He Drown She in the Sea

by Shani Mootoo

  It is supposed to be eagle season, a time when one expects to see them by the hundreds, perched in the highest bare-topped trees along the shore or cruising the length of the Sound as they scan for salmon carcasses. They should be easily spotted on the water, poised on spinning deadheads, a whole fish squirming between a beak or flapping in the talon of a raised foot. But, with this rain one minute, wet snow the next, the fog and the mist, not one eagle is to be seen.

  In spite of blowing rain, Harry has propped the front door and left a few windows slightly open; should the telephone ring, he wants to be sure to hear it. He is tired, but the clump of deadheads banging against the retaining wall needs to be pried apart.

  The New Year is just around the corner. Surely, he thinks, she wouldn’t make him wait until then. If only she would telephone and they could speak, even briefly, he would be freed, better able to celebrate the New Year. Otherwise, likely, he would spend that holiday waiting and alone, too.

  But he wasn’t entirely alone on Christmas Day. Anil, his first friend in Canada, had made the hour-long drive from Vancouver to Elderberry Bay in the wet dark morning, his two grandchildren in tow, to pay the Christmas Day visit, a tradition now.

  They sat on the enclosed verandah and watched wet snow fall. Harry warmed milk for the boys. They had brought him Indian sweets, which he put out on a plate and offered back to them. The children had expected that Harry, whom they knew to be a landscape designer, might have set up the yard with colorful prancing plastic reindeer, and the roof with a gift-laden Santa, one foot already down the chimney, but he hadn’t. They pestered him with questions about what decorations he had in his shed, about why he hadn’t put out any, about the neighbor’s decorations, about those of his clients, and more. Their disappointment was eventually diverted by the competing prattling of the lovebirds he had received as a present that summer past. Harry had become so used to the birds and their mess that straightening the living room where they were kept, any more than piling an array of landscaping and garden magazines and seed and equipment catalogs neatly beside the couch, hadn’t occurred to him. The boys were intrigued by the sour, salty odor of birds inside the house, by their scatter of seed hulls and flecks of paper the female used in nesting. They lost interest, however, when one of them opened the cage and, attempting to coax a puffed-up reluctant bird onto a finger, was nipped so hard that an inverted purple-colored V-line blossomed instantly just under the surface of his skin. They left within an hour of arriving. That is how he spent Christmas Day. That and waiting. He had expected, hoped, that Rose would call, but she didn’t. The last time Harry had taken it upon himself to ring, they spoke less than five minutes—she, whispering, nervous, from her bedroom, until Shem picked up the receiver in the den. Rose in an instant said, “You have the wrong number,” and hung up on her end. He heard Shem say, “Is someone there? Hello?” and Harry, without saying another word, awkwardly put down the phone. She had asked him not to call again, promising to ring every other Friday evening when Shem was away playing poker with friends. And now several Fridays have passed with no word from her. He tries to understand, tries not to resent that he is not free to be in touch with her when he wants, but rather, must wait on her.

  Whatever made him think he could, by himself, fish out the logs, he wonders. If he were to fall into that frigid salt water crammed with mountain-slide debris and logs escaped from booms, he would be beaten to a pulp so fine that he could be formed into the newsprint on which his obituary would be announced.

  He turns back toward the house; he will wait until after the New Year, when he will call on one of his workers to help.

  It would be good to see an eagle. Weeks into the season, and still not one is visible.

  PAUSES AND OTHER GESTURES

  He lies on one side, his side, of the unmade bed, hands tucked behind his head. There is no food in his refrigerator. He has no choice but to drive into Squamish today, but he will lie here, wait, that is, just a little longer. He does not look at the phone on his side table, but is as aware of it as if it were a trailer parked at his bedside. He stares at a dolphin-shaped water stain on the ceiling and indulges in a particular remembering. He conjures up the same few moments time and again. While the several other occasions have blurred together, he keeps this one intact and clear. He had fetched her from her daughter’s apartment in Vancouver’s West End. They were to go to Shannon Falls and then beyond, to the art gallery in Brackendale to see paintings of eagles done by members of the Brackendale Society of Amateur Painters. But he knew, even before he had gone to pick her up in Vancouver, that when they reached Elderberry Bay, some distance still from Shannon Falls, he would stop at his house, the excuse made that he had forgotten his camera there.

