A travelling theatre group from St. John’s had come to Brighton for the weekend to put on a children’s play for the Fall Community Festival. The children were excited and couldn’t wait to see the performance. It wasn’t often something like this came to Brighton; the people of the community usually did it themselves, putting on their own shows with amateur talent, lacking in virtuosity but not without enthusiasm and playfulness, so much so that they inevitably ended up laughing at themselves, which made the show more enjoyable for the adults.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen her?” Jack asked as he slowly ran a razor blade across his cheek.
“At least a year. She’s been touring non-stop.”
Angela’s childhood friend, Sheila, had become a theatre actress, leaving Brighton to study drama in England. She had settled in St. John’s and created the travelling theatre company. Tall, blonde, with cheerful blue eyes, she was a delight to watch. Angela remembered the stories Sheila’s mother told about her great-grandmother, a vaudeville performer from Jersey Island who married an English wartime doctor stationed in India. Outspoken and defiant, this actress once sneered at the Nazis during the occupation of Jersey in the thirties. Sheila’s petite blonde great-grandmother had sat primly in her grade-school chair, held at gunpoint by several Nazi soldiers commanding her to speak German. She consistently replied in French, blatantly disrespecting them. Somehow she had been spared.
Sheila had the same resilience, and the same gift for the stage.
“Will her father come to the show?”
Angela nodded. “Yes, I’m sure he wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Doctor Nelson had arrived in Brighton from Jersey with his small British family in the late sixties. Angela’s father, Tom Harrington, a miner who served on the town council, sang in the church choir with the doctor, each taking turns playing tricks on the choir mistress, alternating soprano and baritone behind her back, confusing her ear.
Mrs. Nelson had died a few years ago, from breast cancer. Doctor Nelson was devastated. She was the only love he’d ever known. An English orphan, he had married Mrs. Nelson when she was eighteen, the daughter of a well-travelled doctor and philanthropic stage actress. He vowed to provide for her in the same way her own father had. Earning a scholarship to medical school, he soon found work in Newfoundland after graduating from Oxford.
Angela and Sheila had met during one of Mrs. Nelson’s piano classes, each conspiring to play the wrong notes in the devilish hopes of frustrating their teacher.
Angela smiled; it would be wonderful to welcome Sheila home and take their minds off everything.
The public school gymnasium was dark. The children were quiet, except for the occasional squeak of an overexcited youngster. The yellow and white spotlight hit the stage and Jane Cranford, president of the Brighton Entertainment series, was illuminated. She was carrot-orange in the light, her freckles and ginger hair overexposed.
“Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s performance of This Autumn’s Tale, performed by Blackwater Tide Theatre, starring our very own Sheila Nelson!” Jane Cranford clapped airily, papers spilling out of her hands. She bent to pick them up and the spotlight heightened the red that had risen in her cheeks. “Now, children,” she said quietly, regaining her composure, “don’t be frightened. This is a special play for the fall festival. It’s all about a child who is far from home and …” The spotlight snapped off loudly, and after a few seconds the curtain drew back choppily, two pairs of fumbling hands on each side gripping the corners tightly. Jane mumbled apologies for the technical difficulties while being whisked off the stage by one of the primary school teachers.
The spotlight blinked on, wavered, and went out again. Finally steady, it rested on the figure standing centre stage. It was Sheila, dressed in layers of billowing white satin as the Good Fairy Princess. She held a white owl puppet on her left arm, covered by a red-velvet robe, wearing a king’s crown. Colourful, skillfully drawn murals adorned the stage, and paper foliage was draped loosely across a grand trellis and white gazebo.
Lily slept, curled on her father’s arm. Katie laughed joyously while Maggie watched it all quietly, her eyes wide with pleasure. Angela leaned on Jack’s shoulder and he smiled wanly.
“What a wonderful show!” Angela exclaimed.
“It was great, love,” Jack said.
