Broken Man on a Halifax Pier

by Choyce, Lesley;

  “Rolf, wake up!” I yelled at him.

  “Take me now, Jesus,” he said without raising his head.

  “I never knew you to be religious before.”

  “Is the storm over?”

  “No. It hasn’t really started yet. I came to get you.”

  Rolf lifted his head up now, reached for the bottle, and seemed appalled that the liquor was all gone. “Me and the captain here were just having a little tête-à-tête. I must have dozed off.”

  “I’m sure the conversation was most stimulating, but I got to get you out of here. We have to leave and we have to leave now.”

  “Why now?”

  “Fuck off,” I said as I lifted him into a standing position. I was shocked at how frail he actually was — this man who had once been strong and healthy and robust like my own father.

  “I should stay here and ride out the storm,” he insisted, trying to pull away.

  “You’re not gonna ride this one out, ole buddy. This whole place is going to be underwater in a few hours and you’re not gonna be around to watch.”

  That ominous darkness I’d seen out to sea seemed much closer now. The wind was on the rise. I poured Rolf into the cab of the truck and yelled for Joe, but I couldn’t see him. There was no one else around. Even the other men worried about their boats had fled to the mainland. Nothing left to do but come back after the storm and see what’s left.

  There was still no Joe.

  I ran out on the wharf and found him standing on the deck of his boat. “I got Rolf,” I said.

  “I think I need to stay here, ride it out with the boat. If we break free, maybe I can steer up the bay and beach ’er into the marsh. Take the truck.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Joe. This storm, this Greta, is a monster. You heard the latest forecast. Storm surge of a metre, maybe two.”

  “At this point, who cares? I’m gonna stay. I’d rather have it this way. Save what’s left of my pitiful existence or go out trying.”

  Damn.

  I wanted to say something. Anything. Something about Brody and that he wouldn’t want to see Joe die in a hurricane. Something. What?

  “What about Beth Ann? What’s she gonna do if she loses you too?” I knew they’d been apart for years, but Brody had been their son. I’d seen them together in the courtroom. There was something there. Something real.

  “What’s she got to do with it, you son of a bitch?”

  I didn’t answer. The rain started up heavy again. Right on cue. Just like in the movies.

  “Damn it, Joe.”

  He looked up at the rain, then down at the deck of his boat. “Fuck it,” he said, and leaped onto the wharf. “Get in the fucking truck and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  43

  Joe floored it as we approached the flooded causeway. “Ford 150, Ford 150, Ford 150,” he repeated as a kind mantra as his tires hit the water. The engine roared and the salt water seeped in through the floorboards. “I may not believe in much, but I believe in this truck,” he grunted out as he gripped the wheel with an iron fist, downshifted, and bulled the truck through the deepening water over what we all hoped was once the road that tethered the peninsula to the mainland. The windshield wipers were beating frantically, fending off rain and waves both. As we sped past the swamped Lexus, Joe felt obliged to comment, “Foreign cars aren’t worth shit.”

  Rolf looked on with dull wonder, but let out a loud whoop when Joe’s Tiger’s Paw tires found purchase on some real gravel. Within minutes we were back in the driveway of my new house.

  “Come in and stay with us,” I said, as I lifted Rolf out of the truck, the rain now streaming down on us.

  “Hell, no,” Joe said. “I’m gonna go see if Beth Ann is gonna be okay. I think I better do that.” All the bluster had gone out of him. But I understood.

  “Thanks for the ride, Joe,” I said.

  “Yeah, sure,” he answered in his usual brief fashion but without the usual hostility. “Anytime.” And left.

  I guided a wobbly Rolf into the house.

  As I bolted the door behind us, Rolf blinked, looked at the unfinished walls of the house, then turned to Ramona, who was standing there. “You folks wouldn’t have anything to drink by any chance?”

  “Coffee,” Ramona said. “That’s all you get.”

  Rolf wiped some water off his face and looked up. Here in the living room was a vaulted ceiling that went all the way up between the roof boards. “It’s like being in church,” he said, smiling.

