Sea of Tranquility

by Lesley Choyce

  The Acadians knew how to grow things, while the Englishman would just look at a field and feel sorry for himself, wonder where he was going to find someone to work it or how he was going to find himself a cup of tea for his morning break. That’s what an Englishman would have done. Back then. Or now maybe. Not much changes.

  No one really complained much when Phonse started bringing the wrecks over from the mainland, one a day on the ferry service. School busses, old hearses, dump trucks gone bad, pick-ups, service vans. One by one until he had that hill filled up with junk. A dream realized. Once the phones were in, people could phone Phonse for a part and he’d send it over on the ferry to be picked up in Mutton Hill Harbour. If it didn’t fit or if it was the wrong one, it could be returned or just tossed in the bay, and Phonse would send another one over.

  To some people it seemed like a lot of trouble for a car part and they’d end up driving to Bridgewater to get a new or reconditioned fuel pump from Canadian Tire. Often a part from Phonse’s yard was seized up pretty bad. All that salt air doing its work. But business was business for Phonse and he didn’t mind a little hard work to make a go of it. Hell, none of his people had ever shirked hard work.

  “Dirt under the nails, that’s what makes any man happy,” Phonse said. Caked oil and grease made him happy, but farming, growing cabbages in his little dyked area next to Oickle’s Pond, made him even happier. His own little dyke by the pond only cost him two days work with his backhoe instead of two generations, but it freed up some fine little marsh full of rich sediment. Phonse liked working there, puttering on a summer day in his off hours, talking to philosophical red-winged blackbirds who looked at him sideways as they dangled on the sides of cattail plants. And frogs; the dark, oil-stained waters of Oickle’s Pond were always full of frogs, as well. Bullfrogs, big as footballs. Tiny peepers, too. Fish in the pond too, of course. Nobody knew what kind. Unidentifiable. Started out as suckers maybe and evolved to survive the change in water quality. Tasted some good, eaten cooked or raw. Phonse was particular to the livers of such fish.

  And the cabbages. The big mealtime ones that could have been grown by an Acadian on a rock with just a sprinkling of piss, two ground-up clam shells, and soil cleaned out from under one thumbnail. But these cabbages were even more than that — grown in the Acadian soil of Phonse’s little garden, a cabbage was a thing to behold. Big as a beach ball. No holes in the leaves from cabbage flies or other bugs ’cause Phonse always kept them doused in cold wood stove ashes. Seemed to help the flavour of a cabbage. Phonse had no German in him but he knew how to turn that cabbage into sauerkraut if he had a mind to. Enough salt to preserve a mummy. Made your eyes water just to think about it. But a Phonse Doucette cabbage was a prize. Men who pay other men to mow their lawns back in Mutton Hill Harbour would pay ten bucks for one head of Phonse’s cabbage and not ask any questions how it was raised. Send one over on a hot summer day to the mainland in a box that’s just been used to ship a big boat engine battery over from the mainland. People’d just stare at that cabbage the whole trip back to Mutton Hill Harbour, not even look at the scenery.

  All that was in Phonse’s blood. Heritage. The ability to develop (“devil-up” as Phonse would say it) a piece of land in the old Acadian tradition. Only this was the modern version of it — if anything at all could be called “modern” on Ragged Island. He had retained a French accent, bestowed upon him by his parents, and he had fine-tuned it while growing up. He sounded more like Jean Chrétien than a true Acadian, but no one knew what a true anglicized Acadian should sound like anyway.

  Sure, some men with old junkers did come across on the one-hour ferry ride to Phonse’s salvage yard for parts, but these were men who didn’t mind investing a little time in finding the right flywheel for an old Oldsmobile, men who preferred talking over working any day of the week. And Phonse could talk the ears off a dead mule if he wanted to.“It’s because I have so many ideas,” he’d say.“Possibilities. Dreams. If only I could devil-up each and every one of them. The world would be a better place.”

