Sea of Tranquility

by Lesley Choyce

  A gull dropped down from the sky and poked once at it but, finding it unsavoury, didn’t scoop it up.

  Moses and Viddy sitting at their kitchen table with hot coffee cups. Talking about selling the boat. If they sold the boat they’d have enough money to stay on the island and not work. Then again, if they sold the boat, they couldn’t go ashore for supplies once a week or haul the kids back and forth to the boarding school ashore. But if they kept the boat, they’d have to move ashore so Moses or Viddy could find regular work. A fine fix that was.

  “Jesus, I don’t want to be separated from the kids each week. We’d be like strangers on weekends.”

  “But they’re closing the school for sure. Wiring. Mould, they say. Mould in the walls. They’re talking of tearing it down.”

  “Mould. Mould and dust mites and anything they can use. I’d rather my kids suffered a little mildew in their lives than have to move ashore and suffer all that.”

  “We’re screwed,Viddy old girl. Funny, I thought you’d be the one to say you didn’t mind moving ashore. Stores and such.”

  “I know. I’m surprised too. Something about old days and old ways.”

  “Tansy and wormwood to cure whatever. Jigging from a dory. Winter haul-up, kraut and summer savoury. Mending nets. How can all that stuff just fade off into the past?”

  “You sound like you’re a hundred years old.”

  “And then some,” Moses said. “I’m my father’s son and his father’s grandson. I got their stories fixed in my head to the point that I think I’ve lived all those lives. I know all the nooks and crannies of the past, but I don’t have a clue about the future.”

  “Nobody does, I guess.”

  “They all laughed at me, you know. With the whale-watching thing and all. When it worked out, they hushed up, but when the tours didn’t work out, they were all down at the wharf saying they knew it was gonna turn out like this. They thought I was a fool, but a couple of them men quietly thanked me for saving the ferry and the island for a while. But then when it all turned to gull shit, even they started blaming me. They did that you know. All those ones we call our friends and neighbours.”

  “Yes, I believe they did. But they’ll forgive you and you’ll forgive them. And we move on.”

  She didn’t mean it that way, but he picked up on it.“Or we don’t move on. We hunker down like it’s just another big winter haul-up. Wait for the weather to ease. Wait for the fish to come back, wait and worry with the tides.”

  Moses found the words unsatisfactory to express what he was feeling, so he got up and went outside and began to split some cut logs. He upended several big chunks of birch and maple and then split them clean and hard until his wrists ached and his jaw muscles kind of locked up. He whacked one last piece with a big knot in it and the splitting maul got stuck good and hard.

  Moses left it that way and walked down to the wharf, fired up the engine on his boat, and steered her straight to Mutton Hill Harbour, cursing every minute he was on the water. He docked her and went to talk to the bank about the value of his boat. He felt bad all of a sudden that he had let everybody down. How was he to know the whales would move off? He couldn’t blame the blasted government for that, could he? Ecotourism, the word made him want to laugh or kick at some-thing really hard. A lifetime of building himself up. He’d been good at it. Him with his good instincts, his perfect timing. Pure, unadulterated bullshit.

  Just before he walked through the door of the godforsaken branch of the Royal Bank, he tried to conjure a picture of him and Viddy and their two boys in some nice little house near the water here in Mutton Hill Harbour. He tried to see himself sitting on a screened-in porch, looking out at rich folks’ sailboats bobbing at their moorings. He saw it all, clear as day. And it made his throat go dry as dead, grey ashes in his old wood stove.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  August was coming to an end. An end of many things. Families had already moved ashore. Others were still in a quandary. As if it wasn’t really going to happen. Everyone was worried about the kids the most. Come September, some believed, it would be discovered that it was all a bad joke. Life would go on as usual. The school would stay open. Kit would teach. The ferry would continue on into the next century. This was what some wanted to believe, despite the fact that they knew politics had failed them, not that it had ever done any good. All manner of Halifax appeals and phone calls to Mutton Hill Harbour lawyers and even sit-down visits with more provincial advisors and government men in Halifax. None of it had done any good. Phonse shouting at the premier, throwing a beach stone through the man’s window on Hollis Street. Moses acting more civil. Kit and Greg together proposing one alternative scenario after another to save the island community. Greg with a laptop showing a workable cost analysis of keeping the island alive.

  But it was as if the government wanted to wipe the place off the map of Canada. The eco-tourism was a gigantic embarrassment after all that media mess. Another failed enterprise that, in retrospect, seemed farcical: travel agency in Chicago sending down tourists from Minneapolis to go look at whales off Ragged Island with no whales to be seen. And now all those Halifax men in suits who knew how to keep their cool when families and lives were being ripped apart.

  And back on the island. Hot and still. Humid, salty sea air in every room. Kelp lying in big, gnarled piles along the shoreline everywhere. Sylvie’s dory, paint still drying in the sun — upside down on the round stones beyond her house, facing out towards the sea. Sylvie had bought the dory years and years ago from Noah Slaunwhite, Moses’ father. She had rowed it around now and again when she needed freedom or wanted sheer physical exhaustion. But it hadn’t been used since she was sixty years old. Sixty to eighty had gone by in the blink of an eye. Twenty years like that. Snap of the fingers, a huff of air through the lungs in and out once or twice. Babies turned to grown men and women around her and having kids of their own. If you lived to be a thousand, she reckoned, a century would be like a burp after dinner.

