Hard Light

by Michael Crummey

  The year Mike Tobin was up with us he soaked himself before we went in, he couldn’t stand those fucking flies. I’d say he had enough juice in his hair to send the boat down to Battle Harbour, you could see the fumes rising from his head like heat over pavement. We split up into pairs then and walked in.

  Joe Crowley was with him, he says they stopped for a smoke after an hour and Mike reached up to scratch the back of his head still holding the cigarette. We heard the yelling, and then we could see a small fire tearing through the trees toward the bay. He stripped off his shirt as he ran and he looked like a big wooden match, his head in flames above the white skin of his chest, a tassel of black smoke trailing behind him. It was funny as hell to look at but we managed to hold off until we got him out of the water and saw that he wasn’t hurt bad. The hair was mostly gone and what was left smelled like piss on fire, but that was the worst of it.

  Mike would’ve preferred if we never said a word about it afterwards, but it was too good to pass up. And Joe was the hardest on him. Every time he wanted a laugh that summer he’d take out a cigarette, wave it in Mike’s direction and shout, “Hey Tobin. Got a light?”

  THE TENNESSEE WALTZ

  Ingredients:

  1 quart of dandelion flowers picked from the meadow garden

  4 gallons of water carried up from the brook

  2 and one half pounds of sugar from the winter store

  1 teaspoonful of cream of tartar, the rind and juice of 2 lemons

  Boil the works in the beer pot for twenty minutes, turn it out into a pan and let it cool. When the liquid is new-milk warm, add four tablespoons of yeast and let it work for about a day, until you can see the tiny bubbles start to rise. Boil your bottles and siphon the beer from your pan, then cork tightly. Keep them in a cool place or the bottles may burst, the small explosions like rifle shots in the middle of the night, your shoes sticking to the floor for weeks, the house stinking of yeast and alcohol.

  Fit to drink after two days in the bottle. A glassful will straighten a crooked spine. Three bottles enough to put a song in your heart and the heart of your neighbour come for a visit; four enough to light the flicker of dandelion flames in your sorry eyes. Five will set your head on fire, have your neighbour dancing around the kitchen with a broom, singing the only line he knows of “The Tennessee Waltz.” Send him home with one less sock than he came with. Wake you early with the tick of a cooling engine in your skull, your face the colour of ash. Your neighbour’s wife wondering what became of that missing sock, and he will never find an explanation to satisfy her.

  Makes about three dozen.

  BONFIRE NIGHT (2)

  They’ve swiped a cupful of gasoline – my father and Johnny Fitzgerald – doused a spruce branch and shoved it beneath the mound meant for burning. A match is struck and tossed: the suck of flame taking hold, the fire eating its way up through the overturned palm of driftwood and boughs, a cap of white smoke shifting over the crown of the bonfire.

  Everyone takes a step back from the scorching heat, the crackle and spit of spruce gum burning. Night falls. Adults pass flasks of whiskey or moonshine, the flicker of silver making its way from hand to hand like the collection plate at church.

  The boys have spent weeks hauling trees and branches across the barrens, scavenging rags and bits of scrap wood, but they aren’t satisfied somehow with the innocence of the fire, its simple appetite. They stand restless in the dark light, their heads full of mischief: something they can’t articulate is eating at them, burning its way from the inside out.

  Match Avery steps up beside them like an answered prayer, breathing alcohol, nodding drunkenly toward the flames. “Some fire,” he tells them. “Nice bit of fire.” He blows soot into the crook of his palm, wipes the hand on the seat of his pants. “All boughs though, she won’t last long.” He nods again, emphatically. He’s an adult, he’s drunk, he knows everything there is to know about anything. “Needs a bit of solid wood to keep her going,” he tells them.

  The boys disappear into darkness, running a narrow dirt path worn through meadows. At Match’s house they head straight for the root cellar like spilled gasoline rushing toward an open flame. They dump a summer’s worth of vegetables onto damp ground, carry the empty wooden barrels back to the fire.

