by Don Hunter
Willie grinned and looked up at the BC Ferries sign above the dock: “SPINNER’S INLET.” “Looks like you came to the right place,” he said. “Which one do you want? Samson, Rachel, or Jackson?”
“Rachel? She’s still alive?”
“You might want to ask her.” He considered that. “Or maybe not. What’s your name?”
The young man told him, then said, “I’ll try Samson.”
“Up the hill, left onto the highway, about one kilometre, left again, road down toward the water, giant cedar on each side, big old house on a ridge. Can’t miss it. Good luck.”
Willie turned to the other young man, another stranger, about the same age as the first one, with a mop of fair hair. “Help you?” and soon gave him his directions, too. Willie made a mental note: Phone Silas at The Tidal Times. Item for the social column. A two-beer tip, surely.
The big old house, built with first-growth, rough-sawn timbers and rocks hauled up from the beach, sat like a sentinel above the inlet that the first Spinners had named more than a century and a half before.
A man in his sixties, wearing workboots, experienced jeans, a logger’s shirt, and a perplexed look, studied a stone he was about to place on a low wall in need of fixing. The stone seemed considerably bigger than the hole waiting for it. He looked up as the stranger raised a hand and stopped close to him. “Hi. Mr. Spinner?”
Samson examined him. Then more closely. Looked away, then back. “Yes,” he said. “Samson Spinner. Who are you?”
“Also.”
“Meaning?”
“I’m also Samson Spinner.”
Samson Senior placed the stone on the wall near the hole.
“I mean, that’s my name,” the young man offered. “I go by Sam.” He frowned at the unrepaired wall. “I think we are distant cousins, or something.” He seemed fixated on the wall, and the stone, and the hole where it was not going to fit.
Samson said, “Christ.” Then, “I don’t have any spare money.”
Sam shrugged, dismissing the thought. He cocked his head, still staring at the wall.
Samson looked from Sam to his stonework. “Something wrong?”
“Well, I don’t know about wrong, exactly …”
“But?”
“Well, it’s just not how I would have gone about it.” He swept an arm, taking in the whole length, about thirty feet, of the structure, which had an unevenness about it in several spots—dips and humps and such. “It’s going to fall down, eventually.”
“And what would you … ?”
“I’m a waller.”
“A brickie, a bricklayer?”
“Waller.”
“So, a kind of stonemason, then.”
“No, brickies and stonemasons use mortar, like you’ve done in places. It’ll crumble with these salt winds off the water, and …”
“It’ll fall down?”
“Eventually.”
“And if you built it?”
“As I said, I’m a waller. Like many of our—yours and mine—early family members. Dry-stone wallers. I’m from that branch. You lot are from the colliers, worked the pits on the west Cumberland coast. Ours worked on the fells. Then we left as well, went to Newfoundland.” He shrugged, apparently in explanation. “We had an Irishman in the family—my great-great-uncle Patrick something. My aunt Lizzie has it all recorded, a family-tree thing. She goes on Find My Past, Ancestry, UK government records office, those kinds of things. I know quite a bit about us.”
Samson looked at his unfinished job, wiped his hands on his pants. “Tell me about our wallers.”
“Over a beer?”
Samson smiled. He went to the house and returned with two opened bottles of Sleeman’s Honey Brown Lager.
They sat on the deck and Samson listened, and learned. … A trench four or five feet wide … two rows of footing stones on each side … space in between filled with heartening or little rock fragments … subsequent layers on top of the footings … each stone resting on two stones below … and finally the cam stones on top.
“And no mortar?”
Head shake. None.
Samson looked at his wall, considered the stones that lay about on the beach and the ones in the field behind the house. “Tell you what.”
An hour later Rachel Spinner spun her veteran Dodge pickup into Samson’s drive. She climbed out, carrying several three-ring binders.
Sam put down the stone he was holding and watched her as she advanced on him.
