as the first treble key was depressed, and a rather flat tinkle broke the silence of the room, Aunt Nora instantly flashed the light, to observe a small furry form hurrying its way down the keys toward the opposite end of the piano.
Uncle Charlie swallowed hard and temporarily stiffened, awaiting the appearance of horns and hooves and all the other eerie stuff that is supposed to attend happenings of this kind. But, of course, he saw nothing like that at all, and came out of it when Aunt Nora nudged him on the elbow, her voice carrying a tinge of laughter.
“It’s a rat, Charlie.”
Uncle Charlie couldn’t believe his ears . . . or his eyes. He was almost let down. The explanation certainly didn’t fit his expectations.
“A rat!”
He could hardly utter the words.
“Well, after that, never mind it . . .”
Which was the old people’s way of expressing the incomprehensible, when the incomprehensible had to be expressed.
Aunt Nora was shining the flashlight back and forth in the direction of the corners of the room.
“Look, he’s got a hole made in each corner. The piano is right in between. . . . He hops on one end table, runs across the piano, then hops down the other end table . . .”
And sure enough, two large holes were plainly visible where the rat had gnawed through the floorboards. Well, where they were so close to the landwash, and you didn’t have the concrete foundations of today, you can picture how it happened.
They used the flashlight to make their way up the stairs, Aunt Nora’s gentle laugh accompanying them each step of the way. Uncle Charlie, not finding the unravelling of the mystery one bit humorous, just shook his head and muttered all the way to the bedroom.
“A rat! A baddamn rat! After all that, a baddamn rat . . .”
To which Aunt Nora responded in motherly fashion.
“Tush, Charlie. Say your prayers and get into bed. If ’twere something else, ye might be sorry for it . . .”
And when you examined the alternatives, any one of which might have been accompanied by hoofs and horns and terribly frightening things like that, a rat was as about as safe an explanation as you might want to get for a piano being played by nobody at three o’clock in the morning.
* * * *
I suppose the story should end there.
The mystery was resolved, thanks to Fr. Mulcahy, who didn’t have to bless the house; and the little Maloney girl, we can assume, was happy enough in heaven playing whatever instruments are provided in that eternal sphere not to have the blame for the nights’ interruptions foisted on her little spirit.
Uncle Charlie found the hole where the rat got in under the house and secured it, fixed up the two ratholes in the parlour, and the rat was never seen inside the house from that day till this.
But it was seen outside the house.
Uncle Charlie was down in the beach picking mussels at low tide some time later when he noticed a big rat, just like the one he had seen running down the piano, perched on a rock just a little distance away, eyeing him curiously. The rat seemed to have a big grin on his face, as if he were enjoying the fact that he had been fooling Uncle Charlie and keeping him awake all those nights.
Uncle Charlie, incensed at what he was sure was in the rat’s mind, picked up a huge rock and hurled it in the direction of the form, while shouting the worst insult he could think of.
“G’wan, ye blood-uv-a-bitch. Ye couldn’t play the piano worth a damn anyway . . .”
To which the rat must have taken instant and deep offence, since he disappeared behind the rock and was never seen or heard of again.
AN UNLIKELY HERO
He was an unlikely hero, sitting there on the end of the bench in our kitchen, quietly smoking a cigarette. There was nothing about him striking or unusual, nothing that would attract attention in any way, nothing that would differentiate him from a hundred other men of his time who had just stepped out of a fishing boat.
I remember studying him over the top of the book I was reading. He looked so ordinary, so typical of the men of his day. There was certainly nothing that would attract an observer’s attention.
The way he was dressed was the way a lot of older fishermen dressed in those days: the thin, worn, visored cap sitting askew on his forehead; the heavy woollen sweater draping over the heavy, black, coarse pants; the knee-high fisherman’s rubbers—black, of course; the red plaid shirt visible only by the rim of the crumpled collar and the edges of the water-sogged sleeves.
It was all too common, and could be seen on any harbour wharf along the coast.
His appearance wasn’t impressive, either. He was too short for the thickness of his body, the heavy fisherman’s clothes adding to the perception of an already too bulky form. His aging face, wrinkled and burnt red with the wind and spray of the open sea, was covered with a greying stubble, days old.
In the traditional mark of respect common to the men of his generation, he had removed his cap on entering the house, and it now rested inconspicuously by the leg of the bench, exposing unruly, greying hair. In its tangled and uncombed state, with patches flattened from the constant removing and fitting of the tight cap, his head gave off an unkempt, bizarre look.
My mother offered him tea and something to eat but he declined, stating apologetically that he had just eaten on his motorboat. Perhaps it were just as well. I suspected that he would probably feel uncomfortable—even a little intimidated—sitting in his fisherman’s garb at a table which my mother always dressed as if she were entertaining the Queen of England, irrespective of the social status of the company. He may have been secretly aware, too, that his clothing exuded that blend of saltwater smells peculiar to people who follow the sea, and which became intensified by the searing heat of the kitchen stove.
