Sea of Tranquility

by Lesley Choyce

  David, she knows, is now sick at heart and exhausted beyond anything he has known before. Aches for his island and home, vowing never to sign on for such a thing as this again. The sun is over his shoulder and he turns to feel the slightest tingle of warmth, warm as the breath of his wife asleep beside him on a winter night when he cannot begin to find the proper channel markers that will lead him to sleep. But he is exhausted still on this morning, his feet are like stone weights in the bottom of lobster pots.

  He has learned to read the ice, knows that he can trust even small pans if they have the right texture, the right look about them. He thinks he knows this frozen landscape, but he is wrong. He makes a leap onto a small ice pan, feels it tilt and give. He is amazed as he realizes that his brain had already given him the signal that it was a wrong step. Old instincts working but a split second too slowly, failing him. A steady stance in a dory is not the same as walking on springtime ice. He drops the pick, feels himself sliding, as if he has fallen onto a big kitchen table face first and its wooden legs give. He tries to grab onto something and then realizes the small ice island is upending itself and coming fully over on him.

  Cold knives of water fill up his boots and his oilskins and the hard ice comes down above him, shutting out the light and the sky. His hands form into fists and he pounds at it, then tries to push it away, but it has suddenly become a cunning, cruel thing of immense weight.

  Sylvie feels the bursting pain in the throat of her husband as he tries to scream, tries to claw his way along the underside of the ice to find the sweet, living air to feed his lungs. She feels the panic, the fear, things completely new and alien to her calm, cerebral husband. Then suffers the immense sadness and regret that comes with his final exhaustion and the knowledge of his foolish error.

  Sylvie draws a deep breath and tests her own breathing. With eyes still closed, she can see the surviving seals upon the ice with the morning sun warming their fur. She hears other men shouting in the enthusiasm of their bloody work but she does not turn in that direction. She is looking to the east, towards the rising sun, blooming warm red and yellow over the panorama of the ice field. She makes what peace she can with David’s belief that we live or die by chance alone. And envisions what is left of her husband, floating up in the stream between two stolid ice islands, his back to the sky, rubber boots keeping the feet afloat, his face down, as if something is of extraordinary interest on the bottom of the ocean.

  Chapter Seven

  Todd Sanger, twelve years old, from Upper Montclair, New Jersey, peered over the side of the steaming ferry boat. “Diatoms,” he said to his little sister,Angeline.“I bet there’s millions and millions of diatoms in there.” Todd was a smart kid who loved science; anything that had to do with science was very dear to him. His father had nicknamed him Beaver after an old TV show, but the kids at Upper Montclair Elementary had shifted it to Beavis.

  “Do they all have names?” Angeline asked.

  “There are quite a few different subspecies, and yes, they all have names. Scientific names in Latin.”

  “Wow.”

  “Some of them glow at night.”

  “I’d like to meet them.”

  Todd just gave her that big-brother look. Girls, what did they know?

  Actually Angeline knew a lot. She knew they were going to a magic island where fairy-tale people lived in gingerbread houses. She knew they were going to see whales. Whales and fishermen, and now they were sailing over a bay of diatoms, several million of them with Latin names and a lot of them friends with her brother. This is what Angeline knew and she perceived she was in a happily-ever-after story because that’s the way that all her mother’s stories ended for her.

  It was a day like no other she had ever experienced. Sun, sea, gulls like gravity-free dancers in the sky. Angeline’s mother and father by the railing, arms about each other. Angeline had only been on one other ferry before in her life— the Staten Island Ferry, where people spit over the side and ground cigarettes into the floor. Everyone on the Staten Island Ferry coughed and so did she when she traversed the dark waters of New York.

  No one was coughing on the ferry to Ragged Island. There were maybe twelve other people on board, and they all looked interesting to her for she knew they must be island people, all torn from the pages of a story book.

  “God, smell that fresh air,” Angeline’s father, Bruce, said. The air wasn’t really fresh at all but permeated with diesel exhaust from the big engine turning the propeller that churned the harbour waters beneath them.

