Sea of Tranquility

by Lesley Choyce

  None of the islanders held it against Kit. Sylvie had sympathized with her when it turned out the dope farmer was only using her, as men do on occasion, for mercenary purposes. His claim to fame was that he was an herbalist, but he had specialized in only one herb, the Mounties asserted.

  There were no whales today. Perhaps in another week or two weeks they would return. This was the season of whales, and Sylvie knew that the whales had saved this island from ruin almost brought on by bad decisions on the mainland. Saved it for her.

  Things were being cut back in Halifax. All sorts of things. People shoved out onto the streets, it was said, lifted hilly dilly out of hospital beds and told to leave. Women having babies in the morning and being carried over their husbands’ shoulders later in the afternoon because things were tight. The government was pinching the pennies, making people feel they didn’t deserve it as good as before.

  Legislators as far away as Halifax and even Ottawa were trying to make her leave. Make everyone leave. They didn’t have to steal your land from you, all they had to do was take away the ferry service and everything would begin to shut down.

  But they would not do that. As long as there were whales. The whales brought the tourists, brought them right on through Mutton Hill Harbour and onto the ferry to her island. Moses Slaunwhite had dropped fishing like a hot potato and started taking tourists out to see the whales near the Trough. Moses knew the waters, had a big enough boat, and was raking in the cash. It was a sweet combination for all as it turned out. The mercantile interests in Mutton Hill Harbour scrambled for the money from the passers-through and polished up the town. Motel owners and bed and breakfast people suddenly had loved right whales all their lives, even the ones who had never even seen a right whale.

  Hell, everybody loved whales now, and no one owned up to the fact that grandfathers with harpoons once slept ashore in those bed and breakfast beds with their old socks still on, socks soaked in slimy whale blubber. Now, by Jesus, everyone loved whales. And there was this economic link, as they were calling it. Ragged Island was the centrepiece. Jacked the prices up on the ferry but at least she still sailed back and forth. Once the warm months were over, it would go back and forth only once a day, but kids could still go to school each day on the mainland if need be, men would still work there and come home to the island. And Sylvie could still stay here, living alone at eighty, if she wanted.

  She would pay no heed to all those well-meaning mainland friends who wanted her “safe and sound on solid soil.” As long as she had the island she was okay. As long as the whales were there the tourists would come to gawk and take too many foolish pictures, and her brood of sea mammals would perform with a mere blink or a small geyser and let the mainlanders squint at the sun glinting off a sleek, arching back.

  A whale could take the indignation of a thousand Styrofoam cups in the sea or a tossed jelly bean. A whale could handle that. Moses knew how to keep a fair distance, knew how to humour his clients but keep them from drowning on the Shoal, keep them from harassing the whales.

  “You keep the whales safe and satisfied and the tourists amazed and the island will be safely looked after,” said Moses to Sylvie. “Halifax is up to sending hired actors in oil skins off to Rhode Island and Japan with the news that they can touch the sandpapery skin of the beast if they fly here and bring their dollars and yens. Dollars and yens — that’s all that matters nowadays. Perhaps a Swiss franc or two. But the Swiss are not so easily amazed. Remember, they were the shrewd bastards could keep the Nazis from coming over the mountains and disrupting their quiet little lives.”

  And so, Sylvie was certain, the whales would come back this year as every other. They would return for her because she cared for the island and she cared deeply for them. And now there would be no more men in her life, but there would be sea creatures and clear, sunny, squint-eyed mornings like this to last a person through her winter, snug in memories.

  Chapter Four

  Lonely without whales, Sylvie craved womantalk. Words to fill empty spaces in her life, chinks in the walls. Kit Lawson would do. It was a Saturday, schoolteacher’s day off, and Kit would be alone now that her dope-growing young man was gone off to rehab or jail. Sylvie hoped it wasn’t terrible punishment. He’d been a cheerful lad, seemed to care about the bees and the soil conditions. Understood rotting kelp and seaweed, was willing to learn all the tricks of gardening on an island like this. She hoped his motivation had not just been profit.

