Both seventeen when they married. It had all started with the high rubber boots in the old schoolhouse.
“What on God’s green earth is that smell?” the old teacher asked. She was a wonderful teacher, that Missus Lantz. But, watch out for yourself when things went wrong and she took after that pointer stick she kept sheathed in the rolled-up map of North America.
“It’s the boots, Jesus,” David said and ran to retrieve them, his and Sylvie’s. High rubber boots set tight side by side like lovers, too close to the scalding black metal of the wood stove, old knot-ty spruce logs ablaze inside warding off winter in favour of education. David had set his own boots there alongside of Sylvie’s. He was always doing nice things for her.“Wants your feet to be warm and dry,” he had said. Such a gentleman for a boy.
They were melting. Oh, my God, what a stench. Everyone grabbing their noses and pinching. The little ones taking the opportunity to howl and screech. Missus Lantz opening the door to winter and inviting the old gentleman in. “Everybody out,” she finally said. “Can’t teach with this!” Melting boots meant freedom.
“Whose bloody Wellingtons?” she asked as David scrimped low across the room to grab the boots and haul them out.
“Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “My fault.” David grabbed the steaming boots and heaved them out into the snow. The little ones ran from where they landed as if the devil had been thrown to catch them at play.
Sylvie remembered going out to look at her own boots and saw that one of them had melted itself onto one of David’s. Lying there in the snow, the two black boots stuck together, the smell still something you could not quite pinch out of your nostrils.
“I was hoping to get them nice and warm for you. And dry inside, you know?”
Sylvie felt weak and shy. Not like her at all.
“I’ll buy you a new pair when my dad takes me in the boat to Mutton Hill Harbour this week.”
“It was an accident.”
“I know,” David said, smiling now. “Everything’s an accident. That’s what my grandfather told me the day he died. I’m named for him, you see, and he was named for his grandfather.”
“What do you mean, it’s all an accident.”
“Everything good and everything bad. All an accident. This snow coming down. Missus Lantz back there trying to air the school out. The melting boots. The fact we live on an island like this. All an accident.”
Such a goofy look on a young man’s face.
“And you think that’s a good thing, do you? You don’t think God has a plan for us?” Sylvie had been told by neighbour women over and over, neighbour women out trimming cabbages or drying cod on wooden slats in the sun or collecting summer savoury from their gardens, the words had been oft repeated.“’Tis all part of God’s great plan.”
“God was the one responsible for making everything accidental. It’s a big game for him, I guess. Wondering what accidental thing will happen next.”
Sylvie knew that this boy liked to talk strangely at times, but his words made her head and heart feel light, like a pair of swooping herons, she was so out of kilter. Her with burning boots turning to deep religion and philosophy in the schoolyard snow.
Somebody was throwing a snowball straight at David’s head, but it missed. A second was thrown. That lout Inglis, always bad intent. Another thrown and missed. David pretended not to see, but Sylvie stuck her tongue out at Coors Inglis. Another snowball, this time thrown harder and with worse aspirations, at Sylvie. David turned, put himself in the way, took it hard on the cheek. Looked over at Inglis, gave him a look but did not go after him.
“Sylvie, don’t ever cut your hair.”
“My hair? I wasn’t going to cut it.”
“Great. You have wonderful hair.”
“It’s only brown.”
“Brown hair is the prettiest.”
Sylvie had known the boy had feelings for her but those feelings had always been in check. Her own emotions had always been in check, too, the way it was supposed to be. Why did this absurd little compliment make her feel so powerfully changed? “I won’t cut it,” she said. “I’ll let it grow long like summer vines.”
“Thank you,” he said, and now, for the first time, he touched the cold wet spot on his cheek where the snowball had connected with his face. Sylvie could not stop herself from touching the spot as well. Her eyes went woozy and she had to take a deep breath, then pulled her hand away quickly as she saw Missus Lantz come out to ring a bell, calling everyone back in.
