Hard Light

by Michael Crummey

  “[Hard Light] fully inhabits the earth, air, fire and water of Newfoundland . . . outstanding.”

  — FRASER SUTHERLAND, Globe and Mail

  “. . . He is a brilliant stylist: never obscure and rarely pedantic. . . . Crummey takes us on outer and inner journeys from which we return with an understanding of eternal forces too powerful to conquer but always necessary to challenge.”

  — R.G. MOYLES, Canadian Book Review Annual

  “. . . The anonymous voices of Hard Light speak to us as distinct individuals. What comes through again and again in the foreground of their short tales is their determination and awareness . . . a concise, poignant social history of Newfoundland.”

  — JOHN STEFFLER, Labour/Le travail

  “[Hard Light] accumulates a power that honours its dead with noble straightforwardness.”

  — BILL ROBERTSON, Saskatoon Star Phoenix

  “. . . An exquisitely evocative world . . . the apparently ordinary shimmers with a matter-of-fact clarity guaranteed to curl your toes.”

  — JUDITH FITZGERALD, Toronto Star

  “The three sections of this book constitute different approaches to ways of life which no longer exist; the language which renders them is precise, understated, eloquent. Hard Light marks Crummey’s emergence as a poet of distinction.”

  — CLAIRE WILKSHIRE, Canadian Literature

  BOOKS BY MICHAEL CRUMMEY

  * * *

  Arguments With Gravity · 1996

  Flesh and Blood · 1998, 2nd ed. 2003

  • Hard Light · 1998

  River Thieves · 2001

  Salvage · 2002

  The Wreckage · 2005

  Galore · 2009

  Under the Keel · 2013

  Sweetland · 2014

  HARD LIGHT

  Michael Crummey

  Hard Light

  with a new afterword by the author

  and a new introduction

  by Lisa Moore

  BRICK BOOKS

  Copyright © Michael Crummey 1998, 2015

  Brick Books Classics first edition, 2015

  ISBN 978-1-77131-387-2

  We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

  BRICK BOOKS

  431 Boler Road, Box 20081

  London, Ontario N6K 4G6

  www.brickbooks.ca

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Crummey, Michael, author

  Hard light / Michael Crummey ; a new afterword by the author and a new introduction by Lisa Moore.

  (Brick Books classics ; 5)

  Poems.

  ISBN 978-1-77131-387-2 (epub)

  I. Moore, Lisa Lynne, 1964–, writer of introduction II. Title. III. Series: Brick Books classics ; 5

  PS8555.R84H37 2015 C811’.54 C2015-900186-2

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  INTRODUCTION: Salvaged from Darkness, by Lisa Moore

  Rust

  — 32 LITTLE STORIES —

  · Water ·

  East by the Sea and West by the Sea

  The Way Things Were

  Making the Fish

  Acts of God

  The Law of the Ocean

  Grace

  When the Time Came

  Fifties

  · Earth ·

  Bread

  Root Cellar

  Husbanding

  Stones

  Bay de Verde

  The Burnt Woods

  Jiggs’ Dinner

  Old Christmas Day

  · Fire ·

  32 Little Stories

  Bonfire Night

  Flame

  The Tennessee Waltz

  Bonfire Night (2)

  What We Needed

  Solomon Evans’ Son

  Infrared

  · Air ·

  Her Mark

  Procession

  Old Wives’ Tales

  Two Voices

  Your Soul, Your Soul, Your Soul

  Kite

  Stan’s Last Song

  Dominion

  — DISCOVERING DARKNESS —

  ‘Magic Lantern’ (April 1889)

  · Learning the Price of Fish, 1876–1887 ·

  ‘And now to make a start as a boy of very little understanding.’ (1876)

  ‘A hard toil and worry for nothing.’ (1879)

  ‘A trip to the Labrador among the Esquimaux’ (1882)

  ‘The price of fish.’ (September, 1887)