  Although he knew precisely where the camera was to be found, he told her as he pulled into the yard that he had to look for it, and invited her to come into the house with him. She hesitated, and he thought, with some surprise, that she was about to accept his invitation. She said, however, that she would remain in the car, quickly adding, as if needing to justify her decision, that she wanted to watch the high-tide waves form and roll in. He did not press her, but her hesitation loomed large in his mind.

  He entered the house, his heart racing, his brain as if it were on fire. He could barely think. He returned to the car without the camera. He walked directly to her side of the car and opened her door. She stared ahead at a wave forming. Neither spoke. The swell erupted and splayed its foam far out on the surface of the water well before it reached shore. She looked up at him. He uttered a word: “Please?”

  He allowed her to lead the way to the house, stepping ahead to open the door only when they arrived at it. They walked quietly, he again behind her, down the hallway to the kitchen. He walked toward the refrigerator. She had positioned herself against a far counter.

  “Will you drink something?” he asked. “Something light? Or, I can make coffee.”

  She did not answer. He tried to read into her silence. Finally she whispered, “No. I am all right. What do you want?” In the quiet of her voice he had heard her composure, and his uncertainty vanished instantly.

  These days he replays in his mind, over and over, the moments that followed.

  He leaned against the refrigerator, his hands pressed behind his back, and in the quiet save for the electrical humming, he muttered, “This is strange, isn’t it? Being alone with you, I mean. It’s good. Are you all right?”

  She nodded, and so he stepped forward. But she raised her hand and shook her head, gesturing no to his advance. He continued and she stepped sideways, raising both hands firmly in front of her. She said, softly but sharply, “No, Harry. Don’t. Stop,” but he mirrored her step and caught her hands in his. She seemed weightless when he pulled her toward him. The heat of her body and the form of her breasts, the unbelievable fact of them against him, caused the light in the room to seem to dim, and a quivering to climb his body, from his feet to his reddening face. She had suddenly seemed to relax, and so, trembling unabashedly, he loosened his hold. She remained there, lightly, against him, and this surprised him, as he knew she would have, through the thinness of her summer dress and the coarseness of his khaki trousers, felt his burning.

  It was under the duvet of the same bed on which he lies alone, the full width of which he is still unable to reclaim for himself, that the two of them rocked their way into each other. But the point of his constant reliving of this time is always to arrive at the moment when, as if a decision had been made, Rose opened herself wide and, curling her body, drew him in.

  Other occasions haunt him, too: the day she was in the water in front of his house, floating on her back, waving at him to join her. He had been watching her as he hosed down the path in front of the house. He had turned away long enough to shut off the hose and reel it onto its rack. When he returned, she had disappeared. Horrified, he ran into the house to fetch his binoculars. Through them he saw her walking on the gravel beach, with no towe
l to dry herself nor robe to wrap around her. When she reached him, she was tired but exhilarated. She had spotted a child in difficulty off in the distance and had swum to the child and taken her directly to the shore. She had been so at home in the water there, he imagined her content in Elderberry Bay.

  His mind flits, too, to the time he had recounted for her his beginnings in Canada, the days when he drove for a taxi company so that he could put himself through school. He had wanted her to understand how he had risen out of adversity and with no family name or inheritance to ease him along, with no assistance from any arm of government—he had, as far as he was concerned, triumphed. He remembers her response: “I am married to a man who comes from the same background as myself, but it is a man who was once a taxi driver, and is now a gardener, who makes me happy.”

  He tries to understand why, on returning to Guanagaspar, she drove herself to the run-down village of Raleigh, where he was born. She looked up the old couple who were like his family. She was surprised that they had remembered her. How could they not have? When she was a child, she had visited the fish market with her mother. Uncle Mako had wrapped colorful footballer fish in newspaper for her.