  Kit lived in a large one-room house with a loft area for a bedroom. Once a fisherman’s house, it was a dream come true for her. “When I first set foot in here,” she told Sylvie,“this place reeked of authenticity. I asked Ned where the toilet was, and he asked if I needed to pee or do the other. I said I just had to pee, and he pointed to a little piece of one-inch black plastic pipe in the wall. I looked at it, then through the window, and saw it went outside and emptied into a little stream that grew ferns and cress. Ned had never encountered the problem of a woman having to take a pee in his old house, owned up to it, said it’d been a lonely several years. Then he built a first-rate outhouse. I had to tell him it had to be away from any watercourse. He said women were funny creatures, but he built it where I wanted it all the same. Built it like he was building a dory. Only certain materials, certain types of spruce wood he cut himself. Enough timber in it to withstand a gale. Guess he didn’t want me to come to harm if I was inside one day and a hurricane happened. Men are funny creatures.”

  “Men are,” Sylvie said.“Men certainly are.”

  “Sylvie?”

  “Yes.” Sylvie had a dreamy look on her face. Talking about how funny men are as creatures.

  “Sylvie, do you know there is something about this place.”

  “The house?”

  “No, not Ned’s house, although I think it is special too, but the island. Do you think there is something indefinable about this island. I felt it the first day I arrived.”

  Sylvie worried through the pockets in her loose skirt looking for a handkerchief. “Oh, my dear. Something, yes. Not everyone can feel it, but you can, can you?”

  “There’s doubt in your voice, like you think I’m teasing. It’s because I’m from away, right?”

  “People from away don’t always understand. Lord, many people who grew up here don’t even understand.”

  “But I do.”

  “I believe that.”

  “It’s not just the land,” Kit said.“It’s the sky, too. Everything is much clearer. Clearer up in the sky and space above this island, too. Last night I had my telescope focussed on the moon, on a place on the moon called the Bay of Rainbows.”

  “You’re lying to an old woman. There’s no place on the moon called the Bay of Rainbows.”

  “No lies. There is.” Kit picked up, of all things, a teacher’s pointing stick and went over to the wall where hung a big, round, blue saucer of a map. The moon. She pointed to a place and read it off: “Bay of Rainbows, just north of the Sea of Rains.”

  Sylvie was hamstrung. Felt like a little girl in school again. “So there it is,” she said, as if the universe was a stranger place than she had ever thought, something like a fairy tale complete with astronomers sitting on mountaintops coming up with exotic names for places on the moon.

  “Sylvie, I saw a bright light there as I was looking at the Bay of Rainbows. A flash.”

  “Moonmen?”

  “No, I think not. Another asteroid on impact.”

  “That’s what all the craters are about, I suppose. A wounded old thing, the moon is, isn’t it?” She felt a kind of kinship there. All her men dying, belligerent asteroids battering the face of the moon in the night.

  “Wounded indeed. Look at that sorry old girl.” Perfectly natural that the moon must be feminine. Not a man in the moon at all. Wounded old girl. A couple of million years old. Up there hanging over the earth. No atmosphere to help ward off chunks of rock gamming about in space.

  “I’ve never f
elt closer to the moon than I do on this island. Back in Massachusetts, back when I taught in Boston, I sat on my rooftop and the moon kept me sane when I felt like I was going crazy.”

  “Some people used to say the full moon made you crazy. Women especially, our blood all controlled by the movement of the moon, our periods and all that.”

  “Oh, women are tidal, for sure. I’m certain of that. Back then in Boston, I always found myself looking at the big crater called the Sea of Crises — Mare Crisium. Everything in my life seemed in perpetual crisis. Men at my door in the night trying to bust through seven locks to steal my TV set. Children in my classroom, high as killer kites on crack cocaine. Air sick as the sea and all the while noise, noise, noise. I’d sit up there on a clear night in my lawn chair on the roof camped out on the Sea of Crises. Thought that was what life was all about.”