“My grandfather wasn’t a hundred percent right about the accidents, Sylvie.”
“Oh, how’s that?’
“You. You were no accident. You were meant to be.”
That was the last year of school for both of them. They could have gone to the mainland for an extra year or even two if they liked, but they did not. Nor did any of the other students from the island school, for the mainland was considered to be a sorry, inferior place. Sixteen gave way to seventeen for Sylvie and for David. The year was 1934. Far away on the mainland of Canada, the Dionne family in Quebec had quintuplets, five girls and they all lived. In Germany, a new leader, a führer, was sworn in. This man named Hitler would order the construction of concentration camps in Germany for Jews and Gypsies. Off the coast of Nova Scotia the fishing was good, but the prices were less than they should be.
In June of 1934, young David Young married Sylvie Down. Sylvie liked him more than any other boy on the island but she did not know if it was what she truly wanted to do. Her mother said she liked David and so did her father. That was not advice or parental pressure. Sylvie’s father spoke thus:“Comes from a good family. Good stock. Father’s a reputable man. Respectable family. Can’t see the harm.” Understatement was Sylvie’s father’s way.
“Women will have more opportunities in your lifetime, you know,” her mother said. Something she picked up at the Women’s Improvement Association meetings and in the newsletter that came once a month.“We want what’s best for you.”
“Can’t do much better than David,” her father had said, but there was still not a quarter ounce of pressure in his voice.
Sylvie felt herself to be the water in the North Brook — clear fluid, pure, slipping down with the pull of gravity towards the waiting sea. It was not an unpleasant feeling at all. She believed there was little control within her to change anything about this elemental force. Sure as the water drawn down the stream, she would marry, she would become the sea, and then what?
The day she said yes to her David Young, she asked him to go with her to sit on the rocks out by the Trough and be with her there all day. David said he would be honoured. Alone on a day in early June, blackflies held imperceptibly at bay by the cool presence of the open sea, they sat arm in arm. Only one whale appeared. It came up once from the deepest part of the channel, surfaced, spouted, let the sun perform for one silver moment upon its dark, wet back, dove deep again, and fanned its tail in a salute or goodbye.
A flock of tiny shorebirds appeared and settled on the rocks nearby, picked through the rotting seaweed that smelled like something sacred to Sylvie and David. Beach peas and sea rocket grew between the stones. A few fishing boats found their way across the sea in front of the island — too far from shore to make out who they were. Year-old seals came up on the flat stones of the shoal and lay on their backs, then at length slipped back into the sea.
The day made her love David more for his silence, but it also gave her mixed emotions because she didn’t know if she loved him or the island more. She wasn’t sure she could love both, and even though she would not be moving away, she felt like she was betraying some intimate, profound relationship. But she did not fight the sonorous current within her that would bring them to marriage in the little Baptist church with the bare walls, hard seats, and the endless drone of old turgid hymns cauterizing everything that seemed alive and chaotic and wonderful.
In Sylvie’s eighty-year-old imagination, David Young is still alive
. Still sixteen, or maybe eighteen. His was the privilege of not growing older like the rest who remained on the island. Sylvie sees him as being yet another gift that the island gave to her. A gift with tenure. Time and memory have polished David, the first husband, like a beach stone, into something hard and true. Born of chaos, a child of a family who believed the world was ruled by chaos, by chance, David had come to her, grew up with her through childhood as if an invisible other, and then crystallized suddenly one winter day into something that would be the centre of her life.
Sylvie sits alone with a cup of cold tea on a summer afternoon in her backyard carved from the forest, her back to the sea, surrounded by tiny flowers of early summer. Spring beauties, blue violets, Indian cucumbers, and the fluted, spore-laden stems shooting up from the furry green moss. She has the great gift of knowing truly where she belongs. Here. Now. Inside her, time can drift. David is still with her and she can smell burning rubber boots and she can feel the pinch of biting blackflies although there are none out at this time of day.