  “Do you think there’s much poverty on the island?” Bruce Sanger’s wife, Elise, asked him.

  “I don’t think they have poverty here in Canada, at least not in the same way as in the States. People in rural areas might be poor but they tend to be self-sufficient.”

  Elise gave him that dubious look wives give their husbands when husbands pretend to know things that they really don’t. Elise was very concerned with social issues and volunteered her time to various organizations to stop child labour in Pakistan, to end cruelty to lab animals in Switzerland, and to alleviate educational deficiencies in the inner city in places like Newark and Paterson, New Jersey.“We’ll see,” she said. She knew that if there was any genuine poverty to be found on Ragged Island, she would sniff it out and rub Bruce’s nose in it. It wasn’t that she was cruel. She just liked being right.

  “This is going to be extremely educational for the kids,” Bruce said.“I think it was worth the long drive.”

  “I wanted to tell the manager of that motel in Maine that the moose head on the wall wasn’t appreciated.”

  “It was kind of spooky. But I’m sure it was just an artifact of days gone by.”

  “Still. It wasn’t appreciated. Killing animals for sport — that’s not a matter to be taken lightly.”

  “I agree.” Bruce hadn’t told Elise yet about every aspect of this curious eco-tour that the Chicago Internet tour agency had lined up for them. She knew about the whales and the island but not about Phonse Doucette’s junkyard. Bruce should not have been attracted to anything involving guns but something about this caught his fancy. He was hoping there would be something else on the island — after the whale boat tour — to attract Elise and the kids and keep them occupied. Poverty might work after all. If there was poverty, Elise would detect it and go to work studying it and he’d have some time to himself. Todd could go with him, maybe, while Angie tagged along with her mom for a look at island poverty. Bruce hoped he was wrong about poverty in Canada, after all. If there was a big junkyard, there must be poor people nearby, Bruce reasoned, but he knew he was far out of his familiar territory.

  Familiar territory to Bruce Sanger was his office at Small, Smith and McCall Investments. He had an important job as a stock analyst and advisor for a currently fashionable mutual fund called the Earth First Fund. It was an “ethical” fund, at least as far as anything could be ethical in the investment patch. Right before the trip, he pumped ten million dollars into an environmentally friendly ceramic roofing tile plant in Chile that was reported to be labour friendly. He’d also brought about a big push of the fund’s money into a geothermal power source in California and a super blue-green algae health food product company in Oregon. He wondered if there was something in a place like Nova Scotia that the ethical investing world had ignored. Something that did not diminish the ozone layer or rile Greenpeace and yet returned an 8 percent dividend each year. He wondered.

  The island grew upon the horizon ever so slowly as they steamed on. “We must be travelling at thirty knots,” Todd announced to his sister.

  “What do you mean?” In her mind, a knot involved a piece of rope.“How do you know?”

  “I just do. It’s a nautical term. Nobody ever says ‘miles per hour’ at sea. You’re always travelling at so many knots.”

  “And we have thirty of them, right?”

  “Right. I bet the water’s over twelve fathoms deep here.”

  �
��It is?”

  “Could be deeper. You could tell if you had sonar.”

  “Who is that?”

  “It’s not a who, it’s an it. Tells distance from an object, underwater. Pretty cool for old technology, when you think about it.”

  Todd had his doubts about old technology, though. He pondered how his father’s generation could have grown up without remotes for TVs. No laptops, no Internet. He was thankful he had been born when he had been and often suffered disbelief over the undeniable fact that people had lived in his parents’ time without the basics.

  Todd was looking forward to the whales, of course. He’d read a book on cetology and considered a future in research at sea. Diatoms glowing at night. Lots of high-tech equipment. Maybe go down in a submersible and see really ugly creatures on the bottom of the sea. This boat ride was a good start — give him the feel for life at sea. And he liked what he found so far: on a boat (old nautical technology, but that had already been factored in and was to be expected), travelling at about thirty knots in twelve fathoms of clean salt water. If you fell overboard you’d drown if no one scooped you up right away. That added an element of danger, which he liked. Todd leaned far over the side of the railing and peered into the frothing water by the hull of the metal boat.