  · Expecting to Be Changed, 1887–1894 ·

  ‘On the broad Atlantic for the first time to cross the pond.’ (November, 1887)

  ‘Names of the Ropes’ (1887)

  ‘Crossing the equator. Arrived in Rio Grande.’ (1888)

  ‘Arrived in Hong Kong, November 9. The histories of China.’ (1888)

  ‘The Fearnot of Liverpool’ (1889)

  ‘Arrived in Odessa, Russia. Bonaparte at Moscow.’ (1889)

  ‘In a great row and got locked up.’ (1890)

  ‘Observatory on Mount Pleasant’ (1890)

  ‘A hard looking sight but not lost.’ (1890)

  ‘Taking photographs.’ (1891)

  ‘Now in Africa among the Natives.’ (1891)

  ‘A narrow escape almost but saved.’ (1892)

  ‘Useful information, the Holy Lands’ (1893)

  · Understanding the Heart, 1894–1935 ·

  ‘When I started trading.’ (1894)

  ‘Boat Building.’ (1899)

  ‘Who can understand the heart of a man.’ (1907)

  ‘Distance from Newfoundland. Northernmost grave in the world.’ (1913)

  ‘Life and its pleasures.’ (1921)

  ‘At home on a cold winter’s night. The changing scenes of Life.’ (1928)

  ‘An old sailor’s portion.’ (1932)

  ‘Pulling along toward the last end of the Warp of life and the man changes.’ (1935)

  — A MAP OF THE ISLANDS —

  What’s Lost

  Naming the Islands

  All the Way Home

  Stealing Bait

  Cousin

  Capelin Scull

  Water Glass

  Newfoundland Sealing Disaster

  Hunters & Gatherers

  The Women

  Cain

  The Cold War

  Moravians

  Painting the Islands

  Company

  The Change Islands

  Cataract

  AFTERWORD

  A Note on the Text

  Biographical Note

  INTRODUCTION: SALVAGED FROM DARKNESS

  * * *

  ■ Michael Crummey’s Hard Light is an homage to the Newfoundland past, a fervent wish to rescue it from darkness, render its voices, to make it speak.

  Throughout this collection Crummey does something akin to taking infrared photographs – like the thermal imaging technology that tracks the loss of heat in a modern dwelling – except the author imagines photographs of houses long since gone. Instead of the signs of heat escaping a poorly insulated eave or doorframe, Crummey’s fanciful images show the traces emanating from the stones people heated in the woodstove and slipped under their blankets at night to keep their feet warm, or the bright halo that an infrared image might record around the bun of a matriarch, passing from one room to another, a century ago.

  These fanciful photographs might register the energy of lost loves, the ghostly traces of children and pets, long buried and forgotten. The traces in Crummey’s thermal imaging might look like the blasts of psychedelic colour rendered in modern infrared photographs, but instead of heat loss, those blasts would register lost stories.

  Crummey is tracing memories and artefacts, sto
ries he has heard from relatives, stories he has gleaned from old photographs, stories half-imagined and thoroughly true. The infrared images conjuring the past in this array of fragments, poems and vignettes might capture all kinds of traces: demolished houses, shipwrecks, the deed to a plot of land, a cemetery in the Burnt Woods, a church bell; a peppermint knob dropped by an older sibling into the screaming throat of a baby in order to get the baby to shut up. The older sibling is intent on stopping the infant’s screams until, in the unexpected success and sudden quiet that follows the peppermint knob, the baby turns the colour of a partridgeberry and the children’s mother rushes to hold the child upside down until the candy pops out.

  Screams resume; life returns: the baby’s voice.

  Hard Light is full of voices, most particularly the voice of the writer’s father, Arthur Crummey. As Michael Crummey says himself, in the Notes on the Text, “More than anyone else’s, though, it is my father’s voice and his stories that made me want to write these things down.”