  Match turns them in the red and yellow flicker, amazed by the boys’ luck, by their resourcefulness. “Now these,” he announces, “are lovely barrels.” While my father and Johnny Fitzgerald look on Match stamps them flat himself, heaving the splintered sticks atop the blaze, throwing up a shower of sparks. “Nice barrels,” he says again when he’s done, and then wanders off toward another circle of light.

  The boys stand together in the startling heat, multiplied now by dry lumber, the flames standing high as meadow grass before the haying. The bonfire goes on burning for hours beside them, dark flankers spitting at the stars.

  WHAT WE NEEDED

  Battle Harbour, Labrador, Early 1930s

  Mother always said I would never find a man tall enough to marry me. People worried about those sorts of things in Connecticut. I left for Labrador at twenty-three, a green nurse standing head and shoulders over every girl I trained with and still single.

  The first Newfoundland Ranger posted on the coast arrived a year later, fresh from three weeks of instruction in St. John’s. A boat dropped him at the Battle Harbour wharf in October with enough rough lumber to put a roof over his head. The weather had already begun to turn by then, most of the fishing crews had scuttled back to the Island to wait out the winter. He stood there a long time, staring at that stack of wood, wondering how he was going to make something of it before the snow settled in.

  There were eight men from Twillingate on the wharf with all their outfit: nets and chests, a few quintals of cured fish, waiting to take the last coastal boat of the season home. They were sitting on their gear, a few of them with pipes, halos of tobacco smoke around their heads. It was a Wednesday afternoon and the Kyle wasn’t due into Battle Harbour until the weekend. He nodded in their direction.

  It took them three days to put up the house, just a stone’s throw from the hospital. He bought a new iron stove and a couple of chairs from Slade’s, used a piece of lumber laid across wood horses for a table. He had no other furniture and there was nothing more to be had until the Kyle started its run again in the spring. He took a picture of the men beside the nearly finished shack, their hands stuffed down the front of coveralls, a blond spill of sawdust on their shoulders. Saw them off on the Kyle that Sunday, slipping the skipper a bottle of rum for the trip back to Notre Dame Bay.

  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. When the doctor was called away to other outports, the nurses delivered children, amputated limbs on fire with gangrene, sometimes only an ordinary carpenter’s saw pulling through flesh and bone.

  On the last decently warm morning of that year he saw nurses setting up beds to lay the TB patients out in the fresh air. Every fine day saw a row of them on the hospital veranda, below the building’s inscription which read, Such as you have done to the least of these my brethren, so have you done unto me. He put on his uniform and boots, stepped along the path to the hospital and asked the first nurse he encountered about any extra cots he might be able to borrow or rent for the winter. When I looked up at him the heat of a blush flooded my face. He stood six feet six inches tall, a little higher in his boots.

  My bridesmaids were the other nurses, and two men from Twillingate stood for the groom, dressed in their coveralls. He was relieved of his position for failing to remain single four years after joining the police force, built a small schooner and worked the coast for the Grenfell Mission, bringing patients from as far away as Red Bay and Rigolet for treatment or surgery.

  We didn’t have much back then, but we had what we needed. A house, a stove for a bit of fire, some furniture. A four-poster bed brought in on the Kyle the summer we were wed. />
  SOLOMON EVANS’ SON

  The graveyard in the Burnt Woods was being fenced in the year 1890. The first person buried there was Solomon Evans’ son.

  The new school on the South Side was built in the summer of 1894 beside the church. First prayers were held on January 12th, 1895.

  The first church bell for the South Side arrived on March 25th, 1908, and it rang for the first time on March 27th, the peals as clear as the blue sky, the gulls put to wing by the sound of it, their brief racket like an echo rusting into silence.

