“Must have been terrible for anything with wings in that storm.” Ramona looked sad now. I remembered back to the deer on the highway. Her compassion for the animal and how my actions had offended her and sent her packing. It had all almost ended right then.
Up ahead I saw someone walking our way. As he got closer, I could see it was Joe. When he saw us, he waved. And he started to jog.
When he reached us he was out of breath. “Found her,” he said. “Beached in the marsh just like Gus said.” He struggled to regain his breath. “Mostly in one piece,” he added. “Nice soft bit of marsh to come ashore. Bit of water inside but nothing busted. That ole boat of your father’s has more lives than a cat.”
“How do we get it out of there?”
“Salvage boat can do it. Get some lines on it and tow it back to deep water at high tide. I know a guy down in Port Dufferin. He’s probably gonna be busier than a one-armed man at a chainsaw throwing competition, but he owes me big time. I’ll get you a good price.”
“Call him,” I said. “I’ll pay him to tow it out and it’s yours.”
Joe gave me a dirty look. “You can’t do that. It was your father’s boat. I can’t just take it.”
“Why not?”
“That boat survived that mess last night for a reason.”
Coast talk again. It so often came down to this. Things happened for a reason. We’d probably never know that reason, but supposedly there was some kind of cosmic plan. What used to be called destiny. Something I knew must all be bullshit. Leftovers from religion and superstition and days when people felt they had no real control over their lives.
“Yeah,” I said. “And the reason was so you’d have a goddamn boat to keep fishing.”
Joe looked at me and I saw a look that reminded me of Brody. A defiance. A stubbornness. A strength.
“Here’s the deal. You arrange to tow the boat, make it seaworthy, and get it back out to sea. Do some fishing. When you start to make some profit, maybe you can pay me some kind of rent on the boat.”
“Deal.”
“Just one more thing, though. You gotta take Rolf on as a hand. He’s gonna waste away if he doesn’t get back out to sea.”
“That old bastard’s bad luck.”
“Then how’d he end up with the only building left standing out there after a hurricane ripped everything else apart?”
Joe swallowed a grunted laugh. “Not everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I found your father’s fish shack too. Floated off and came ashore near the brook. Bumped up against a tree and when the water dropped, there she was. A bit beat-up but in one piece. Looks like a little cabin some trout fishermen built for himself. On government land, I think. But then it always was on government-owned land, so maybe this was just nature’s way of relocating it.” Joe looked off to the mainland. “Gotta go. I need to tell Beth Ann we found your boat intact. You’re okay if she takes on to work as partner with me? Me and Rolf, that is.”
“Of course,” I said. “But I thought you two hated each other.”
“We did. But that’s old news. We figured that after all those years apart, we’ve gotten over old grudges. I asked her if she’d take me back. And she said she’d think about it.”
“Well, that’s a start,” Ramona said.
“That’s what we all need — a new start. Look, I gotta go.” And the big guy awkwardly began to jog back toward the mainland.
When he was gone, Ramona looked up into the sun and took a deep breath. “Someone should write about all this.”
“Yeah, someone probably should. But not me. I’m living it. I don’t want to record it. Besides, I’m no longer a writer, remember?”
“Once a writer, always a writer. You can’t fall out of love with words.”
“Don’t forget, I come from a couple of parents who never trusted words. Too much empty language, my father used to say at the dinner table. Speak only when you have something worth investing your breath in. They weren’t much for self-expression, my parents, either one of them.”
But then I remembered. The tool box. The freezer bag with the letters.
“Oh, my God,” I said out loud. “The letters.”
46
By afternoon, a tow truck had fished the Lexus out of the bay and towed it off to a garage to see if it could be salvaged. I didn’t think it could.
Beth Ann had taken Mackenzie home with her and the workers had done all they could until the shell of the house could dry out in the sun. All the vinyl siding and the Tyvek moisture barrier had been removed. New materials had been ordered and work would resume in the days ahead.
“Just a minor setback,” Big Carl said before he drove off. “Now the house has a story. Every house needs a story. Nothing worse than a house that has no history.”
Now it was just Ramona and me, alone with our storied house, ready to camp out on the first floor, under the stars. We had food and water, and, despite what we’d just gone through, we were feeling like we were on track to our new beginning.
Just the fact that we’d survived the night, all of us together, huddled like an ancient clan facing the worst of the elements, should have made me feel euphoric. But I kept thinking about Brody — the poor bugger’s life snuffed out before he even had a chance to figure out what to do with it. The pain and loss that would linger on for Beth Ann and Joe. And Mackenzie, all on her own to give birth and raise a kid.
The guilt swept over me again. And I knew it would never really go away. What do you call it when a father kills a son? Filicide? Not a word you hear very often.
I tried to put Brody out of my head as I walked the creaky stairs down into the basement and found the canvas bag. How it had found its way into a tool box, and then been left forgotten all those years, only to find its way back to me on the property where my parents once lived remained a mystery. And why now at this turning point in my life?
