Hard Light

by Michael Crummey

  We’d be watching from behind the woodpile to see him throw the buckets down and let fly with the cursing. God damn every long-legged man up in the Burnt Woods Cemetery, he’d say. Aunt Sally would turn her eyes to the heavens if she was around to hear him, Lewis, your soul, your soul, your soul, she’d say. And the more she said it, the more Uncle Lew would swear. We’d let him make the trip to the brook five or six times before we came out from behind the shed or the woodpile and offered to get the water for him, as if we were just passing by and wanting to help out.

  A damn sin what we did, the poor man dead and buried in the Burnt Woods for years now. Six feet of dirt for you up there, no matter what height you are alive and standing.

  KITE

  I was crooked as a rainbow when I was a boy, I’ll admit it. Stabbed Hollis with a pocket knife down on the Labrador. Swung at him with a berry can and split his head open. He’d have beat the snot out of me on more than one occasion if I wasn’t the faster runner.

  He read something about Marconi’s kites one summer and made one for himself out of brown paper and scrap wood; it had a tail ten feet long with bits of coloured rag tied every foot. He worked on it for a week in the old shed, and I chased him out into the meadow garden when he finished it. A perfect day for a kite, a brisk easterly and mostly clear. Helped him get it up and stood beside him as he let out yard after yard of string, the kite pulling taut like an anchored boat in a tide, the narrow wake of the tail snaking behind it. And I’m tugging at Hollis’ sleeve, wanting to hold it myself; he’s leaning back to keep it high in the wind and telling me no, no way, fuck off, it’s my kite, no.

  Crooked as a rainbow, like I said. I stomped off toward the house, wishing him dead. When I reached the edge of the garden the kite caught a downdraft, arcing to the ground like a hawk after a rabbit, as if my contrariness had sucked the very wind out of the sky behind me. It landed nose first ten feet in front of where I stood. Hollis was running in my direction, yelling something I couldn’t hear over the sound of the wind and I wouldn’t have listened anyway. So angry by then I wanted to do something unforgivable. Put both my feet through the kite where it lay and then I ran like hell.

  Now he’s gone I wish he’d caught up to me that day. Maybe he would have given me something to remember him by, the mark of his hand on my body somewhere. The thin line of a scar I could hold him with a while longer, before the sky carried him off for good.

  STAN’S LAST SONG

  On New Year’s Day the Orangemen gathered at the Lodge, their sashes draped across sweatered chests and overcoats, salt and pepper hats or bowlers leaving their ears bare to the frost. By eight o’clock in the morning they were ready to set out, marching down through Riverhead across the South Side Hills, up every laneway, then over to the north side of Western Bay. The Catholics kept to their kitchens when they passed, thirty-five or forty men singing, their voices mapped by clouds of breath in the bitter air, cartoon bubbles holding the words of old Protestant hymns. If there was a lodge member who was too ill to join the parade, they stopped at his home to sing outside the fence, I Need Thee Every Hour or A Closer Walk with Thee, the sick man joining in from his bed.

  After the parade, the Orangemen went back to the Lodge where the women had prepared a lunch. Soup and sandwich for a quarter. Then afternoon recitations, songs and skits, and Aunt Edna Milley would get halfway through her poem and forget the rest, every year it was the same thing, the familiar words fading like the faces of loved ones long dead. In the evening another meal, and then an after-dinner speaker, the preacher or Kitch Williams from the school, it was nine or ten o’clock before that was finished and cleared away.

  That was when the Time really got started, a clap of movement in the hall, tables and chairs scraped back against the walls, people arriving from up and down the shore for the dance, Catholic and Protestant alike. A hundred people in the Lodge, the hardwood floor pitching and rolling under the stamp of feet. Stan Kennedy playing his accordion and calling out the square dances, Swing your Partner, Now Step Back. Stan was as blind as a stone, but he could play that accordion, his face lifted to the ceiling like a supplicant seeking forgiveness. Never had a lesson in his life, his body possessed by music, his hands pulling tunes from the air as people shouted out requests.

  It was what everyone looked forward to, that dance. Stan played until four in the morning, he could barely croak out a word by the time we let him stop. The windows dripping steam from the heat of the dancers.

  And the grey light of the moon showing the way home as people stepped out into the cold, their jackets folded across their arms, the sound of Stan’s last song drifting to the stars.