  On her return from that visit to his friends, Rose immediately telephoned Harry. She told him that the old people, wiry and a little age-bent, wanted to know if he was happy, how he was managing, if he had good friends, kind neighbors. Tante Eugenie, in her unchanged style, slid fresh carite slices into hot oil, and the three of them ate. They wanted to give Rose everything they had; Uncle Mako went to the back of the house and returned with a bundle of dasheen bush, milk dripping from its fresh knife cuts. He went down to the beach and returned dragging a crocus bag full of live conch. The bag was so heavy that it took him and Rose, both lifting it by its corners, to put it in the trunk of the car, which she had to have cleaned the instant she got back to her house. Before Rose left, the old lady took her hands in hers and said, “Child, we old now; we going to dead and gone soon. But until then, we here for you just like we was for him. If you need anything, you come to us. We don’t have much, but whatever we can do for you, we will do.” She removed a chain with a cross pendant from around her neck and handed it to Rose. “Take this. Is for you to hand to our Harry, but you wear it until, God willing, next you see him.” It had been a gift from Harry’s mother to Tante Eugenie, a piece of costume jewelry worth only the memory of an uneventful Mother’s Day decades ago. Rose told Harry over the phone that she had not yet removed it, nor would she until she had the chance to give it to him herself.

  All of this and then, so abruptly, no contact.

  Was he no more than fuel to light a spark between her and her onerous husband? Was he, Harry, a good presence for them? In the silence that exists between them these days, such thoughts occur to him often.

  Rain pellets flick hard at his window. He must go into Squamish before the shops close. He is bound to run into Kay in Squamish. After turning down the offer of Christmas lunch at her house, he dreads seeing her. But he does not have a drop of milk in the house, nor bread, nor eggs. He turns on his side and stares at the black piece of plastic that is his phone.

  He picks up the receiver and listens. It works. In all of this rain, it still works. He replaces it quickly.

  New Year’s Eve is just around the corner.

  THE SPRING BEFORE THAT SUMMER

  Last spring, during a visit to the Squamish liquor store, a woman he hadn’t noticed before pushed a loaded dolly down an aisle toward him. She grinned so warmly that for a moment he thought they might have been acquainted, but he couldn’t think from where.

  “Nice day to be out and about. A little sun finally, eh? Not going to last, though—weatherman’s prediction: thunderstorm tomorrow, of course!”

  He couldn’t place her. She swiftly slit open crates with a little pocketknife, whipped bottles out of the boxes and began shelving them. “So what can we do for you today?”

  He realized that she was just being friendly. After that first time, whenever he went into the store, she seemed to go out of her way to chat with him, once even stepping away from her cashier’s counter to offer him assistance. On one occasion, as he was leaving, she lifted her work badge toward him and said, “Kay. That’s my name. And you?”

  He clutched his paper bag of wine, twisted it at the bottles’ neck, reached in the pocket of his jacket for his car keys, and said, all at once, “St. George. Harry St. George.”

  “St. George! Harry! Now, who would have guessed? Okay, St. George. Don’t stay away too long, you hear? You come back and see me soon.” But she was already taking a bottle from the next customer, so he couldn’t tell if she was flirting, being friendly, or just spewing meaningless words. As he reached the door, he heard her shout out, “Don’t get too burned in that sun.” He turned to see her smile mischievously.

  He found himself thinking of her now and then after that. He would walk in one day, he had thought, not buy anything, but go straight to her and invite her to go with him for a quick coffee in the mall. But he kept putting it off. Then summer came, and so did Rose, and Harry no longer had mind or heart for anyone but Rose.

  It wasn’t until Rose was back in Guanagaspar, and the days in Elderberry Bay were approaching autumn, getting shorter and cooler, that Kay and Harry were to run into each other again.