“Over here.” Rachel pointed to a convenient log that had sat many Spinners, and opened one of the binders. Sam sat beside her, as directed, and listened and followed Rachel’s finger running across pages of births, marriages, and deaths.
Rachel stopped, stabbed at an entry. “That’s you,” she said. She beckoned Samson over. “That’s him. He’s real. Look at this one. It’s a copy of his great-great-grandfather’s death certificate. Henry Spinner, died in Cockermouth, Cumberland. You know that’s where Wordsworth was born, don’t you? Cause of death, pneumonia. Occupation, waller.”
“They worked winters on the fells,” Sam Spinner said. “Freezing cold, pouring rain, they just kept at it.”
Rachel nodded at Samson. “He’s real, all right.” She examined the corner of the new wall that Sam had started. “I hope you’re paying him for that.” To Sam, “Willie at the ferry said you had a lad with you. Is he another of us?”
“No, but he said like me he’s here looking for a relative, an older one, forget which ‘great’ it was.”
“What’s this older relative’s name?” Rachel asked.
“Svensen.”
“Christ,” Samson said.
Up … and Away
When seventeen-year-old Connie Wilson returned from a trip to Victoria with her normally sandy-brown hair mostly emerald green but with a few pink and purple streaks and explained that that is what thespians do and that she planned to become one, there were repercussions.
But first Connie’s father, Charlie, had to be diverted when he misheard the word “thespian” and started to describe how he, as a liberal-minded modern parent, would support his children no matter what they decided they were, as he had had his own differences to overcome as a youth. He did not clarify that his differences had been mainly with authority and had resulted in two brief custodial stays in the youth residential centre in Burnaby. It was explained to Charlie that Connie’s choice was unrelated to sexual preference—although there were plenty of thespians who enjoy the varieties, as there were no doubt cowboys, mechanics, and cops—but rather it defined those who made their living on stage, screen, and radio, acting.
That was what Connie was setting as her goal, attending drama school. In a month’s time there were auditions being held in Vancouver by the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA), on West 61st Street in New York City: musical theatre. Her dream. The Wizard of Oz … ruby slippers … Dorothy!
Connie was named in honour of her grandma, Margarita (Maggie) Consuela Pereyra-Mendez Wilson, a woman with an inclination to the dramatic, especially under stress, who, when Connie declared her passion, claimed that the urge to perform came from her side. This may have been borne out after she phoned 911 twice in two weeks, screaming for firefighters after Lennie got the toaster stuck on high. She got Constable Ravina Sidhu, who said, “Hello … emergency … No, I told you last time, Maggie, we don’t have a fire department. There’s just me. Should I bring my extinguisher down?”
Connie sounded like a songbird in the spring, and the kitchen floor at the Wilsons had a growing bare spot in front of the TV where she followed tap-dancing lessons on YouTube.
“This AMDA—how much?” Charlie asked.
Connie was aware that while her dad was a generous man, his pockets were never very deep, and especi
ally lately, after the disappointing negotiations with Samson about the old blue truck at the Swede’s funeral. “Bloody Spinners,” Charlie had grunted.
But Connie was not discouraged. The immediate concern was cash to get to Vancouver and stay for the auditions, and she had a plan. All she needed was her dad’s twelve-foot ladder, which she could repair with duct tape, a bucket, a sponge, and a chamois. She would wash windows.
Her first estimate, at the Inlet seniors complex, was rejected by the resident manager Jeremiah Bell. However, when Connie explained the purpose of her labours, Jeremiah, who had himself spent numerous hours as a background performer, or extra, on the old X-Files and a couple of other Vancouver-made shows, waiting in vain to be discovered, relented.
He advised her to start at the top row of windows so that any water and suds that drifted down to the lower windows would just help with the washing of them.
Connie propped the ladder against the wall so that the top rung, with the bucket attached by a wire hook, was adjacent to the first window on the left of the second floor, the highest. She climbed up, dipped the sponge into the bucket, and began spreading the good news.