Their first night of marriage, they talked through the darkness. They touched, yes, but only tentatively, briefly, fingertips brushing hair, tracing the collarbone at the neck, palms resting on the other’s elbow, hands cupped on the other’s shoulder. Sylvie was amazed at David’s love of ideas, notions. “Suppose we have children, good children, healthy children, and they lead good honest lives and grow up and they have children, good children, happy children, well-meaning children who have their own after that. And one of those children, our great-grandchild, becomes an inventor or a scientist or something and discovers something truly, truly wonderful, like a way to feed everybody on earth so no one will starve, right? And this is a great wonderful thing.”
Sylvie wondered at the odd nature of thinking of this man she had married. Here she lay in bed, expecting to be treated to some kind of new experience, some physical thing that both scared her and fascinated her. She had been warned it could be a harsh thing sometimes, but she was prepared, mentally and physically. But this was not the way at all.
“Now suppose this new discovery gets into the wrong hands and is used to create famines and starvation instead of preventing suffering. Suppose thousands or more die. Just suppose that happened.”
“David, what?”
He let out a long sigh. “I don’t know. Does that mean it would be wrong for us to have a child that would lead to such a terrible thing?”
“How would we know?” Sylvie asked.
“We can’t know. That’s it. Each of us, each married couple like us, has the power to possibly change the world for good or bad. And we can’t do a thing about it.”
“Then why concern ourselves with it? What can we do?”
“We can’t and I guess that’s my point. I’m sorry. It’s my grandfather talking here,” David admitted.
“I didn’t know I was climbing into bed with your grandfather,” Sylvie said, teasing.
“Don’t get me wrong, I want to have children. As many as you want.”
“I want ten,” she joked.
“Ten it is. Why not twelve?”
“Twelve is too many to feed.”
“We’ll start with one and see how it goes from there.”
“I want all of our children to stay here on the island.”
“So do I,” David agreed. “But once they outgrow us, we can’t make them stay.”
“No, but we can make sure they love the island like we love the island.”
David said nothing.
“Do you love this place?” she asked.
“I do, but not in the same way you do. I could almost be jealous if I wanted to.”
“Do you want to be jealous?”
“No. Let’s go to sleep now.”
Sylvie has a swarm of pictures in her head, the tea some strange, exotic drug now that has catapulted her mind into another place. Things that rule her life: fish and cabbage, the backs of whales in sunlight, that mysterious moon pulling the sea slowly in and out every day, the swimming seals. Generations of German and English and French ancestors, for she could trace her roots to all three. The island had lured all three nationalities together.
And she remembers David, standing in oilskins not a hundred yards offshore, hauling up nets with cold, slapping fish, a great steady stance he had in that dory made by his grandfather. She could still see the silhouette, the slanting posture, the wet net in his hand, back bent under the weight. His steady hand with a strong pull. While David stood there, German soldiers on the other side of the sea were slaughtering innocent families, preparing to slaughter the French and the English. In her memory, though, those two brief years of her first marriage, less than two years really, were a tenured stint in paradise.
March of 1936. Bad news for the fishermen. Almost no market at all for the valuable catch. Hope, however, in the fact that big ships would dock soon by the government wharf and look for men to go to the ice floes in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Good money to be made from seal pelts.
“I’ll be gone no more than a month. Hard work, but we need the money. Save some up, spend some to build up the old place here. Plenty of food on the table after this no matter what the fishing does. Do something nice for you when I get back. Don’t fancy the thought of staying on a big sloppy metal boat that long with a bunch of mainlanders, but they say the Allen Grant is a good solid ship, steady captain and all that.”
And all that. Sylvie did not like the thought of butchering baby seals. The greys, the harbour, the hooded ones. She was opposed to the idea. Did not want to debate the difference between catching fish and killing baby seals on ice floes near Isle Magdalene on a ship captained by a Lunenburg man and owned by Halifax investors, they said.