  Better, perhaps, or at the very least, more cluttered. So men would come for the talk and buy something or other, usually a car part that wouldn’t fit or, if it did, was seized, chipped, cracked, or otherwise brutalized by the island’s weather. No one ever complained. Yet over the years, Phonse noted the marked decline in customers, what with the Canadian Tire only a half-hour’s drive from Mutton Hill Harbour, and other competition from junkyards on the mainland. Men with German names, some of Irish descent, some from Halifax. Some, it was said, were even tied in with computer networks telling the world that they had available for sale the drive shaft of a 1957 Chevy station wagon. “Computers,” Phonse said, and shook his head. “Someday, I’ll show them how that is done. I’ll be on that Internet thing. I’ll put some of my ideas on there. Then people will see.”

  Phonse was not ever discouraged. Like his ancestors, he adapted to hard times and thrived on adversity. Cabbage seed on a rock. Spit on it and look at it with kindness and it will grow. Feed six families.

  So the junkyard business was slow. Some of the old regulars would come, though, and buy something or other. If it was a slow day, Phonse would get out his guns. He loved guns, all kinds of guns. But he never, ever hunted. He hated hunters and would love to see all hunters tied up together in a big huge fishing net and picked up by a Coast Guard helicopter, taken out to the deepest part of the sea, right there in the pathway of the whales that cruised back to this island every summer. He’d like to see them dropped from the sky and sunk to the bottom of the sea to feed the fishes or whatever. That’s what he would do with hunters.

  So you couldn’t talk about hunting around Phonse when he got out his guns. Everyone knew this and was careful. All those Mutton Hill Harbour duck hunters and deer hunters, men who shot a thing and paid another man to skin and clean it for them. Those kind of men. Pale, pasty-faced, and mostly English.

  Phonse’s gun collection, all unregistered, would have satisfied the Michigan Militia. Not particularly modern, but diverse and large. Smith and Wesson hand guns. Derringers, snubby little detective guns, old wild west shiny six-shooters, rifles, Winchesters, German handguns, shotguns. Old double-barrelled ones mostly. He didn’t approve of shotguns in principle but he liked the sound they made going off. “Any bloody fool can shoot a duck with a shotgun. Or a goose. Who can’t hit a thing when it sprays pellets all over the sky?”

  Guns, guns, and more guns. Some men made the ferry trip just to admire his guns. Phonse made his own bullets, too. Melted down old lead flashing from torn-down houses and made bullets to fit his many guns.“Something very meditative,” he said,“about pouring molten lead into bullet casings. So bright and silvery. Nothing as satisfying as lead.” He made buckshot for his shotguns as well.

  And it was the gun thing, and all the general interest in his armoury, that launched his most successful financial venture. On slow days, Phonse took out a .22 rifle and shot at things. Old cars, mostly, never at animals. Everyone who came to visit was given a chance to shoot at something. They all agreed at how satisfying it was to shoot at, say, an old postal truck, or a school bus tire, or the side door of a car once owned by the local member of parliament. The feel was satisfying, the sound — kerwunk of bullet into metal — was satisfying, other men looking at you like you’d just won an Olympic sporting event. It was all satisfying.

  As a result, Phonse drifted into a sideline business. With the auto parts industry going to hell in a handcart thanks to mainlanders and computers and Canadian Tire and whatnot, Phonse slowly but surely allowed his junkyard to develop into a kind of firearm entertainment centre. He referred to it in more grandiose moments as a “theme park.” Eventually, people (97 percent of them men) came over on the ferry and paid Phonse an admission charge to use his rifles, handguns, and shotguns to shoot at things. You’d be allowed to pick a vehicle and buy hand-made ammo and shoot to your heart’s content.

  “It’s really more like
t’erapy, if you want to look at it as such.”

  And therapy it was. Satisfying kerwunks all over the place, or the blast and skrittle of windshields shattering. If a saleable car part like that was to be destroyed, a patron might offer to pay for the price of that part. Phonse didn’t ask for the extra money. It was just a code of conduct. The sort of thing men understand when they get together for noble, significant rituals like this. Maybe just the muted thunk of bullets blasting into an old sofa would do for some. Oil barrels for targets, or a washing machine worn down by years of trying to wrestle fish smells out of a man’s pants.