  Sylvie felt slightly dizzy suddenly. The mention of children did it to her. Sylvie had never had any children. Not exactly the way she had planned it. Husbands were like children sometimes. But she knew it wasn’t the same. But there were plenty of other people’s children out there in the world. Without family, sometimes Sylvie felt totally and hopelessly alone. Not often. But sometimes. It was like she had moved to the moon, camped out in a lawn chair in the sea of whatever — Sea of Sylvie Alone. “What about the children?”

  “The ones back in the city?”

  “Yes. Did you try to help them?”

  “Yes. I did.” Kit had suddenly lost her enthusiasm for the geography of earth’s satellite. “And almost died trying. Every time I got involved, it would be the parents or brothers or some guy selling the stuff who came at me and threatened me to stay clear. I tried and tried until I realized it was killing me. If I’d stayed I would have gone after one of them, the big dealers, would have gone after him with a can of gasoline in the night and burned him to hell.”

  Sylvie wanted to ask if she was so dead set against men selling drugs to her students, how did she end up with a guy growing weed on this island. But she kept her thoughts to herself. Knew it was part of life’s complications. Nothing simple, clear cut, ever. The idea of children stoned out on something called crack cocaine filled her with a big pool of sadness in the very centre of her being, made her feel ancient.

  “The island restored me,” Kit said.“The island children too. So polite. Call me ‘miss’ all the time. The one-room schoolhouse. Boys in big rubber boots. The fact they all cheered when I brought back a wood stove for the middle of the room, to supplement the electric heat. The fifth-grade boys carrying in firewood to feed the stove while we studied ancient Egypt.”

  “Too bad the school board made you get rid of the stove again. I always liked the smell of softwood burning, brought your mind alive.”

  “Spruced up your senses, so to speak,” the schoolmarm said with a clever inflection. “Oh well, it reminded me I wasn’t beyond the leash of civilization. Taught me a lesson. Kids suddenly seemed to be all that much more helpful once they saw I had lost a battle with authority. They were even kinder after John was arrested. I guess I knew what he had been up to, but John had this silly dream, believed marijuana would do no real harm. Felt that if he could bring a milder, more natural, and less harmful drug back into use, sell it cheap — no, not to kids — well, that would keep people from getting all caught up in the dangerous stuff. Mind you, I wasn’t fully convinced of this. But he always had a way of putting a good spin on everything. Even this. Something good will come out of it for John. You wait. He believes in lifelong learning. Self-education. Probably learn from his time in the institutions. Write a book about it, rise back above it. I miss him, though.”

  “I know all about that.”

  “I’m sorry. I guess you do. I have no idea what it must feel like to lose a husband.”

  “It takes some practice, but you never get used to it. Men underfoot can be an annoyance, but when they are gone, it seems as if they get themselves all polished up in your memory. Can’t remember a bad thing about them. I still find an old shirt in the back of the closet and put it up to my face and it’s like he was a prince, a king among men, finest man ever to put two feet on the floor on any morning. You forget the other stuff.”

  Then silence arrived like an unexpected house guest, didn’t knock on the door or anything. Just barged in, took the place over. Silence, a masculine silence. Sort of commandeered the big one-room house, tromped about, rattled the dishes, bumped into things like men do. Silence nonetheless. Two women staring away from each other for an instant and then back.

  “John said he’d make some money from his plants and then we’d set up a camp here for kids from the city. A safe place, a happy place. They’d study the moon at night and we’d watch whales in the day. Go back to growing cabbages without pesticides.”

  “Men have to have dreams, don’t they?”

  “While women do practical things, is that what you mean?”

  “Not always. I just think our dreams are more down-to-earth. At least mine were. But now I don’t know anymore. Living alone, you turn a bit inward. A good thing and a bad thing. Winter was hard but now this is summer. It feels good, but I need my whales back out there. They’ve never failed to show up.”