Sheila smiled, holding Lily in her arms. Maggie and Kate hugged her legs beneath the layers of her creamy silk dress.
“Thanks, it was a lot of fun; I don’t get to do children’s theatre very often.”
“You don’t come home very often either,” Wanda interrupted. “How are you, my love?”
“Best kind today, love,” Sheila said.
“Good thing we bumped into you before we leave!”
Jack stiffened behind her.
“Where are you going?” Sheila asked.
“To the mainland. Peter found a job at that new gold mine, and we’re leaving in a month!”
Angela’s face paled, remembering Pete and Jack on her doorstep the previous evening. She clenched her jaw and turned to Jack, who avoided her gaze.
Lily fussed in Angela’s arms. Katie and Maggie were tussling over the last stick of gum they’d found in their mother’s purse.
“Lucky Wanda, you only have one.”
Wanda smiled, shifted a sleeping Susie on her hip. “But I plan to have more now that Pete’s got this job on the mainland.”
Angela’s eyes widened in panic. “Good for you….” she said and her voice trailed off weakly. Jack grabbed her hand and held it firmly.
“Come over for a drink before you leave?” Wanda asked.
Sheila nodded and smiled as Wanda walked away.
“Some glad to be rid of her,” Sheila whispered.
“Sheila!” Angela admonished.
“She stole Peter Fifield from me when I was seventeen.”
“Sheila, come on, you’ve got a theatre group in town, an up-and-coming folk musician who is completely in love with you, and you’re worried about some small-town miner with big thumbs?” Angela whispered back.
“It’s not his big thumbs I’m after,” Sheila said.
“Some bad you are,” Angela said and tried not to laugh as Sheila wistfully looked at Pete’s full back and thick, long legs.
“Pass me some screech,” Sheila whispered, drunker than she’d been in ages, or so she said.
“You’re getting right royally pissed,” Angela said, her voice slurred due to the amount of Jamaican rum she’d consumed.
They were sitting in Sheila’s bedroom after the show. Jack had taken the kids home to bed and Doctor Nelson sat sound asleep in his study, slumped over a novel.
Angela grew quiet. “Jack lost his job yesterday.”
“Oh no,” Sheila said and rolled over on the twin bed, a remnant from adolescence, still covered in a pink gingham bedspread. She rose and went to the window and struggled to open it since it was stuck in the molded pane. This reminded Angela of when they would sit here after school, blowing smoke rings out the window from the crisp, sharp-smelling English cigarettes stolen from Mrs. Nelson’s purse.
“What are you going to do?”
“Jack doesn’t want to leave home. He thinks life will be rough up there, but rough we can handle. Starvation — which is what’ll happen if we stay here — we can’t.”
“Where would you go on the mainland?”
“I don’t know, I suppose the same place Wanda is going.”
“That could be good then, living in a town with some people from home?”
“Yes, it’ll be a comfort, that’s for sure.”
“But it won’t be home.”
“No, it won’t be. But I guess it’ll have to do. I mean, we don’t have a choice, do we?”
Peter sat at the back of the church in his usual spot. The Women’s League was tired of cleaning the dirt on the floor from the sneakers he wore in the summer and salt stains from his work boots in the
winter. The other men in town wore their Sunday shoes to Mass, but not Peter. He wouldn’t bother with the charade if it weren’t for Wanda. She made him go. Said it had to do with giving Susie a sense of the world, a sense of service and goodness. So he complied.
He looked around the small room, a kaleidoscope of purple from the stained-glass windows, the large wooden crucifix draped with a purple cloth and the priest’s vestments. His father had hated purple, thought it was too bright for the sombre occasion of Mass. Peter could still remember his parents trying to stuff him and his two younger brothers into suits for a Sunday Mass and his mother dabbing iodine over the cut on her lip, his father gargling with minty mouthwash in an effort to hide the sour, yeasty smell of more than two days of drinking beer non-stop.