  Men from Mutton Hill Harbour started bringing over guns of their own, but the ferry operator put an end to that. It didn’t look good and seemed dangerous. So everyone used Phonse’s rifles; not a one spoke about hunting, and the thing evolved.“She’s more successful than Upper Clements Park will ever be,” Phonse bragged, referring to the little theme park near Annapolis Royal that had cost the taxpayer millions over the years. Phonse knew that the English had stolen all that land around Annapolis Royal from his French forefathers, and he was proud that his theme park was a success and the other one was a financial black hole. “No government grant, nothing. Just a man who can devil-up an idea.”

  Since they couldn’t bring over their own guns, men started bringing over things they wanted to shoot at, and that was fine for Phonse. Some brought their old buggered-up computers that had lost a year’s work inside them. Some brought television sets with complaints that their TVs only showed stupid television programs. Some unlikely people came to shoot Phonse’s guns and paid handsomely. Do-gooders, peaceniks, Greenpeacers, and aging hippies came to shoot at things. They brought flags, old magazines, portraits of politicians,VCRs, and the like.

  A retired computer programmer once brought a case of computer disks. He said they were “five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies” that were no good anymore. Phonse didn’t care whether they were good or not — the money was, and that was all that mattered. The disks were tossed in the air and shot like clay pigeons. The programmer came back and donated several more cases of them, and it was a favourite in-between-snack of sorts after the main course of shooting up your old toaster or blasting your mother-in-law’s microwave.

  Homemade beer was sold too, but only after the guns were locked away. Phonse made excellent “Acadian Bitter,” and it slid down the throat like liquid silk. Tree huggers and investment analysts were starting to drink warm bitter side by side after a good shoot-out session, and Phonse knew he had struck gold.

  The rest of the islanders approved of Phonse’s business, and it was a source of community pride that Phonse had been so inventive and caught on to something new that worked so well and earned him cash flow while being good for the mental health of the large, often pitiable community of mainlanders.

  Chapter Three

  South of the island there was this: water, deep as deep there is anywhere along these Atlantic shores. One of Sylvie’s favoured haunts was the “Trough,” also known as the “Trowel” due to some pronunciation quirks locally. The Trough was a long channel of sorts between the island itself and an outer reef of rocks, a jagged shoal known as Rocky Shoal, a double whammy of a name.

  The Trough had this deep and fast current that raced east to west like it was an undersea freight train to nowhere but up around Seal Point and the next piece of open Atlantic. Phonse said he could throw a quarter in there and it would travel at least a mile before it would land on sea bottom, where it might rouse a lobster or a dozing, camouflaged haddock. Sylvie knew this place, knew it from childhood. Understood the beauty of this place. But also the danger. Men had drowned here.

  Of course, the North Atlantic had drowned plenty of island men. Women had lost fathers, husbands, and sons to bad luck from here to the Grand Banks and beyond. Winds that should’ve switched over from nor’west to sou’east but hung stiff in the winter and cluttered up the rails with enough ice to topple a ship and spill terrified men to cold, watery death. Boatloads of dead fish encased in steel heading back into the grey Atlantic.

  There was no denying that this stretch of shore had been a powerful part of her childhood, and if it spoke of death to her, it also spoke of calm summer mornings like this: a short walk from the backyard, past the blooming crabapples and the green, mossy streams gurgling clear and bright. Sylvie, at eighty (and what of it?), could stand and look out to sea, sail away and be anywhere she wanted to be. Back then or right here. Out past the farthest waves she could see or far inside to that safe place inside her heart. Sylvie loved the world and loved life, and curses on the man who would want to alter that in any way. Despite her age, despite the deaths of four good — well, not perfect, but mostly good — husbands.

  The currents of the Trough brought the whales in close to shore. Sylvie had seen her first whale here when she was ten. Alone, glinting up at the teasing sun it appeared, glistening, wet, and magnificent like out of a dream. It blew fountains of salt water up into the sky for her and showed its dark, mysterious eye. And blinked. Did that for her. Blinked as if to say hello, little Sylvie, then dazzled her with another shot of spuming sea-water way up into the morning breeze.