  “There’s time,” Kit said. “Moses’ll be in some sour mood if they don’t show up. All those tourists coming out on the ferry to get on his boat. If he doesn’t have whales, he’ll be a sorry captain.”

  Sylvie looked back at the map of the moon, its big, round, sallow, hurt face. She read the name of the great crater she was staring at: the Sea of Tranquility. She tried to imagine the man who would have named it thus. But Sylvie knew the real, true sea of tranquility. It was here surrounding this island on a summer morning and it took up residence in her heart, kept her tides in check during the hard times.

  “It’s not just a big dead thing, is it?” Kit said.

  “No, it’s not. It’s alive. Everything is. Everything. In its own way.”

  Kit saw silence creep back in the room, wandering around, looking into cupboards, thought it wonderful that an old woman who had lost so many men to graves, a woman who must’ve hurt a hundred times more than what her hurt felt like, could still say a thing like that. Sit there, a little damp-eyed, and just spit it out without question. Everything alive, nothing dead. That was the lesson of the island. You can’t really kill a thing. It’s all alive, all you have to do is understand that, see it with your eyes, feel it in your bones. Dig deep and the news would always be there but you needed to hear it out loud from someone like Sylvie sometimes. Those few words embraced by masculine silence. And silence finally giving up on its own power, stopping to listen to a woman speak words, words that worked their way into all the important little crevices in the wooden walls. Words, sealing the place up against the cold. Words married to the silence in a good way. Ceremonies like that. Island ways.

  Chapter Five

  Timing was the key to Moses Slaunwhite’s life. He was the first child born in Nova Scotia in the year 1951. The very first. His father had watchmaker’s blood in him and had a house full of Swiss and German clocks, all set in perfect accord with a short-wave radio report he received regularly from Greenwich, England. The scratchy report would always go like this: “When you hear the long tone following a series of short tones, it will now be something o’clock Greenwich mean time.” Then followed annoying radio noises, several short and one long, and that would be something o’clock on the hour on the other side of the Atlantic. Moses’ father, Noah Slaunwhite, would subtract several hours to account for time zones and he’d have it precise, then race around the house checking all of his clocks right down to the second hands swirling about their orbits as if they could give a damn about precision.

  So from the start, timing was everything, and Moses was evicted from the warmth and security of his mother’s womb at one minute after midnight Atlantic Standard Time on January 1, 1951. Just as planned. Moses’ father was very proud, especially of the exactitude
of it all. Moses’ mother was in considerable pain and couldn’t wait to drop the placenta and be done with bringing another child into the world. She wanted sleep. Lots of sleep.

  Now, it so happened that the newspaper in Halifax had a contest going with dozens of prizes for the first child born in 1951. Why the owners of the paper thought it was such a great thing to be the first baby of 1951, nobody knew. As far as they and the fun-loving public were concerned, when it came to babies in this contest, you didn’t have to be the biggest, the prettiest, the happiest, or the smartest. You just had to be the first. Some mothers missed it and failed to achieve the goal, ending up with a really late 1950 baby. Some hung on too long to their parcels of delight and waited until several minutes of the new year had slipped by and other babies had already popped out from North Sydney to Yarmouth.

  But Moses arrived at 12:01. The head appeared at midnight exactly and the whole child had emerged, rather perfunctorily, within one minute, tops. The father was proud, the mother was exhausted and near unconsciousness as was the way with women giving birth.

  It was New Year’s Day in 1951 and Noah Slaunwhite was in his boat frothing his way across the waters to Mutton Hill Harbour to make a phone call to the Herald in Halifax. A proud father alone in his boat, having left his wife home to sleep and heal with a neighbour woman named Sylvie who would attend to any worries should they arise.

  Now there was the problem that Noah hadn’t expected in his precision-laden world of clocks and watches chiming on the hour every hour, even on his boat where the clock was called a chronometer and housed in polished brass. The problem with his timely, successful son was the remote location of where he had been born so precisely.