  THAT FALL

  It had been, for a good and pleasant while, that every other Friday evening, Rose from her home in Guanagaspar and Harry from his in Elderberry Bay would speak on the telephone. Harry would hurry from work so they might have a chance to chat well in advance of her husband Shem’s return from his standing poker engagement with the boys.

  However, one Friday evening in the late summer/early fall, knowing that Rose and Shem were scheduled to spend that weekend at their beach house, Harry, rather than return home to an end-of-week evening without Rose’s scheduled voice in his ear, decided to eat his supper at the Squamish Hotel pub.

  A mournful wail of country music from the jukebox clashed with laughter, excited chatter, the pings, whistles, and dings of pinball machines, the clack of pool balls, and an undecipherable buzz of commentary that accompanied car racing on a huge television screen in a corner. Two smaller screens hung from the ceiling near the bar, throwing irregular flashes of blue light throughout the room. One ran a sitcom with a black family. Their chatter was inaudible, yet every few seconds a burst of audience laughter erupted. The other screened music videos, though no sound was heard.

  Harry had ordered the fisherman’s catch and a local beer and sat at a table in an area he had determined to be the least noisy.

  Along with two of his workers, he had spent most of that day, a cool but sunny one, crouched under rosebushes, tilling and turning powdered oyster shell and fresh compost into the soil around the plants’ thick aged trunks where the toughest, largest thorns were. Long and unyielding spicules had gripped his clothing and etched his arms with inch-long blood-beaded slashes. His body burned and his scalp stung. He felt alive.

  Under the dim yellow light of a torch-shaped wall sconce, he listed the following week’s chores in a notebook, Rose always at the back of his mind, imagining that she, too, missed their week’s end telephone engagement.

  Copper fungicide on fruit trees, he wrote. Spray can.

  Telephone Asha’s Garden Center for grease bands. Call Dalton’s.

  He absently looked up. Among a handful of male patrons was a woman hugging the bar counter one minute, swinging around to lean her back against it the next. She wore a cropped blouse, one of those handkerchief-type tops that tie in a knot just below the breast area, and jeans that seemed to pinch her lower body into rigidity so that she swiveled on the pointed toes of her high-heeled shoes. Harry stared at the exposed belly and, when she swiveled, at the taut behind, of the flamboyant woman. Her roaming eyes caught his. She smiled quickly. He bent his head again.

  Apply grease bands to apple trees MONDAY!

  Mountain ash, strawberr
y flats for Osborne’s.

  Mildew spray/Dr. Chen’s roses.

  Suddenly his name was shouted by a woman’s unfamiliar voice. Not expecting that any woman he knew would visit a place like this, he decided instantly that another patron named Harry was being addressed. The noise in the pub had certainly increased since his arrival half an hour earlier. He applied himself to the list again.

  Birdseed.

  Sharpen pruning shears.

  Cultivator rental.

  Shoelaces.

  Unexpectedly his shoulders were grabbed, thumbs shoved into his back and released before there was time to react. He swung around and there was Kay. He pushed his chair back and stood.

  She ignored his outstretched hand and wrapped her arms around him. He imagined he smelled of oyster ash, compost, and the sweat of a hard day’s work. He looked to see from where she might have appeared: on the other side of the room was a congregation of women, some sitting at a long table, some milling about, all behaving rather raucously. Kay pulled back a chair and sat at his table. He lowered himself into his chair.

  She was instantly full of chatter. She and her friends were celebrating the end of “summer camp for grown-up girls.” She had won the prize for having the season’s highest number of bogus golf shots. She carried on about not being much of a golfer; the only driving she really fancied was on logging roads that led to remote lakes and campsites. She laughed at herself, and he couldn’t help but laugh along. He was happy to see her. It was good, to tell the truth, to have her come up to him and greet him so warmly in such a public place. It made him feel as if he belonged—nowhere in particular, yet everywhere. Sometimes, she was saying, she just got in her vehicle and headed to one of the lakes—she pointed vaguely behind her—to do a little canoeing.