“Good chance to maybe set a bit of money by and eventually get my own boat. Fish prices will come back. Here’s an opportunity at building a thing up. Maybe something better for our young ones down the road.”
And like that, one morning, he was gone, and Sylvie was waking up alone in her bed. A March morning. Rain. Eight days of it. Walked to the sea every day, the sea of rains. Pelting, icy, cold, drenching. Her own oilskins and high rubber boots to protect her. Seals right up on the island shoreline, one or two with big, round, dark eyes, not even afraid of her.
Even then she still felt the tug of the current. She stopped and stared at the clear little brook, the wet, glowing moss that looked so vital in any weather. Sylvie dropped a twig in the rapids and watched it get swept away, then catch on a shelf of root, then swirl in a little eddy round and round, then disappear down the watercourse.
When the news came back to her about David, it was delivered by his father. David’s father — a stout man who carried a hat in his hand almost always, worrying its brim until the brims wore out. He came without his wife, knocked once, walked in. Winter had completely slipped away in the rain and left a damp, warm procession of days. Blackflies, mistaking it for summer, had come alive. They were in the man’s hair and he brushed them away, a dozen of them, tiny black gnats. He caught one, however, and pinched it between thumb and forefinger, then stared at the burst of blood, the red stain like a lost thought on his finger.
“On the ice,” he said. “Shift of wind. Up ’til then things’d been going good. Nearly ready to return. Ice so unpredictable at that time of year. David was always one to be cautious, you would know that better than most. But he went in, not much after sun-up. Too far from his companions, I guess. Couldn’t get a proper grip on the ice, lost his pick, legs and hands going numb, I suppose.”
Sylvie didn’t hear a thing beyond that.
“Guess we’ll hear the full story when they come back. It’s a sorry thing for all of us.”
He swatted at blackflies again as he put his hat back on his head. “Sorry for … bringing all this in,” he said, waving at the bugs as he walked back out.
So, at eighty, Sylvie still imagines this scene, created from the clever guesswork of her imagination.
The sun
is just barely up, shining bright. A man, her husband, climbs down from the side of a big metal ship that sits like a human grey disgrace in all that white, frozen beauty. Her husband rows with the other sealers across calm water laced with bits of ice stubble, docks besides a solid white sheet, flat as a stove top. She hates that pickaxe in his hand and can see the dried seal blood on the sleeves of his coat. She sees him head off away from the rest. Preferring to be alone at the dirty deeds rather than talking it through with the others.
She hears the crunch of his rubber boots on the hard snow atop the ice. A short hike across the frozen expanse and there’s a mother with several seal pups. She sees their dark human eyes. Sylvie cannot help but think of those eyes as the eyes of children. The irony, the terrible irony of her David, so fearful of the future — of inadvertently committing some crime against humanity — doing this. She will never voice her view that her husband is some kind of killer, that they all are. It will be a private condemnation that she can closet away from the world of speech. For she loves this man deeply, has travelled every twist and turn of thread of thought in his mind that sent him out onto the ice at sunrise.
David is doing this for her, for their children who will never be born. She will forgive him. She hears his ragged breath as he hurries, stepping across one small space between the ice pans, a distance no greater than hopping across the North Brook. She sees the boot land with a hard thwack on the ice. She sees the axe swing free in his hand. She wants to be able to see his face, but she cannot. Perhaps it’s better that way. What would she see in his eyes? Determination? Exhaustion, more likely. Eyes fixed on something a million miles away. Thinking of her, perhaps. Thinking of the island.
David stumbles on a small ice ridge, collects himself, walks on towards the mother seal and her several young ones. The ice is bleached pure and white as white can be. A sound can be heard now as the other men drive axe picks into the skulls of young and old seals alike as their mothers howl and try to defend their brood, only to find themselves butchered too. Something so appallingly wrong with this scene that it is inconceivable to Sylvie that she herself is somehow connected to this. But she is connected, inextricably so. This spectacle is part of her life, will never leave her.
Sea of Tranquility Page 5