  The voices throughout have the cadence of oral stories, are full of rhythms and turns of phrase that have been hammered smooth through the telling and retelling, full of insight and morality, full of the intensity of childhood joy and mischief.

  On childhood mischief: “Uncle Lewis Crummey was the shortest man in Western Bay, five foot nothing and every inch of that was temper, we had a great bit of fun with him when we were youngsters.”

  The children decide to pull a prank on Uncle Lewis that makes sport of his lack of height, but much later, when Lewis Crummey is buried in the Burnt Woods Cemetery, the narrator becomes circumspect: “Six feet of dirt for you up there, no matter what height you are alive and standing.”

  The scope of this small story – a child in a community of children, gleefully causing trouble for an innocent, raging relative – turns on a dime with this single sentence. The mood shifts from hilarity to a sober reckoning of the unequivocal nature of death. The narrator is casting back over a lifetime, a man both whimsical and pragmatic in the face of time passing, the passing of loved ones.

  Michael Crummey retrieves the bright bits and sparks that escape the backdraft of the Angel of History’s wings. Scraps, faded documents, the red tangle of life pulled from the belly of a cod, photographs, bones; a dog’s tongue snipped in two, down the middle, the result of a child’s operation undertaken to make the dog speak.

  Other artefacts that flare with stories: a severed finger, a zeppelin and its shadow chasing a pregnant woman until she is overtaken, the loss of the fishery, the loss of whole communities. The loss of a way of life.

  Hard Light is an unsentimental elegy for a life of hard, physical labour, a life fashioned in oral stories that the author seems to have absorbed just before that kind of life was swept into the darkness of the past.

  In one story the signature on a deed of land changing hands is only an X: the obdurate, stubborn, stone silence of the X, often the stand-in signature of an individual from a primarily oral culture where writing has not yet gained a foothold.

  All the secrets, emotions and thoughts, the great, private history encompassed by a single life – to which such a mark alludes – is conjured here, like a flame that bursts out of a stone and a stick rubbed together in the dark. Brief, incandescent. Also hilarious, honest, shocking, spare and bold.

  Like that X, paradoxically both everyman and an individual, Crummey’s stories and fragments mark these lives, give them breadth and illumination.

  Michael Crummey is taken with the integrity of lives forged from earning a living on the sea, and the talent that enabled those fishermen and women to recognize the intense beauty of a landscape or a love or an ordinary moment – a talent otherwise known as wisdom.

  The writing here is alive with the desire to salvage, scavenge, to reconstruct, to preserve that wisdom, to go after, unearth and to imagine, then to hold fast.

  Take the instructions for ‘making fish’ in Hard Light. They are exacting, and ironically so, because communal knowledge of how to cure fish appears to be inborn, or learned by osmosis, or passed down through the observation of minute gestures, fast flicks of the knife blade, absorbed subconsciously and collectively. A knowledge that lives in the hands.

  Hands that are covered with “. . . blisters, open sores, cracks webbed round the knuckles . . . [thickened] into leather around the joints, you can barely close your hand to make a fist.”

  The gestures, the passing of fish from one man to the next, the salting and slicing, are as carefully choreographed as a ballet.

  But the author writes the instructions just as the knowledge has become obsolete, as good as lost. Fishing communities abandoned, stages weathered and rotted, falling into the water.

  “We didn’t have much back then, but we had what we needed.” How much is said in that spare line, a line as honed and unadorned as the lives it describes. It is the voice of a young nurse living in Battle Harbour, who falls in love, is married in a ceremony attended by the few souls who haven’t yet “scuttled back to the Island to wait out the winter” and who help throw up a house, out of a pile of wood, in the matter of three days.

  “A lot of things were done that way on the coast: because they had to be done, because there was no one else to do them.”

  This is all that was needed: romantic love at first sight, the skill to ease pain, to birth babies, to operate and cauterize, and the landscape – wild, sometimes desolate, and so magnificent it could bring a human being to her knees. It could be enough.