  She told no one for years, for she knew they were killing whales back then, the men of the island, killing them and stripping their flesh and cutting it into big square chunks as if the only way to civilize a thing was to carve it into slabs with right angles. Then what did they do with the flesh they robbed from the sea? Somewhere over in Ketch Harbour they cooked it somehow, did awful things to it. She did not want any of that to happen to this one.

  While Sylvie was growing up, as the island was shaping her into a dreamy, sensitive young woman, the fishermen of the island stopped killing whales and went back to harvesting mere scaly fish. It was not an act of compassion but economy. Whale oil gave way to kerosene, thanks to a Nova Scotian inventor named Abraham Gesner. He saved many, many whales, Sylvie would one day understand. If whales were in heaven, then Gesner was there with them as a hero of humankind. And Sylvie was certain, even now at eighty years into a sometimes disheartening life, that there were whales in heaven. For if there were not, then she herself did not want to take up citizenship in that celestial republic.

  Heaven would also have to be an island. An island adrift in an endless sea, a sea with dark, glistening whales all around.

  The Trough brought to the island other unusual things over the years. Fish that no one had ever seen before. Some called them prehistoric, flushed up from impossible depths and killed no doubt by their disappointment at discovering that there were worlds other than their own bottomless, dark haven. Fish that turned out to have big, long, absurd foreign names that no one could pronounce. So they were shortened. One was a “Chuck,” short for something like Chukensiatosiuk. Another was called by locals a cowfish because it seemed to have hooves. Some called it a devilfish, but there were already too many fish by that name in the sea.

  Seals perched out on the shoals to wait and see what the Trough would bring by next. Dead men floated in during a pair of world wars. Sylvie had seen them both and was thankful that it was only one dead man per war.

  Oh, before she was born, ships loved to come aground here. Ignorant British captains caught unaware by the zealous current of the Trough and then trying to counter the pull, only to ram aground on Rocky Shoal. Bleached pieces of those ships and a few bleached bones even still littered the shores along here, but once the sea has its way with a thing human or inanimate, it doffs it off its back up onto the rocks and lets the shoreward lift have it: waves and then the work of rust, lichen, and blooming red moulds. Old shoes, washed up, bloomed with life — moss and yellow pan flake lichen, soldier cap fungus and crawling natty ants. A little soil caught in a crust of heel and suddenly sea rocket grows green, then bursts a pale electric blue flower atop. Before you know it, some bird from Antarctica is foraging a meal from the worn leather of the toe and the succulence of a rotten lace filled with bugs only a bird c
an savour.

  An island was a place to live and to die. Few had had the same privilege as Sylvie; she knew that, and felt blessed beyond even her years.

  Two hundred and some people lived upon the island now, fewer than in the past, but enough. The peripatetic ferry made two crossings over and two back each day. Older kids would go to school on the mainland while the younger ones hung back a few years, taken good care of by the woman from the States, Kit Lawson, who knew the names of all the stars in the sky as well as the names of great composers, and who sometimes talked about seeing things on the moon with her expensive black telescope. Kit was as bad as Sylvie. Couldn’t hold a man and did it by fours. Sylvie had seen it happen. Boyfriends, she guessed, not for marriage but here for the live-in type relationship as they do these days. Seemed serious enough. The first was an island fisherman named Ned. The next one had long hair and smoked a pipe, an intellectual type who spoke to everyone about politics. Having failed to convert anyone to atheism or socialism, some supposed, he fled back to the mainland and a job.

  The third one was a dreamer — a poetic sort who lounged along the shores at the Trough sometimes and picked at a piece of driftwood until there was nothing left in his paws but salt. Always had a notebook but never wrote anything down. He too found his final ferry back to Mutton Hill Harbour and headed back to civilization. Then that last one. Nice, sweet boy who came and made friends with everybody. Started growing marijuana in the unused cabbage fields and found himself in trouble with the law.