  “Careful,Todd,” his sister chastised him.

  He ignored her but suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder. For a split second he imagined it was someone about to push him overboard. He’d heard about that happening on the Staten Island Ferry. Instead, the hand gently tugged him back, and he turned around to see a young man in greasy overalls, a small blond mustache and a curious kind of smile on his face. “Wouldn’t lean over like that, lad, if I’s you. Could fall in. Chilly still, ya know. Too early to swim. Gots to be careful.” Alistair Swinnemar was missing three teeth where they had been punched out of his right jaw. He still had a hand on Todd’s shoulder.

  Alistair lived on the island and often got into trouble, but he was kind and good-natured as a general rule. He feared the little tourist kid might go overboard and he’d have to go in after him. Not much of a swimmer, like most islanders, but what could you do if a kid went splash?

  Alistair let go of Todd and laughed at the look on the kid’s face. Todd was wondering how this galumph got away with touching him. If this had been New Jersey, and a stranger grabbed a kid like that, he would have been arrested. Alistair saw the goofball look on the kid’s face and shrugged, looked at the kid’s sister and she shrugged too. Angeline liked the funny-looking islander who had maybe just saved her brother’s life. She wondered if they all talked like that on the island where they were going.

  “Going to have to hire an interpreter if we want to understand them,” Todd said to Angeline after Alistair had walked away.

  Angeline saw trees on the island now — tall, dark green evergreens like in the picture books her mother read to her at bed time. She saw a few houses that seemed as if they had come out of the pages of books as well. All brightly coloured, the ones along the shore. It was like watching a Disney movie with a really slow but nice beginning. Arriving at a new place, far from home. Diatoms in the water, gulls making noises like “cronk, cronk, cronk” in the air. The sound of the big engine. A sky big like a huge blue bowl turned upside down over your head. She couldn’t help but giggle.

  “I’ve never seen a place like this before,” her brother grudgingly admitted. The island slowly grew larger and this reminded Todd of the shots of Jurassic Park in the movie, the helicopter coming in from the sea. If he was lucky, he conjectured, there would be raptors.

  Bruce smelled fish as they approached the government wharf on the island. It reminded him of walking past the kitchen at Tomile’s Spanish Seafood Restaurant in Greenwich Village. On the way to the washroom you had to walk past the kitchen and the smell of seafood was not always that pleasant there. Dead fish is still dead fish.

  Crates of lobster in seaweed were waiting on the island dock for a trip to the markets on the mainland. Several hundred confused lobsters, kidnapped from their deep private lives and hoisted aloft into an alien world. Lobster intelligence, brain evolution asleep at the wheel for a thousand years. Exoskeletons did not always protect. Some sort of evolutionary trade coming on here: a family arriving from the greater New York area, just getting off the boat as bug-eyed crustaceans from the local sea floor head south to feed the fat faces of businessmen from the same locale. An exchange of hostages. The lobsters getting the raw end of the deal. Nutcrackers, claw crackers, who knows what awaiting them. Pliers maybe, electric cutting tools, vice grips to help get at their meat. Destiny awaiting.

  “This place reeks with authenticity,” Elise said. Colourful old lobster pot floats hung from a big poplar tree. Cars without mufflers idled on the concrete wharf and greeted returning husbands, wives. Alistair Swinnemar lollygagged, talking to the hangashores, and then threw one leg over his Yamaha dirt bike and started it up, spit broken clam shells under the tires, and roared off, the engine sounding like a bumblebee amplified through an old Marshall amp with a really big stack of concert speakers.