  The first time the bell tolled a death was for Mrs. Ellen Kennel. The school was closed for the afternoon, the children standing in the balcony of the church to watch her funeral, and some of them followed the coffin to the graveyard in the Burnt Woods. A hedge of people stood around the hole in the earth. The minister threw a handful of dirt on the wooden lid. “Ashes to ashes,” he intoned, the October wind stealing the words from his mouth as he spoke.

  The mourners filing out past the plain wooden cross marking the grave of Solomon Evans’ son. Darkness of spruce trees, maples scorched by the coming of winter. And no one could recall the boy’s name, or what it was he died of.

  INFRARED

  A picture that was never taken, infrared photograph of the square wooden house in Western Bay, a record of heat and its loss. Most of the building sits in darkness, a shallow haze of escaping energy pink above the shingles, deeper and more insistent where the chimney rises into the night air.

  Downstairs the kitchen is a ball of flame, the draughty windows spilling fire. The wood stove at the centre, as dark as a heart, stoked full with junks of spruce and throwing heat like a small sun. The family sits as far back as kitchen walls allow, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows, sweat on their brows, the temperature pushing eighty-five degrees.

  In the next room, behind the closed door, a film of ice forms on water left sitting in a cup. Steam rises from the head of the woman who walks in from the kitchen to retrieve it and in the photograph her neat bun of hair is haloed by a shaggy orange glow.

  Later, the outline of sleepers under blankets in the upstairs bedrooms mapped by a dull cocoon of warmth, a bright circle lying at their feet: beach rocks heated in the oven and carried to bed in knitted woolen covers. The outrageous autumn-red pulse fading as the house moves deeper into night, the incandescent warmth of it slowly guttering into darkness.

  · Air ·

  HER MARK

  I, Ellen Rose of Western Bay in the Dominion of Newfoundland. Married woman, mother, stranger to my grandchildren. In consideration of natural love and affection, hereby give and make over unto my daughter Minnie Jane Crummey of Western Bay, a meadow garden situated at Riverhead, bounded to the north and east by Loveys Estate, to the south by John Lynch’s land, to the west by the local road leading countrywards. Bounded above by the sky, by the blue song of angels and God’s stars. Below by the bones of those who made me.

  I leave nothing else. Every word I have spoken the wind has taken, as it will take me. As it will take my grandchildren’s children, their heads full of fragments and my face not among those. The day will come when we are not remembered, I have wasted no part of my life in trying to make it otherwise.

  In witness thereof I have set my hand and seal this thirteenth day of December, One thousand Nine hundred and Thirty Three.

  Her

  Ellen Rose

  Mark

  PROCESSION

  Mary Penny was twenty-one years old and almost nine months pregnant when she died of fright. A clear Saturday morning, wind off the ocean. Her husband away, fishing on the Labrador. She was carrying a bucket down to the brook for water, a hand on her belly, the child moving beneath her fingers like a salmon in a gill net.

  From the bank above the brook she could see the United Church on the south side below Riverhead, the new school beside it. She kept her hand to her belly as she walked down the steep slope, balanced herself on stones over the surface. The bucket floated for a moment, then dipped and dragged with the weight of the water. She grunted as she pulled the full container clear of the brook. A stitch in her side moved slowly across her back, a thin flame licking at muscle.

  At the top of the slope again she set the weight down in the grass, straightening with her hands on her hips, lungs clutching at the salt air. The sky was perfectly clear. She stared out across the mouth of the harbour, lifted a hand to shade her eyes. Her eyebrows pursed. There was a spot moving toward her, a peculiarly metallic smudge on the horizon that was becoming larger, more spherical. No, not a cloud, it was too uniform, too intent somehow.

  Carried off course to the eastern coast of Newfoundland by a south-westerly wind over the Atlantic, the airboat was about to turn and begin a journey along the coast of the United States. In New York, a baseball game between the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers would be interrupted as it passed overhead, the players and the crowd of fifteen thousand standing to stare at its nearly silent procession above the city.

  It came closer to the spot where Mary stood alone, a cylindrical tent as large as the church, now larger, the sun lost behind it.