I carried the bag upstairs and Ramona watched me sit down in one of the plastic lawn chairs we had been using for furniture, one that had miraculously survived the storm. She left me alone, pretending to fuss with what was left of our kitchen.
I opened the canvas bag, set it aside, and carefully opened the sealed freezer bag. There were two stacks of envelopes, one tied up with a blue ribbon, the other one with a pink one. Each had an empty envelope on top with a label: Desmond to Elsie, Elsie to Desmond.
Every envelope had a carefully folded letter inside; each one had been opened with a letter opener or a sharp knife. At first this seemed like some cosmic joke. My parents writing letters to each other. When, how, and why?
I opened one addressed to my mother first. It was postmarked Lunenburg, NS.
Dear Elsie,
Well, here I am. We ship out tomorrow for the Grand Banks. I got a job right away with a Captain Groening. All he did was look at my hands and ask me where I grew up. Then he signed me on. Good pay, he says, if we make a good catch. He asked me how I liked bad weather at sea. I told him I loved it.
If this all goes as planned, I will have that nest egg I promised. I love you enough to be away from you so I can guarantee our life together. I believe this will all work out. I’ll be home once each month to see you and it will be hell to leave again. But we’ve talked about it. We can do this. You must stay with your parents for two years and then we will marry.
We’ve been planning this all through high school. We’ve watched the others who dive right into things and struggle. I won’t do that to you. I love you too much.
At the end of two years, I’ll have enough saved to buy a boat. Then it will be you and me and nothing else will matter.
Love,
Desmond
It was inconceivable that the father I knew, the man of so very few words, could have written this. His handwriting was elegant. The words were straight from his heart. I knew some of the story of him going to sea as a young man, but he had never wanted to talk about it. He never mentioned anythin
g about his “plan” to save money, buy a boat, get married. It was as straightforward as that, but it meant them not being together for the better part of two years. How could anyone do that if they were really in love?
Those were very different times. I thought of Ramona and I being apart. Two years would be an eternity.
I opened the top letter in the second pile.
Dear Desmond,
You must be at sea now and far from shore as I am writing this. I want most for you to be safe and to be careful. If anything were to happen to you I could not go on. I think I love you even more now that you are away than when we were spending time together. What was that quote we read in school? “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” ’Tis true, I now can see.
My mother is still treating me like a little girl and bullying me around the house. My father I hardly see. I so look forward to the day when I am free of them and we can shape our own lives.
That property you had your eye on. I spoke with Mr. Robichaud when I saw him at the store. He said you had spoken to him and that he liked you very much, said you were a lad with “character,” as he put it. He said he wanted us to have it and if you had a down payment by January, it would be yours. He said you can pay in monthly installments for however long it takes.
I walk there in the day when I can and I stand in the field and imagine the house. Our house.
I know you don’t like me to talk about it, but I am glad we didn’t listen to what others say we should and shouldn’t do when we are together. I am glad that my first time was with you and that we let nothing hold us back when you and I are alone. I love you and will wait for you.
Love always,
Elsie
When I looked up from the letter, it was like the world had turned itself upside down. These could not be my parents. As I remembered them, they were two adults who always did what they were supposed to do. They felt duty and responsibility, were never frivolous with words, expressed little emotion, and had hardly ever shown outward signs of real affection for each other. And now this.
And what did that last paragraph have to do with? Clearly they’d been having sex as teenagers. High-school sweethearts stealing away to some safe and hidden place to make love, despite the uptight morals of the day.
Was I invading their privacy by reading the letters? Or had they been preserved so I would one day find them? I would never know.
I opened the next one from my father. It was postmarked November 20.
Dear Elsie,
We are back ashore now but will return to sea in just a few days, so it will not be until December when I can see you. I miss you more than ever.
The sea is cold and it is a hard life on a big vessel where the men are rough and no one seems to have a good word for each other. It is a different life. But I am adjusting.
That’s wonderful news about the Robichaud property and assure Mr. Robichaud I will have the down payment promised.
I am learning the awful ways of the world and will be happy when I can leave this all behind and return to Stewart Harbour. Just writing these words breaks my heart to think that I am not with you but so far away. Rest assured that once I return, I will never go away again.
I miss your warmth and your smile and our time together when we pushed everything, absolutely everything away from us so it was just you and me. And we will return to that soon, I promise.
You are everything to me. Remain just as you are and believe in me, please.
Always believe in me.
Love,
Desmond
I carefully placed the letter back into its envelope and did not read another. Not then. This was enough to digest in one day.
I walked over to Ramona and put my arms around her. “Do you think all of us are wrong about our parents? Is it possible that children never understand them?”
“I think it’s very possible. What did you discover that so shocks you?”
“That my parents were in love.”
47
In the days that followed, I read a few more letters and then I stopped. I soon hit a point where I felt like an interloper, a spy. Even though they were long gone, I felt my parents deserved some privacy. But now, finally, after so many years of having shut them out of my life, I knew who they really were.