  The Sangers disembarked and clung together like they had just gone back in time. Bruce surveyed the shoreline; saw a square white building with particle board walls and a sign: “The Aetna Canteen”; saw people driving big, old, rusty cars slowly up a gravel road. No license plates. Men and women with tanned, creased faces like potatoes left in the bin too long. Bruce knew he had found what he was looking for — something completely unlike his familiar Wall Street world or the claustrophobic backyard universe of his neighbours back in Upper Montclair. Something like this. Authentic. All his life he had dreamed of authenticity, felt he was trapped in an artificial world where nothing was true. This was the proverbial real thing.

  He walked down the wharf toward land and Angeline picked up a small dried starfish that had been dropped by a passing gull.“Poor thing,” she said.“Can we bring it back to life?”

  Todd harrumphed.“Sure. If we had the right enzymes.”

  “Can we buy enzymes here?” Angeline asked.

  “I doubt it,” Elise said, looking at the marker buoys hanging in the trees and then at the small garden patch behind where aluminum pie plates dangled from spruce posts in the light sea breeze.

  “Your brother’s not telling the truth,” Bruce said.

  “I read it somewhere. You can bring things back to life with the right enzymes. Not people maybe, but some things.”

  “Perhaps. Angeline, I’m afraid it’s dead. You can keep it if you want. A souvenir.”

  “I don’t want a souvenir. I’d rather it came back to life.” She tossed it into the clear water near the wharf and it floated a second, then sank to the bottom.

  Bruce scanned the hill ahead until he saw what he was looking for: sunlight glinting off the windshields of junk cars, what looked like hundreds if not thousands of them. He cupped his ear to listen for the ting of rifle bullets hitting car doors but heard nothing. Too early in the day, perhaps.

  Elise wondered if the reading levels of the children in the island school were far below the national norm. She considered other assorted problems that might beset an isolated island like this. Incest, inbred families maybe. Already she’d seen signs of a critical need for dental help here. True, it didn’t appear to be anything like the urban poverty of New York or Newark, but she was sure there was a quiet desperation here, people in need of help, her help. A report could be made to her club back in Montclair. It was always on the lookout for unsung charitable causes. Some people in a place no one had heard of before in need of real assistance. This could be the ticket.

  The Sangers had walked right past Moses Slaunwhite’s whale tour boat. The sign was down for painting, touching up. So instead of loitering and asking for information on whale-watching, the New Jersey family sauntered toward the only commercial establishment on the shore: the Aetna. “Lobster sandwiches $4.95,” the hand-painted sign read. “With or without Sauerkraut.”“Beans a
nd Bread $3.95.”“German Food Upon Request.” Elise wondered what the German food could be: things made from intestines and ground kidneys, no doubt, or fatty sausages with dry, caked blood. She was not a fan of anything German, particularly their food.

  Bruce asked the girl at the cash register inside if she had any bottled water. Niva? Aquafina? Perrier? But the girl shook her head no.

  “Got some pop in the cooler. Pepsi, Doctor Pepper, Sprite.”

  “Any ginger beer?” Elise asked.“Or Snapple?”

  “Sorry, just what’s in them cans.”

  But everything in “them cans” was Pepsi, Doctor Pepper, Sprite. Bruce bought four cans of Sprite and they retired to the lawn outside, where they discovered an old woman sitting at a picnic table with a display of home-baked goods in front of her. She had no sign or anything, and Bruce silently asserted that here was the least aggressive salesperson, if she were indeed selling anything at all, that he’d ever seen. It would be worth a laugh back at the office where his colleagues prided themselves on being the most aggressive traders in the ethical stock markets of Wall Street, if not in North America.

  The old woman was looking at them. Not begging them to buy with her look, just smiling, being friendly. Angeline ran over to her and looked the old woman straight in her eye.

  “How old are you?” she blurted out;to her, the woman looked positively ancient. She had never seen any woman who looked this old before. Both of her grandparents were dead and she had been privately in search of a grandmother for the last year of her life.

  Sylvie looked at the child whose parents remained at a cautious distance. “I’m eighty,” Sylvie whispered, “but if your folks ask, I want you to tell them I’m a hundred and one.”