  “How would you know?” I asked and punched him gently on the arm. Ramona held out a towel to me and then kissed me. “I was worried. Really worried. It’s getting bad out there. They say on the radio it’s gonna get much worse.”

  “Where’s your mother and Mackenzie?” I asked.

  Ramona took my hand and led me to what would one day be our own bedroom. There on the mattress on the floor lay Brenda with her arms wrapped around Mackenzie. Both were fast asleep.

  “What was it like out there past the causeway?”

  “Hellish. Your car didn’t make it. Sorry.”

  Ramona looked shocked for only an instant. “How’d you get back?”

  “Joe,” I answered.

  Just then it sounded like something solid hit the side of the house. Like a truck had just crashed into it. This was the kind of wind you rarely felt in Nova Scotia. Wind that could uproot trees, wind that could do real damage.

  “Flashlights, candles, what do we have?” I asked.

  “Not much. Six candles. Two flashlights. Do you think we’re going to need them?” she asked.

  “Very likely. This looks like it’s shaping up to be a pretty bad blow. Juan was about the worst I’ve seen. I went out into the wind, thinking it would be fun. Got hit in the head with a flying shingle. Could have lost my eye. You could lean into the wind at a forty-five-degree angle and still not fall. Nothing quite like it.”

  “Well, stay inside. No one gets to go out and play. Including you.”

  I found some dry clothes and shone the flashlight around the inside of the house. “Guess we get to see how good the workmanship is. Hope those boys knew their stuff.”

  At around nine o’clock, we lost power. It came back on briefly once, then twice, then a third time, and that was it for the duration, I expected. The wind roared. Boards groaned. Ramona lit a single candle. Rolf and Stanley seemed to be having a chatty conversation about God knows what.

  I looked at my watch. It was going to be a long night. No one was going anywhere. Trees would be down on roads by now, many of those would be flooded. I expected that out by the wharf, Rolf’s shack and mine already had knee-deep water sloshing around. Nothing for it now but to wait.

  The candle produced a gentle but eerie glow. I suddenly realized there was enough scrap wood lying around that I could make a fire in the fireplace. I found some matches and old newspapers and made a little campfire there. Mackenzie and Brenda slept on through the madness of the storm. Stanley hovered nearby, chatting with Rolf, looking in on them every few minutes to make sure they were asleep. Best thing to be doing on a night like this, maybe. Sound asleep.

  Me? I knew this was a storm bigger than Juan. The sea had finally begun to warm a bit through September; nothing now to ward off a tropical low pressure system. This one had somehow refuelled in strength as it moved north on the Gulf Stream. It had teamed up with another low pressure system. Not exactly a “perfect storm,” whatever that was, but something that may not have happened in Nova Scotia for well over one hundred years.

  Ramona and I sat on lawn furniture cushions by the fire. Light and heat. I felt the chill of rain start to fade from my body. I felt the warmth of a woman tuck into me. Somewhere around eleven, I heard shingles lifting from the roof. They had only recently been nailed down, and the tar had not felt enough really sunny days to melt them together for good. You’d hear a kind of rip and then snap. I soon heard the first bit of vinyl siding pull loose, slap several times alo
ng the outer wall until that too ripped and sailed off to parts unknown.

  I kept watch on my father’s old barometer. Pressure still dropping. Ramona thought I was crazy when I went to the back of the house and opened two windows. “Air pressure,” I tried to explain. “I don’t know if it’s true, but I think it has something to do with balancing the inner and outer air pressure to keep windows from imploding.”

  But, as if on cue, a big tree branch crashed into the glass of one of the living room windows on the front of the house. Glass blew in and sprayed across the room. The wind roared into the building.

  Ramona was on her feet first. She walked to the pile of unused plywood, found a half sheet and tried to hold it up to the window, but the invasive wind pushed her back. I grabbed one end of it and we wrestled it across the room and set it on the floor while we scrambled around for a hammer and some nails.