They’d looked presentable. The suits hid the bruises on the boys and all seemed well. When Mass was over, the whiskey would come out, and that’s when Peter’s father was at his roughest.
Peter nodded at Jack and Angela as they took their seats a few pews ahead. Angela looked at him sharply. Peter avoided eye contact. She could always see through him, and he knew that half the time she didn’t like what she saw.
The winter his father caught him having a draw off a cigarette and the trail of blood as he fled from the house. Angela had been trudging home with a few groceries for her mother, the winter after her father had died. She dropped the bag with the eggs in it when she saw his purple face and the blood from his nose and lip.
“You are coming with me,” she’d said.
“I’ll be alright.”
She took charge, stepping over the egg yolks, lying whole out of their shells, like dandelion heads snapped from their stems, and dragged him to her mother’s. The wind meowed and hissed in the bitter cold.
“Tea and a Purity biscuit for you,” her mother said.
Angela stood in front of him and patted the wounds with a warm, salty cloth.
“I can take care of myself,” he muttered. He sat stone-faced and flicked the cloth away like it was a tick.
“Give it up,” Angela said warningly and held his chin with her small hand.
The next day Peter wrote Angela Harrington gives good head on the bathroom wall, and she was shamed and mocked by the boys and girls alike.
“I know it was you,” she said in the playground after school as she wiped away tears with the tip of her pink frosted nail.
“Quit mothering me,” he said.
So Angela stopped. Not too many knew the truth about Peter’s home life, and if they did they handled the information awkwardly: laughed, made jokes, or turned a blind eye.
As Peter sat in Mass, watching his best friend take his seat, he still couldn’t look Angela in the eye. If she looked at him long enough she’d know how desperately he wanted to leave, contrary to all the senseless nostalgia and pining to stay that everyone else felt. He wasn’t sure about who would make it out of Brighton. Some stayed in towns like this long after the industry’s lifespan. Stayed and worked here and there, odd jobs in town or worked as scabs for striking mining companies. Some stayed on the dole for life.
Peter wouldn’t let that happen to his family. He’d been fighting to get out of Brighton, he would joke with Jack, since they took a trip to Montreal in 1976. What were they? Seventeen or eighteen and in love with the city that served drinks all night, the garish spectacle of the dancing girls, the smoked meat sandwiches at two in the morning, smothered with the best mustard Peter had ever tasted. Then they came back and Jack fell for Angela, watched her in her bikini at the swimming hole, diving off the rock cliff into the deep muddy water below, her long legs tapered to thin ankles, muscles taut under the swell of her heart-shaped bottom, and he’d never looked elsewhere. Shortly after Wanda was available — her boyfriend had died in a motorcycle accident — Peter ditched Sheila and made his move because he couldn’t very well let the prettiest girl in school get away on him.
Peter looked once again at Jack in the pew, praying intently while Maggie climbed over him, her yellow skirt flaring like a petal. Angela, gaunt and stern, shepherded Maggie to her seat and shifted Lily on her hip, while Katie prayed alongside her father.
He better make it out, Peter thought. He would do anything he could to make sure of it.
Jack didn’t look back when he came up from underground for the last time, the skip cage rickety, confining, and sour-smelling, but he shook everyone’s hands and put on a pleasant face. Inside he was angry and irritable. The other miners’ tongues were as busy as ants on his last night shift.
“I got a job in Alberta,” one said.
“Me too,” another three or four chorused.
All night, talking of successfully selling their homes, belongings sorted and packed, going-away parties planned. The only thing louder than the men who had found jobs were the angry ones who had yet to find work.
“My wife has threatened to go out and work. What do I know about taking care of babies?” someone said.
“My wife has threatened to move back in with her mother if I don’t find something,” someone else shouted miserably.
Jack was silent. Sad and still and silent with shock.
The din from the machinery was the last sound he heard when he came up from underground. It had never sounded so abrasive. It made him angry.