  Her heart leapt in her chest, a panicked animal kicking at the stall door. The baby turned suddenly, dropped, like a log collapsing in a fireplace. She began running awkwardly, holding her stomach. She tried to call for her mother, her younger sister, but no sound came from her mouth; the shadow of the Zeppelin chasing her across the grass. Halfway along the path to her house she fell on her stomach, the pain pulling a cry from her throat. She lifted herself and began running again, the stitch across her back like a hook attached to a tree behind her.

  Another two hundred yards.

  By the time she reached the house she was already in labour. Bleeding through her clothes.

  OLD WIVES’ TALES

  Except it wasn’t a wife talking, or a woman for that matter. It was Charlie Rose at the house to see Father. I was only five or six years old and not even a part of the conversation, sitting under the kitchen table with the dog, listening to the men talk. Charlie said you had to get one before it learned to fly and split its tongue. Right down the middle, he said, and when the crow found the use of its wings it would be able to speak, Arthur, the same as you or I at this table.

  You know how a child’s mind works. The dog was just a pup then, three or four months old, a yellow Lab. A hot summer that year, we were sitting outside the day after Charlie’s visit, her mouth open, panting, the thin tongue hanging there as pink and wet as the flesh of a watermelon. I loved that animal, I just wanted to hear her speak is all. Went in the house and brought out Mother’s sewing shears, held one side of the tongue between my thumb and forefinger. The line down the centre like a factory-made perforation meant as a guide for the scissors.

  What a mess that dog made when she drank, water slopping in all directions, her tongue split like a radio antennae, the separate leaves flailing as she lap-lap-lapped at the bowl. And not a word in her head for all that.

  TWO VOICES

  My uncle sits beside the wood stove in the kitchen, between two voices. On his left the varnished radio, on the daybed to his right his baby sister, squalling. Look, the radio begins, up in the air, it’s a bird, it’s a plane . . . it’s Superman! His sister screams into her red fists, a single unappeasable cry. My uncle leans toward the radio, the words distorted or lost beneath the baby’s wail, like mice scurrying beneath a woodpile: . . . aster . . . ana . . . ding bull . . . He cannot hush her or make her stop. Able . . . eap . . . build . . . gle bound, the program is about to begin, his mother is elsewhere.

  He stands over the child, stares down at her face, at the round open mouth like an entrance to a rabbit hole, a hidden creature crying from inside. He fingers a peppermint knob in his pocket and his hand suggests a plan, the candy about the size of the voice that will not stop: he drops it into the hole like a stone into a well, the soft plop echoing in the sudden, sickening silence.

  Silence. He does not even hear the radi
o now as his sister’s face begins to swell to the colour of a partridgeberry, a bright painful red, and panic enters him like a voice from the stars as the cheeks become blueish, then blue, and the eyes bulge in their sockets like snared animals. The entire episode of suffocation taking place in absolute silence, my uncle immobilized and staring stupidly at his sister, while behind him Superman goes on saving another world in silence.

  And behind him his mother claps through the door, pushing him away and lifting the girl into the air by her heels, she is shouting something he cannot hear as she slaps the baby’s back, and a wet peppermint candy falls to the floor, nothing, nothing, he hears nothing at all until the first cry, his sister’s voice returning, the sound of her squall returning him to the world, to his mother yelling curses on his head, and the radio’s bland conversation going on and on like a long sigh of relief in the background.

  YOUR SOUL, YOUR SOUL, YOUR SOUL

  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.

  After every snowfall we’d shovel a path from his house down to the brook so he could carry up his water, but we were careful not to make it wide enough for the buckets. Uncle Lew too short to hold the water above the snow, he’d get halfway home when his arms would start dragging with the weight, the buckets banging the snowbanks on both sides of the path, slopping water, and he’d find himself standing in front of his door with empty containers. He’d have to turn around and make the trip over again, always with the same result.