  There’s a profound sense of humanity in the whole of Michael Crummey’s writing, in both his poetry and prose, an attention to the cadence and rhythm of spoken language, the phrases shaped out of the life of hard work, diction alive with wit, precision and brevity.

  And there is the space for the things not said, or things articulated through deeds rather than words, like the new couple who refuses to admit their feelings for each other, or even speak the word love until they have eaten a whole sack of flour together.

  The form of these stories straddles poetry and prose, is a cobbling together of genres, to suit the subject: a life cobbled from seasonal work, where the worker’s dexterity – jumping from job to job: mining, fishing, snaring rabbits, planting a garden, sealing, logging – could be likened to the dexterity of a sealer copying pans of ice.

  Crummey also captures a bitter/fierce awareness of class: a boy who travels with his father’s fishing crew for the first time and catches a glimpse of the elite passengers traveling on the Kyle – passengers from Boston or New York – served by white-uniformed waiters.

  The passengers are drinking twelve-year-old whiskey. The whiskey is already three years older than the boy who has had nothing more nourishing than hard tack and water for three days.

  But for all that’s salvaged here, there is the suggestion of all that is irrevocably lost.

  Michael Crummey is of a generation of Newfoundlanders whose childhoods balanced on the cusp of great change and a disappearing world.

  The Newfoundland remembered in these pages is only alive in the decaying physical traces of it that remain: weathered and collapsing outport houses; black and white photographs of women in boxy coats with big buttons, kerchiefs over their hair, posing in the long grass.

  Or: the photograph of a coffin resting on a carriage.

  Or: the photograph never taken – an infrared image of heat escaping an outport home from the past, a house no longer standing. An empty field with a house that only remains in the author’s imagination, or a community’s collective memory.

  In the infrared photograph, never taken, the radiating heat is a metaphor of those who have passed away. Ghosts. Souls. Voices.

  In these stories and poems, an intimate, bright world flares up, glowing in the darkness of recent history, full-blown and vivid.

  LISA MOORE · St. John ’ s, 2014

  HARD LIGHT

  in memory of my grandparents,

  Arthur Gasker Crummey and Minnie
(Rose) Crummey

  and for my grandmother, Sarah (Reid) Sharpe

  RUST

  The boy watches his father’s hands. The faint blue line of veins rivered across the backs, the knuckles like tiny furrowed hills on a plain. A moon rising at the tip of each finger.

  Distance. Other worlds.

  They have a history the boy knows nothing of, another life they have left behind. Twine knitted to mend the traps, the bodies of codfish opened with a blade, the red tangle of life pulled from their bellies. Motion and rhythms repeated to the point of thoughtlessness, map of a gone world etched into the unconscious life of his hands by daily necessities, the habits of generations.

  On Saturday mornings the boy waits at the border of company property, rides figure eights on his bicycle beside the railway tracks, watches the door beneath the deck head for his father coming off night shift.

  Late September.

  His father emerges from the mill in grey work clothes, a lunch tin cradled in the crook of one arm, his hands closeted in the pockets of a windbreaker. They head home together, past the concrete foundation of the Royal Stores that burned to the ground before the boy was born. Past the hospital, the hockey rink. The air smells of the near forest and sulphur from the ore mill and the early frost. What’s left of summer is turning to rust in the leaves of birch and maple on the hills around the town, swathes of orange and coral like embers burning among the darkness of black spruce and fir.

  The heat of their voices snagged in nets of white cloud. Their words flickering beneath the surface of what will be remembered, gone from the boy’s head before they reach the front door of the house on Jackson Street. The mine will close, the town will collapse around them like a building hollowed by flame.

  It will be years still before the boy thinks to ask his father about that other life, the world his hands carry with them like a barely discernable tattoo. His body hasn’t been touched yet by the sad, particular beauty of things passing, of things about to be lost for good. Time’s dark, indelible scar.