  DOMINION

  My grandfather paid seventy-five dollars for the radio, it was only the second one on the shore in those days. The antenna was a Y-shaped wire strung between dogberry trees in the yard like a slender crucifix. The timid signals from St. John’s or Halifax or Toronto gathered from the sky like prayers to the Almighty. The air festooned with words: News of the war overseas. Hymn sings on VOWR. Saturday night hockey games, the angelic voice of Foster Hewitt calling the play-by-play, Hello Canada and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland. That other Dominion. Half a dozen fishermen sitting around a draughty kitchen in Riverhead, Western Bay, in the District of Bay de Verde. Arms on their knees and heads bowed to follow the game being played in Toronto or Montreal, Boston, Detroit, or New York.

  Bottles of spruce or molasses or dandelion beer, my grandfather knitting twine to mend the traps in the spring. A curse on the fucking Canadiens but they can play hockey those Frenchmen. Clouds of static when the winter storms blow up, every head leaning closer to the radio, a slender thread of air holding them to a world they will never see. The pictures they have in their heads of these cities like a blind man’s conception of colour.

  After the game is over, when the visitors have pushed out the door into the winter night, when the lights are doused and the family is swaddled in blankets, an oven-heated beach rock at the foot of each bed, the wind whistles through the trees in the yard, and the wind is full of words that only the trees can understand.

  The dark mahogany radio sits expressionless in the kitchen, a little Buddha, contemplating silence.

  Discovering Darkness

  You happen on the book by accident, diary of a stranger long dead. Leaf through the pages, the photographs, buy it on a whim. At home you leave it on the coffee table and sit watching television, the face on the cover staring sternly at the ceiling. Your grandmother comes into the room and sits beside you; picks up the journal and looks at it for a moment. You have never seen her hold a book in her hands before. She says “I knew him,” turning the book so you can see the man’s face, the leather hat sitting crookedly on his head. When she was a girl in Twillingate, she worked at the grocery store where the old man bought his butter and flour : retired from the sea by then, his children grown and gone, living alone with his wife.

  The book connected to you suddenly, the life recorded there a part of the world you claim as your own, the man’s face a part of the darkness you come from. And when you begin reading it is partly your own story you find there.

  For we are men of yesterday; we know nothing; our days upon the earth are as shadows.

  – THE BOOK OF JOB

  All knowing darkens as it builds.

  – TIM LILBURN

  ‘Magic Lantern.’ (April, 1889)

  Bound for Great Britain and

  beset by evening calm,

  sails sheeted slack and lifeless;

  the likeness of stars on the water,

  hard yellow berries not ripe enough

  to be gathered

  Passengers and crew above decks

  avoiding the breathless heat of their berths,

  everyone wanting to be

  anywhere but here

  Brought out the magic lantern

  and slides bought when I was last

  in England, set it aboard a ta
ble

  on the foredeck –

  every head turning to

  the breadth of the topmast

  when the kerosene flame was lit

  behind the lens,

  the Tower of London standing

  on the yellow canvas as if

  we had dreamed it there

  together

  Flashed up the Crystal Palace,

  Piccadilly, the National Gallery,

  then London Bridge,

  the length of it shaken by

  a rare gust of wind;

  and the nearly-full moon rose

  above the topyard,

  the Doune Castle lying stilled

  in its light like a photograph

  projected on the water

  · Learning the Price of Fish, 1876–1887 ·

  ‘And now to make a start as a boy of

  very little understanding.’ (1876)

  After a single season jigging cod

  I gave up on the ocean,

  boarded a steamship bound

  for Little Bay Mines where

  I secured a position

  picking for copper;

  kept at it through the winter,

  a long shadow working

  effortlessly beside me

  while my back was shaken crooked

  by the jabber of pickhead on rock,

  my hands too numb

  at the end of a shift

  to properly hold a spoon

  In June I jacked up and went

  back to fishing, shipping out

  with a crew headed to the French Shore,

  happy just to be on the water

  after seven months discovering darkness

  in the mine

  Salt air like a handful of brine

  held to the face of an unconscious man

  coming slowly to his senses

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

  Left Twillingate on April 15th after seals,

  steering off NE through open water, arriving

  in Quirpon a day past the Grey Islands April 21st.

  Sailed from there to Green’s Pond, then to Gramper’s Cove,

  dickering through slack ice until White Bay

  where we came on a gale of wind and got raftered

  between pans, the boat brought up solid

  like an axe in a knot of birch.

  Lay there a week getting short of provisions

  and patience till the Captain decided some

  would have to leave the vessel or starve,

  sending six overboard with two boats and what food

  could be spared. We marched south toward

  Twillingate, hauling boats and supplies till

  we came on a run of open water in Lobster Harbour,

  rowing on to Handy Island before giving up for darkness.

  Set out for a long day’s launching and pulling

  to Flourdelu at first light, the ice slobby and

  treacherous, taking us through to the waist on times.

  Next day on to Lacie, chewing handfuls of old snow

  when the fresh water ran dry.