  When it came time to try to hold it up there against the onslaught of rain and malevolent wind, Rolf and Stanley both braced it with their backs while Ramona and I hammered away like maniacs. We were all breathing hard by the time the sucker was nailed down, me realizing we should have done this from the outside before the storm. Too late now.

  Without a word to each other, we nailed plywood on the two other windows facing south. My hands were bleeding from the shattered glass, and when we settled by the fire, Ramona gently picked out some shards and wiped my hands until the bleeding stopped.

  “I gotta go upstairs and see if I can do anything about those windows.” She reluctantly let go of my hand and I cautiously took the unfinished stairs to the second storey. It was an otherworldly view up there, looking down on the living room with the vaulted ceiling. There was, of course, no way I could get to those front windows high up above the living room, but so far they were holding. I took the flashlight and shone it up toward the roof. Rainwater was being driven up under the eaves. That was to be expected. But there was something else.

  The flashlight beam glinted off the metal brackets — the joist hangers — holding the rafters to the ceiling joists. Weren’t they also called hurricane hangers? Probably for good reason. Problem was, although they were all in place in the back half of the roof, many were missing from the front rafters. That bit of unfinished work Big Carl had mentioned. All the rafters were nailed in with angled nails, but this was an unfinished house. A house in progress. Not quite ready to take on a storm like this.

  Shit.

  The wind was constant. It roared. It had a voice of its own — dark, malevolent, insistent. Like something in a horror movie. A monster. It would let up ever so slightly and then roar back. As I stood there on the second floor with my flashlight aimed at the roof, I felt the next assault of air — a blast that first shook the walls, then made the floorboards beneath me shudder. Then I heard the creaking boards of the roof and the nails fighting back. Good carpenters, I told myself. Good roof. But it may not be enough.

  I went back downstairs and found Rolf, Stanley, and Ramona feeding triangles of scrap pine to the fire.

  “We have to wake your mother and Mackenzie and get us all into the basement,” I said.

  Ramona nodded. Her father went into the bedroom. We had no electricity, no battery-powered radio. No cellphone service. We didn’t know if the storm was about to blow itself out or hammer away all night. Was it going to ease up or was this only the beginning? All I knew was that it had been hyped up as massive, based on the early reports. Too bad that I, like many around there, hadn’t taken it all that seriously.

  The doorway to the basement had been one of the first of the returned items. Opening it, I had the strangest flashbacks of days as a kid, going into the old cellar by myself. Not a scary place, but an alone place. A place where I could hide out from the daytime world among old Mason jars and my father’s workbench and tools. A place to daydream and plot a life of adventure. God, I loved that old cellar as a kid.

  This was different. I was opening that old door to take us to what I hoped would be a place of safety and refuge from the monster storm. We were well up away from the water, away from those ever-rising tides. It was a new basement, sealed from the outside. If we were lucky, we’d be dry at least, and safe if more windows shattered or if the outside doors blew off.

  People, candles, matches, flashlights, mattress, blankets. All were carefully but quickly carried down the temporary, two-by-ten stair steps into a basement that still smelled of fresh concrete.

  Mackenzie seemed to well understand the gravity of the situation, but Stanley had to comfort his wife and assure her things were okay. She looked frightened and confused, but he seemed to have the magic touch. His facial expression and voice told her all was well. Nothing to fear. The daughter had gotten her acting skills from her father, I could see.

  The voice of my father was in my head again. Do what you have to do. When push comes to shove, you will know what you have to do. And you need to keep your wits about you. You have no choice. It’s your duty. Those platitudes probably saved his ass a hundred times at sea. Far from land, you’re on your own most of the time. No one is going to come save you. He’d never used the word once in his life but his religion was self-reliance. His bible was that set of bromides, probably handed down to him by his father.

  The comfort of the fireplace flames gone, we now huddled together around a single candle set on the concrete floor and watched its flame. That night, we returned to the world of our most ancient ancestors, circling a small, hopeful flame in a hostile, dark wilderness, with nothing to keep us alive but our collective ability to comfort and care for each other.