Inside the complex, Hyacinth Jakes stepped out of the shower, lifted her robe off the hook, and turned at a squelchy sound from outside. As a ten-year-old girl in her home village in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, she and her junior class had once, in the interest of “introduction to theatre,” been forced to watch a performance by a group of travelling players of the Victorian horror-melodrama The Face at the Window, followed by Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn. She had been scared silly, and now Connie’s face at the window, wide-eyed from shock as she felt the ladder’s poorly repaired (duct tape) faulty right rail give way, and distorted through a wave of sudsy water, threw Hyacinth into serial-killer flashback mode.
Hyacinth screamed. Connie floated backward and down, still holding the ladder and shouting, “Sooooorrrrry!” as she landed in Jeremiah Bell’s newly prepared vegetable patch, where the soft soil cushioned her arrival.
Jeremiah, with visions of insurance claims dancing in his head, scooped Connie up, made sure she was all right, and paid her in cash from his pocket twice the amount they had agreed on for cleaning all of the windows, not half of one of them. He ran inside, grabbed the phone from Hyacinth, who was about to call for police, pointed out that she really needed to finish getting dressed, and promised her a nice cup of tea.
Charlie Wilson pulled into their driveway where Connie was busy working on the ladder. “How’d your first day go, kid?” he asked.
Connie finished putting the final wrap on a new course of duct tape, tapped it down, and looked up. “I was wondering,” she said, “how many people might be needing their lawns mowed about now.”
If Only …
Samson Spinner watched the passengers disembark from the Gulf Queen, jostling and laughing, on a dazzling Gulf Islands summer day. He wondered, once again, why he turned up every time the ferry came in on a summer weekend, disgorging happy, often festive, people, while he failed to dispel his own mood, which was a blend of illusory optimism and looming disappointment. And of course, he knew why.
He stared across at a group of four women of a certain age, close to his own, one of whom seemed to stare his way, nodded, smiled, and … my God! … could it be … ? But no, it wasn’t. It never was, and no amount of wishful thinking was going to change that, was it?
If only … he wondered how many other people were tormented by that futile sentiment of … what was it? Regret? Remorse? Repentance? All of the above? What if I had … ? Or followed Annabelle Bell-Atkinson on election night and considered the other of the two diverging roads … the one that would have led to …
If only he had honoured the half-promises he had made to the widow, Thelma Spooner, when they were both young and she ran the post office. He smiled, once more remembering the time they had held a mock wedding. It had been a means of getting the provincial government road crews to save the old wedding tree they were supposed to cut down for a highway extension, and instead divide the new road into two to save the towering maple. They’d had champagne, and Samson had carved their names into a heart on the trunk, like kids do, prompting Thelma to say it was nice to have something in writing. And they had kissed, and the guests had applauded.
Those guests had long since stopped asking Samson if he had heard from Thelma, who, after accepting that there was not going to be a proposal unless she made it—and she was too damn proud, and had expected more of him, to do that—had been offered and had taken a supervisory job with Canada Post in Calgary.
She had left on a long weekend just like this one—sunny, warm, filled with promise for some. Since then she had sent him a couple of birthday cards with two kisses and love and best wishes from “always your friend, Thelma.”
There had remained a slight connection, through Thelma’s daughter, but then Heather had moved her riding club to Sidney on Vancouver Island, along with her two daughters and a son and her husband. Heather had always continued being civil to Samson, but with a distance about her. She had once remarked that she had been to Calgary and stayed with her mother, who remained single. Thelma, she said, appeared to concentrate her interests on her work at Canada Post, and the performances of the Calgary Flames. She said that her mother sent him her regards.
Samson had had on-and-off relationships, all of which finished as off, and had stayed unattached. Somehow none of them matched up to that first love, Thelma.