And I understood well my father’s final trip to sea. I think he fully understood what he was doing and I respected him for that. And the fact that those letters ended up in the tool box told me that it was my father who had kept them all those years. Or maybe he collected them from my mother after she was gone. But then why would he have given away the tool box with the letters in them? Could have been that he did that on purpose. Maybe he wanted someone to find them, to save them. But, then again, that too didn’t seem at all like my father. I’d never know the full story. I just knew they had somehow found their way to me. I was the one who had abandoned my family as my brother had done. But Ramona had brought me back.
After the storm, life went on. The storm had done its best to hurt us. The damage was done. Some things could be repaired, some boats could be refloated, some weren’t worth the effort or the money. Ramona said she didn’t want another new car, not another fancy car. So she wrote off the Lexus and we drove to Antigonish to buy a truck. Nothing fancy. Just a used Ford 150 pickup truck, a little newer than Joe’s but a truck that fit right in here.
“In California,” Ramona said, as we drove home from Antigonish, “if a psychic told me that one day I’d own a pickup truck, I would have demanded my money back.”
The warm days ended one morning in November when the ground was covered in frost. We didn’t have a lawn yet, just raw dirt and rock around the house. The field with the tall wild grasses wilted to brown. In Nova Scotia in September you believe that the heat of summer will never end. When those cold November mornings roll around, you find it hard to believe summer ever happened.
I thought of my father heading out of Lunenburg on a big steel fish trawler on an icy day, working the sea, turning raw and painful through the day. A man with a vision of the future. Work hard. Don’t complain. Sacrifice. And you will be rewarded. Old times. Old rules. Old dreams.
Big Carl had promised to have the house fully finished “by the time the snow flies,” and he kept his word.
Ramona had started on some preventative medication by then, even though I saw no sign of deterioration. We were both settling. Both changing. Putting parts of our lives far behind but building something new and solid at the same time. Hanging on. Making things better. Not worse. Learning about our neighbours, watching out for them, them watching out for us. Becoming part of the community. Not just outsiders.
I went to sea once or twice a week with Joe and Beth Ann when Rolf wanted a break. Lifting lobster traps or handlining for haddock, I’d get flashbacks of my father fishing, my mother cooking fish. But the work at sea really wasn’t for me.
Ramona was getting a bit of cabin fever by the end of December (shack wacky, people around there would call it), so I booked us a room at the Marriott on the Halifax waterfront for New Year’s Eve and we drove the truck to Halifax in a snowstorm. We had no intention of taking part in festivities; instead, we drank some pinot noir and, toward midnight, put on our winter coats and walked along the harbour until we came to the pier where we’d first met. It was closed off by a chain-link fence now and was under reconstruction. The sign read: No Trespassing. Under Repair. Fortunately for us, some vandal had busted the lock on the gate with bolt cutters, so we walked out on the pier into the darkness as the snow swirled.
“Under Repair,” I said. “Forget the No Trespassing. But I like the repair part.”
“Who repaired what?” Ramona asked.
“I don’t think I need to answer that,” I said.
We heard the dark water lapping beneath us. Same ocean as Stewart Harbour but a different world.
After that, we went back to our room at the hotel. We stayed up all night talking. But I can’t
remember what we talked about.
On the second day of the new year, Mackenzie had a baby. I had a grandson and his name was Dylan. She settled in with Joe and Beth Ann, who were indeed back together. You’d never know they’d split up, or hated each other’s guts for thirty years. People change. They grow apart but sometimes they grow back together. Is it strange or is it normal? Who cares?
I never did start that community newspaper but it could happen yet.
I started to write again, although there were many false starts. I started to think about what words were important to me and which ones weren’t. I started to think long and hard about what was worth writing about and why anyone would want to read it. Which was most important? The process or the product?
We visited with the new baby and mother and made the usual fuss. Mackenzie looked like she was up for the job. She was doing just fine living where she was but knew she could move in with us if need be.
After our visit with her, we decided that the trip to Halifax had been a waste of time. The Marriott was so the opposite of who we were now. So we decided to spend one winter night in the old fish shack for old times’ sake. Joe’s friend who had towed the Sheer Delight out of the marsh had floated my father’s fish shack and towed it up the inlet as well, and with the aid of a bulldozer skidded it back to where it once stood before the storm. “No big deal,” he said and didn’t charge me any money. He said he was from Newfoundland and it brought back old memories, seeing a house afloat.
We must have burned a half cord of wood that night trying to stay warm, but it beat the hell out of the Marriott. And in the morning, there was a skim of ice up and down the edges of the inlet as the sun shone brilliantly upon the sea ghosts swirling up out of the water.
“Otherworldly,” Ramona said.
“Ourworldly,” I retorted as I watched our breath collide in an amazing manner in the clear, frigid air.
Epilogue
We’ve been in the house for five years now. Already the place holds many memories. It’s become my responsibility to remember everything. Ramona says that’s my job. I must hold onto everything. Every detail. And so I write it down. Nothing is lost. Nothing.
Broken Man on a Halifax Pier Page 27