Above ground, it was a quiet morning. Mid-September mist clotted the air. A ribbon of sparrows trailed one after the other in jagged flight. The song of that bird — he never knew its name — with the high-pitched tweet followed by four notes, descending in pitch and key, always tore at his heart. It always sounded melancholy.
He’d told Angela not to wait for him or to worry. He was going to go for a walk after his last shift at work. He was going to sneak away to the swimming hole and spend the morning by himself.
The rising sun sizzled the mist off the rocks; it was a sudden sharp and direct light.
A swim might be just the thing, Jack thought.
He walked down the hill and dropped his lunch tin, hard hat, and bag of personals from his locker on his back step and then took off. He quickened his pace, reaching the well-worn skinny path to the swimming hole in minutes. The backwoods quickly swallowed him up. The balsam fir trees were so thick, they looked black. One was so big, its roots stuck up out of the earth like a dried brown parsnip, tapered at the end to form a spindly root, a wheezy tie to the soil. The blueberry bushes were swiped clean. The women in Brighton donned kerchiefs, shorts, tube tops, and sneakers to collect them in late August under the drowsy sun, squatting over the bushes picking bucketful after bucketful, leaving very little for the black bears. Jack passed the crop of boulders and smiled. As kids they would hide behind the rocks with Peter’s binoculars and watch the women picking berries. When the women bent over in their tube tops, an inch of white skin, revealed alongside the caramel tan on their necks and arms, would convince the boys they’d seen chest.
One of the women, Mrs. Hynes, had gotten lost out here. She’d strayed from the group and spent three nights out here alone.
“It’s the senses that drive you mad,” she’d said for years afterwards while telling her story over a game of cards at the Union Hall. “First it’s your sight; you see things that aren’t there. I saw my son beckoning me to follow him. Then it’s your hearing. You hear things that aren’t there. I heard my grandchildren calling out to me, Nanny, supper’s ready, they’d called, confused as to why I wasn’t coming to the table to eat.”
Jack was on the path alone now, and it was silent. The sun had risen and he was nearing the falls. A few more feet to go.
Finally, no one here to tell me what to do.
Out here he couldn’t feel the swell of Angela’s will or the tether of Peter’s friendship.
I can’t hear my children, my parents, my wife, or my friends. Free from responsibilities. I could stay out here forever. Let them send out a search-and-rescue crowd.
They’d sent one out for Mrs. Hynes, found her covered in patches of m
oss she’d pulled from the ground to make a quilt to keep warm.
Angela had been unforgiving. “Why would anyone leave the group while out berry-picking? She must have wanted to get lost in the woods,” she’d said and rolled her eyes.
Angela would go out with her mother every year and fill ten buckets, and they had jam, scones, muffins, pancakes, pies, and cakes all year long. She’d give the girls bowlfuls swimming in milk and sugar for breakfast. She even made tea with dried berries and honey.
Of course, Angela wouldn’t have strayed from the group. She’d have shepherded them from bush to bush, inspected pails, and created an emergency plan in case of black bears or charging moose.
Jack’s mother had also been unforgiving. “It was the death of her father that did that to her, made Angela all funny,” she’d say and roll her eyes.
Jack quickened his pace along the trail. He only had a few hours before she’d come looking for him and drag him back home. He rounded the corner to the clearing. The rocks were thirty feet high, the falls pouring down in a single straight spurt and pooling at the bottom in a twenty-foot hole, fit for diving and swimming. Jack took off his clothes and climbed up the side of the rock wall, footrests smashed by hand a generation ago. His own father and grandfather before him had scaled these walls for the thrill of a dive.
At the top of the cliff he waded in the cold, silty water. His ankles turned a sudden sharp red. His feet were unsteady on the pebbles but he made it to the edge without slipping. He threw his arms up and jumped head-first. The moment of weightlessness before hitting the water; the sucking punch of the palm of water as it rushed to envelop him. Then the cocooned suspension as the water ballooned out around him. It was a pure joy.
Saltwater Cowboys Page 3