  Ramona must have thought me crazy when I suddenly, without explanation, ran back up the stairs, ripped open the cellar door and then, after a mere second or two, came back through, and ran back down.

  In my bleeding hands were Brody’s ashes. Mackenzie was looking at me now. She knew what I had gone upstairs for. I handed her the little box and she tucked it with two hands beneath her chin.

  Silence can be good or bad. The wind was doing all the talking. The storm carried the narrative — big and brutish. Even in the basement, it was hard to hear each other when we spoke, so we were mostly mute. We heard things hitting the house and more shingles being ripped from the roof. There was howling of wind and a ripping sound as it shifted direction. And other ungodly sounds we couldn’t even begin to identify.

  The candle flickered. I studied the walls, the piles of goods people had returned. The things my father had given away. And he had given away everything. There were some end tables, a lamp, a box of mouldy records, three of the worn wooden chairs that my mother had once stripped and repainted. And an old heavy tool box that had once so fascinated me in my reveries in the basement as a kid. Inside were tools that had belonged to my grandfather. A carpenter’s compass, small saws, screwdrivers, and items I didn’t have names for.

  I sidled away from Ramona and undid the clasp on the lid, wondering if there might be something in there of value to us in this time of crisis. I opened it and shone the light inside. The smell hit me first. Old tools, old tools that had been oiled and kept usable over maybe a hundred years. I couldn’t even remember who had returned the box. So many folks had just shown up, even when I wasn’t there, and returned things. Things they thought a son might want from his father.

  But it wasn’t just tools inside. There was a package of something there. It was a small canvas bag, the kind of sack a sailor might take to sea for a shaving or medical kit. As I tried to open it, the string holding it closed disintegrated. Inside was something wrapped in three layers of clear plastic freezer bags like my mother would have used to freeze summer vegetables. Beneath the flashlight beam, I could see that these were letters.

  The battery died on my flashlight right then and the candle flickered. What kind of letters? Certainly my mother and my father were not the sort of people who wrote letters to people. I couldn’t even conjure up who would be writing to them or who they would write to. In what dim light t
here was, I left the freezer bags unopened. I put them back into the canvas bag and locked it back into the tool box.

  A quick draft swooped down from above, the candle went out and I thought the worst.

  But then the wind suddenly stopped. All was quiet. Ramona tried to light another candle but the match broke.

  Rolf was the first one to speak. “Holy Mother of God. Do you hear that?”

  What he meant was the quiet. It was deafening. Brenda had fallen back asleep, held fast in her husband’s arms. Mackenzie, however, was wide awake. She was rubbing her round belly. I had forgotten that there were more than the six of us. The storm had made us into an extended family, a tribe. We represented generations past and generations to come. And we were in the middle of one of the most horrific storms ever to hit this coast.

  No one had to say it out loud. The storm was not over. You didn’t have to know much about hurricanes to know that this hiatus was the so-called eye.

  “Everyone stay put,” I said, even though I don’t think it needed to be said.

  Ramona leaned into me and, with her voice shaking, said, “I don’t know what’s going on.” Her grasp on my arm was tight, almost painful. There was something different about her voice, almost like she was acting. The fear had not been there all night. I refused to register what might be happening.

  She fumbled a couple of times with matches again, trying to relight the candle in the dark until I took them from her and succeeded in bringing a small pool of light back into the immensity of the dark. I saw the fear in her eyes and said, “It’s going to be all right. I promise you.”

  No one else spoke. The term eye wall echoed in my head again. That’s the term Environment Canada had used. Somewhere on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia would experience the eye wall of the hurricane with winds more powerful than the storm itself.

  And we were most certainly in the eye. The rain had even stopped.

  But then it started again. Rain without wind at first. And then wind. A freight train this time instead of a truck. A wall of raging air. Ferocious. A fist of wind. It hit once hard enough for the house to shudder yet again. With the second fist, I heard glass breaking — the upper windows, no doubt.