As he sat he inclined forward, tilted so that his right knee absorbed the weight of his arm and the forward thrust of his body. This rather awkward-looking position enabled him to smoke with the least possible loss of energy or movement. The cigarette he held with the burning end cupped into the palm of his hand, to ensure that no ashes dropped onto the kitchen floor.
Everything about him was quiet, ordinary, nondescript, from the peculiar leaning position in which he sat to the rhythmic smoking of the cigarette. He would inhale quietly, then emit the smoke noiselessly as he continued to converse in soft tones with my mother, ironing on a table by the kitchen window. His conversation wasn’t flowing so much as it was occasional; snatches of commonplace observations about weather and hay and gardens, to which my mother would reply in turn, her responses punctuated by the positioning of a particular piece of garment or the rhythmic motion of the iron in her hand.
Dressed for the cold and damp of the sea as he was, and sitting directly across from the big wood-burning stove—my mother always kept the heat at blast-furnace levels if the weather was the least bit raw—beads of sweat trickled down his forehead. He didn’t seem to mind, however, looking comfortable in the kitchen and in the presence of my mother, who continued to iron and fold as she gave his conversation her full attention.
His grey eyes were expressionless as he gazed continually in the direction of the woodbox, pausing periodically to take short draws on the
cigarette, emitting the smoke downwards, toward the floor, as if he did not wish to offend by his action. He straightened as he again explained the reason for his visit.
“Yes . . . all the way from St. Mary’s, would you believe . . . then to break down just as we got on the net off the point. . . . Yes, break down just as we got on the net. . . . Clever salmon, too . . . we could see them. . . . Clever salmon. . . . We sculled in. . . . Granted, the wind was to our back. . . . Yes, you talk about it . . . all the way from St. Mary’s and break down just as we got to the net . . .”
In the manner of his generation he would repeat words and phrases, as if in disbelief at the unexpected turn of events that had brought him into our kitchen. He spoke with the Irish lilt of the St. Mary’s Bay people, like the people on the Southern Shore, in a soft, musical cadence. You could close your eyes and be in Ireland.
“It wasn’t all bad, just the same. . . . We asked around . . . turns out there’s a garage here. . . . At the head of the harbour. . . . So whilst the man from the garage was fixing the motor, I said I’d come up and say hello to George . . .”
He seemed to ignore the cigarette, the smoke curling upwards around his fingers, as my father’s name took him back in memory.
“Yes, I said I’d come up and see your husband. . . . Hadn’t seen him since before the war. . . . We worked together on Bell Island, you know. George and myself. . . . Didn’t know he’d died, just the same. . . . Didn’t know he’d died. . . . A young man, too, . . . God rest his soul . . . a young man . . . God rest his soul . . . a fine man . . .”
He shifted his position to lean back, drawing heavily on the cigarette as his eyes rested on me across the kitchen, as if something about me reminded him of my father. He continued his singsong tempo, speaking in a quietly respectful tone.
“Yes, b’y, I knew your father well. A fine man, your father. . . . You looks a bit like him . . . a bit like him. . . . Now, I didn’t know he’d died, just the same. He was a fine man, your father . . . a fine man.”
The latter phrase he would repeat, in a dreamlike manner, shaking his head as if he were having difficulty accepting the news of my father’s death. Then he would lapse back into silence again.
My mother would periodically comment as she lifted or turned a garment, and he would respond, quietly, repeating a phrase, adding a word. Moments of silence interrupted their quiet exchange, moments during which his eyes would again focus expressionless on the woodbox, as if his thoughts were far, far away.
It was during one of these silent moments on his part that my mother abruptly changed the conversation. She had stood the iron on end and was folding a gleaming white starched shirt, nodding in the direction of our guest. Her tone suggested that she had suddenly thought of something very important.
“That’s the man you should talk to, David, my son. You’re always reading about wars. Mr. Mulcahy here went right through the war. Now he could tell you some stories.”
“In the war!”
The phrase was rife with expectancy and excitement. I had been raised, nurtured, imbued with stories of Beaumont Hamel and German submarines off Bell Island. I had stood in the upland meadow as a child watching in fascination as formations of big warplanes flew over in the direction of Torbay airport on their way to strange-sounding places. I had sat just as fascinated at the edge of a card table hearing over and over the names of the men who were fighting and dying in those same places.
I had stood in front of the altar rail in our church a dozen times, reading and rereading the engraved names of the thirteen men from our parish who had died in the First World War, and I knew every detail of my uncle’s death while serving with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment in Gallipoli in that same war. My head swirled with romantic names like Suvla Bay and West Mudros and Portianos Cemetery, where he was buried, at the age of nineteen.