  Our fourth day out we passed Cape St. John and

  Cull Island where the schooner Queen ran ashore,

  all hands but one coming across on a line

  before the wind took her over. The papers reported

  how they perished there, and published Dr Dowsley’s

  letter to his wife dated December 18th, 1867 –

  my dear Margaret, I have been out to see if there is

  any chance of rescue but no such thing I would give

  the world for one drink of water but I shall never

  get it now We are all wet and frozen may God pity

  and have mercy . . .

  I was sixteen years old, my first

  time to the ice and I stared at the island as

  we slogged past it, a bald crown of rock and

  no sign of life to be made out there but shadows.

  It was three days more past the Cape, trimming

  the shore all the way through Green Bay nearly

  blocked with ice; we didn’t get clear of it

  until Lading Tickle when a SW wind took it off

  the land, we hung up our rugs for sails on the oars

  and straightened them out for home.

  Arrived in Twillingate on June 17th, our boots

  sliced through with the rough walking

  and blood still in our mouths from the snow.

  And on the 18th our schooner sailed into the harbour

  behind us, all hands rested and well fed, we had

  a hard toil and worry for nothing.

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

  Left home on July 3rd with Captain Abraham Herl

  being my first start for the Labrador,

  a pleasant breeze behind us and on the 7th

  we stopped over in Indian Tickle, laying up

  a night in the lee of Breen’s Island;

  then down as far as Hopedale among the Esquimaux

  where I took a good view of their materials

  passed on from the days when our Lord

  Jesus Christ was preaching in the Holy Lands.

  The people seemed strange to me as it was

  my first time among them and I could not

  understand their language which some claim

  is descended directly from Cain

  but they showed us many curious things

  and I was delighted with them.

  We stayed over a weekend and attended

  a service at the Moravian church

  where the German preacher offered prayers

  in that queer hum rutted with clicks

  and burps, and several among us thought

  to be offended on God’s behalf.

  But he prayed for a good trip of fishing

  for the visitors in a more familiar tongue,

  our traps came up full off the Farmyard Islands,

  and Captain Herl suggested God is not

  so particular as some would have us believe.

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

  I have had a fair trial on the fishing line now,

  being three summers out from home, two summers on

  the French Shore, four down on the Labrador,

  and three trips this year to the Banks of Newfoundland,

  and this is what I have learned to be the price of fish

  Shem Yates and Harry Brown lost with the Abyssinia,

  making through slack ice sixty miles NE of the Grey Islands

  when the wind turned and she struck hard on a block,

  the vessel split like a stick of frozen kindling –

  May, 1886

  Tom Viven out of Crow Head, his boat running

  loaded down through heavy seas that opened her up forward,

  going down just off Kettle Cove and a good trip of fish lost besides –

  August, 1884

  My last trip to the French Shore, Luke Brumley and Fred Strong

  sent out to take in a trap set loose in a gale,

  the rough weather filling their skiff with water

  when they hauled up the span line, the two men

  pitched under only a good shout from the Traveller

  but neither one could swim a stroke –

  June, 1882

  Show me a map and I’ll name you a dead man for

  every cove between home and Battle Harbour

  I am twenty-four years old,

  there is no guarantee I will ever see twenty-five

  · Expecting To Be Changed, 1887–1894 ·

  ‘On the broad Atlantic for the first time

  to cross the pond.’ (November, 1887)

  When I signed on the Konigsburg

  bound for Italy with

  a load of dry cod

  I had expectations,

  but I could not rightly s
ay

  what they were

  We hove up the anchor,

  sheeted our topsails

  and my family waved me out

  of the harbour

  as if they knew they had

  seen me for the last time

  I expected to be changed

  and I thought a change

  would not do me

  any harm

  ‘Names of the Ropes’ (1887)

  Now as the sails are set a sailor must know

  all the ropes or running gear before he can

  reef, clew or furl, and the names of the ropes

  are as follows. Jib halliards. Troat halliards.

  Peak, Royal and Topgallant halliards.

  Royal braces, Topgallant braces, Topsail braces.

  Fore and Main braces. Preventer main braces.

  After main braces. Sheets and lifts for the

  Topgallant, Topsail and Main. Clewgarnets.

  Foretack, Topsail buntlines, Reef burtons.

  Leech lines. Slab lines. Spanker’s brail and

  outhall. Boom topping outhall. Flying jib

  downhall, jib downhall, fore topmast stays.

  Which is not to mention the standing rigging

  on which the sailors move among the ropes

  in all weather and sometimes appear

  to be spiders mending a web, while at others

  they appear to be caught and helpless as flies

  in a web of someone else’s design.