Should … had been a recurring thought for Samson since she had left. Should I call her? Should I ask her if …? But he hadn’t, beyond a couple of Christmas cards wishing her seasonal joy and such, and those cards and good intentions had fallen by the way the last couple of years.
What if he had followed his first instincts and asked her to marry him, instead of letting doubts and uncertainty, and maybe a lack of confidence, dictate the future, which was now the present. What if?
“Samson.”
He was snapped out of his reverie by a voice at his side. It was his recently arrived young relative and namesake, Sam Spinner from Newfoundland, who had just finished building a classic dry-stone wall on the old Spinner property, Samson’s home. The wall had become a point of interest since Silas Cotswold had run a piece about it in The Tidal Times: “An Ancient Craft Come Home.” Silas had even included graphics showing how the walls were constructed so that no matter the slope of the land, they remained horizontal. And he’d thrown in the information that the wallers of yore slyly included little runs that led rabbits to a surprise ending and supper for the labour force. The result had been a flow of Inlet people, and some from Salt Spring, to see the structure, and half a dozen—so far—orders for Sam to build similar walls.
“You meeting someone?”
Samson scanned the final few passengers leaving the Queen. “Not today,” he replied.
“You looked like you were expecting somebody. They miss the boat, maybe?”
Somebody certainly did. “Maybe.” Then, “What about you? You expecting somebody?”
Sam smiled and nodded at the last passenger, a young woman trundling a travelling case on wheels and making hard going of pulling the thing because one of the wheels had come adrift. He answered as both of them went to lend a hand.
“It’s Cathy,” he said. “She’s a Sloan, from Marystown. Fishing family. We were unofficially engaged, and I wrote and asked her to come after Rachel said I could have that small cottage on her property—with caveats. She said I can stay in the cottage and Cathy will have one of the extra rooms in Rachel’s house until we get properly engaged and then married. She said she’s old-fashioned and that’s the rule in her house.”
“Not something many would want to dispute,” Samson laughed.
He reached Cathy Sloan and hoisted her case while Sam hugged the girl and lifted her
off her feet. They headed for Rachel’s pickup, which had lately also become a waller’s busy work truck.
After they got Cathy organized, and the girl and Rachel sat down for tea and talk, Sam said, “I tried to get her come with me at the start, but she wasn’t sure, so far from home. She kept saying, ‘But what if … ?’ She never said as much, but she meant if it—we—didn’t work out. What then? Because you never know, do you?”
Samson said, “No, you don’t. But there’s only one way to know for sure. And I can tell you that ignoring ‘What if?’ and getting on with it is a hell of a sight better than later on saying, ‘If only …’”
Samson stopped his endless, fruitless checking of the Gulf Queen passengers … except for the occasional long summer weekend, when he happened to be at the wharf.
Ballots
The poll opened at nine o’clock, an hour later than promised in The Tidal Times, because Anwen Brannigan had lost the key to the Legion Hall, where voting was to happen.
“Mislaid,” she said. “Not lost. And now I have it.”
Anwen had been odd-jobbing and cleaning at the hall for a couple of years, since her brood had grown and fled for more promising climes. She tended to keep her own hours, and the fact that a mayor and council were to be decided (well, a mayor, with the also-rans becoming council by default) had not altered them.
She had addressed the complaint from Annabelle Bell-Atkinson, who was the first—and only, so far—one in line, that she had kept people waiting and disrupted their day. Anwen said, “There’s nobody else here.” And pointed about her at the absence of citizens waiting to vote. “I mean other than you, and those two [the geeks.] Anyway, I’ve got some dusting to do.”
Annabelle asked, “Where are the ballot boxes?”
“Boxes?” Anwen said. “Where do you think we are, the United Nations? The box is where I put it.” She pointed to the porch and an upturned cardboard item that had held cauliflowers for Gilbert’s Groceries and had a scissored slot in the top. “You put your ballot in there.” She added, “Gilbert supplied it free. Civic duty and all that.”