I had followed the retreat and advance of the United Nations armies up and down the Korean peninsula, village by village, on a National Geographic map my aunt had sent me from Lynn, Massachusetts. And now, after two years spent in Memorial University—where I did my first real history courses—I was reading everything I could lay my hands on about battles and campaigns and cavalry charges. So, you can understand my excitement, at the age of eighteen, at actually meeting somebody who had been a real-live participant, somebody who had actually been there, somebody who had actually endured the horror and the carnage.
It wasn’t the first time.
Our own little outport, like other towns and villages in Newfoundland, had sent young men and women to serve in the wars, and I had the occasion, at different times, to become acquainted with veterans and survivors, even at my young age. I once stood next to a sailor at a bar one Christmas Eve, reliving one of his Christmas Eve memories of 1942 in Walvis Bay. A man I saw day after day, a neighbour who lived just down the road, had been all through the North African campaign and took part in the invasion of Italy.
Yet these men would never talk about their experiences in the war.
My attempts to question or probe were never reciprocated with a like enthusiasm. The conversation inevitably became a pointless exercise. Their reticence baffled me, like that of my history professor, when I inquired about the scar on the back of his hand one day after class. He told me simply that it had been done by a machine gun bullet in an apple orchard and then he had continued on his way, as if, for him, that happening had been the most normal thing in the world.
My mother’s suggestion had presented another opportunity to satiate my youthful curiosity on a subject that had come to obsess me, but when I looked up from my book at the man sitting across the kitchen, I experienced complete disillusionment. His presence conveyed only inoffensiveness and apology. He looked ordinary, just like dozens of others I had seen around the coast knitting twine or mending nets or just sitting on the heads of wharves looking silently out to sea.
The image he projected seemed of value only to blend, in some unreal romantic sense, with the sights and sounds of the outport kitchen within and the larger world of the seascape without, but had very little value for anything else. His conversation, to my newly acquired academic mind, was dull and uninteresting—references to news items on the radio, names of people sick and dying, talk of horses and capelin, of bad weather for potatoes and hay.
He didn’t look at all like those young, athletic-looking Americans or precisely tailored German officers that were the stuff of the war photographs that crammed the Newsweeks in the old press. I wanted to go back to the book I was reading, but I knew I had to be polite, so I dutifully followed my mother’s invitation to speak with him. My question, however, betrayed no spark of my former excitement.
“You were really in the war?”
After his answer I would go back to my book. He did not have an inspiring presence.
He had to have noticed the disinterest in my voice, but he displayed no hint of displeasure. He just rested his eyes on me for what seemed to be a long time—thoughtful, kindly, understanding eyes that took no offence at the haughty arrogance of an eighteen-year-old university student who read a lot of books.
He took another long draw from the cigarette, then stood up and walked to the stove, lifting the damper before dropping in the butt. When he spoke, the tone was almost apologetic, the phrases coming slowly, like the gentle rise and fall of the sea.
“Well, I was in the war, I s’pose. . . . I s’pose you’d say I was in the war. . . . Now, I didn’t jine up or go overseas in uniform or anything like that, like the other b’ys did . . .”
I tried hard to muster some enthusiasm.
“Did you go into Normandy, Sicily . . . ? Did you fire guns?”
He paused a moment before replying.
“No, I didn’t go into any places like that. . . . I didn’t fire any guns, either . . .”
He paused, seeming to recoll
ect. The expression on his face changed even as the narrative took on a different tone, a tone I had difficulty interpreting. But the words were still quiet, inoffensive.
“No, I didn’t do any of that. There was no guns where we were. Well, not on the boats I was on, anyway . . .”
Boats!
The word generated renewed excitement. Newfoundland-ers by the score had enlisted in the Canadian and British navy. I was so caught up in the word that I missed the part about “no guns.”
“Boats!” I repeated the word back to him. “You were in the navy?”
He settled the damper down gently before he replied. Softly, quietly, inoffensively.
“No, I wasn’t in the navy. Like I said, I didn’t jine up like the other lads . . .”
He stood for a moment by the stove before speaking to me directly, the words coming out factually, as if they were of no great importance.
“I was in the merchant marine. You knows about the merchant marine, getting the ships back and forth. . . . Getting the food over . . . the guns. . . . We never had any guns ourselves. . . . Some of the other boats did. . . . Certainly, we couldn’t fire them if we did have them. . . . Where I was just an ordinary deckhand. . . . An ordinary seaman . . .”
He returned to the same spot on the bench again. Then, heedless of the fact that he had put a cigarette out only moments before, he took a sodden pack of tobacco from the pocket of his sagging pants to roll another. But he didn’t continue rolling. He just held the pouch in his hand, staring at it, as if suddenly distracted.
“Just the merchant marine!”
The disappointment must have been evident in my voice. I hadn’t read much about the merchant marine. I did know that they ferried supplies and war matériel across the Atlantic to Britain, but they had never fought any battles or won any medals. Then the story of the Jervis Bay flashed through my mind; the story in our grade nine literature book about the armed merchant cruiser that had fought the German U-boat to the end so that the convoy could escape.