  How or why the idea got into her head, she wasn’t sure. It took a full moon night to pull the idea out and set it down on the cotton tablecloth in front of her. The idea. If others knew her thoughts, perhaps they’d put her in some horrible institution with a snap of the fingers, but they would not find out. If she was old and crazy, so be it. Things rooted deep down in her being, powerful swelling emotional things, were swimming through her consciousness. Not much room for pure reason and logic, was there? William Toye would understand this business. The mad philosopher was with her often now, as was the young and gentle David Young. And the others. All her good dead men were with her as she painted the dory blue-green on those calm, hot days on the shoreline. Sanded, repaired, and corked the seams with new oakum. She ran her hand along the smooth deep keel. Studied the spruce knees to see if they were cracked with age or not. Decided the old boat was fit as fun could be. Painting felt like renewal. Some of the boatmen about would not trust an old boat even if it had been inside and dry for years. Old wood could get too dry and start to soak up anything once set upon the sea. The sea had no sympathy for anyone with a craft that was not in good repair.

  Sylvie did not worry. Noah’s little boat was a blue-green, glossy prize shining in the sun. They both had age as an ally, she was certain. Both lacked fear. Not a speck of it.

  Paint dry now. Cured for a couple of good dry days before the humidity set in. Not a blister, not a peel. Oar locks greased. Fresh oars, ordered in from the general store. Questions about what for and why, all answered with vague allusions to lawn ornaments, hobbies, an old woman and her ways. Small knot of men, old but younger than she, laughing. At her. Men who had given up their sea legs for over a decade. Men who would hang around the small general store and complain, never do much else with their lives. Complain and grow lines on their foreheads, watch their hair thin and blame the world for being unkind.

  The world was not unkind, Sylvie knew. She was part of it, not separated from it. Connected. To i
sland and sea. And in her connection to these things beneath her feet and surrounding her in the ocean of air, she believed she was some kind of hinge or oarlock or pivotal capstan. Which was why she had this task before her. And still trying to make good common sense out of it.

  An old woman was not a weak woman. The two were not synonymous, never were, except in the minds of people who didn’t know any better. Two arms and a strong back to lift on the gunwale, roll it over and see what the dory looked like right side up. Wobble and then balance. She had lines on her, yes. Sweet curve of the earth. A good arc of a keel. She sat in it, alone. Testing the feel of the new oars. Remembering something William had taught her:“Man named Buridan, a French philosopher from the early fourteenth century, believed that a person must do only what is of the greatest good. Nothing else. Cuts through all the seeming complexity, doesn’t it? Only problem is that philosophy students for the next six centuries became more interested in what became known as ‘Buridan’s ass,’ and they weren’t referring to his posterior.”

  God, she missed him. William Toye. Loved that talk. Still singing in her ears. Madness and wisdom that she carried like a tool kit in her head.

  “So the dilemma of Buridan’s ass is this,” William had said. “You have a very hungry animal, an ass, standing in a field. Starving he is. Before him are two perfectly good piles of hay and each is the same distance from where he stands. By Buridan’s principle of choosing the greatest good, the poor creature would starve.”

  But Sylvie knew Jean Buridan need not be laughed at. She’d whittled away at all those books of philosophy left in her care and found Buridan’s notion noble and simple, his starving ass not withstanding. And it had something, something to do with her plan. An image embedded deep in her thoughts, cropping up now almost every night.

  A woman in a small boat alone on a wide, empty sea. A tranquil, serene ocean without a ripple. Every time she peered at the face in the dream, tried to make it come into focus, she was always surprised that it was not herself. It was someone different each time. A woman even older than herself with a face of sagging flesh over sturdy bones. Another time it was the face of a young beauty, with blushing cheeks, white teeth, eyes like summer skies. Another time it was a woman crying, the face of anguish, and yet again it was a teenage girl laughing and laughing. She saw her there in her dream — the one that kept coming at her night after night, but a dream always beginning a different way. Started as pure chaos but then grew more focussed, and, each successive time, there would be the woman in the boat on the serene waters, far from land. Sylvie’s point of view always came in from above and from the back and passed through the person sitting on the boat until she was in front of her and looking back at who she was. Sylvie was sure the woman in the boat should be herself but it was not. She even got out old photographs of herself when she was young and they did not quite coincide.

  Until one night she could not see the boat or the woman at all in her dream. She could not find them even though she was at sea and scanning the horizon in all directions. She was not above looking down, however, and she could not move forward or back. Then she felt something tug at her arms and looking down realized she was rowing a dory. She couldn’t see any woman in the boat now because, at last, she had become that person. She woke up satisfied and confirmed.

  Sylvie was old-fashioned in that she believed in patterns of things. Unity, beginnings and ends, and threads or similar colours running through a fabric. She had learned the logic of quilts from her mother and the precision of needlework and the creation of patterns that made sense and pleased the eye. Order out of chaos. Even though her life became rich in complexity and often confusion, even embracing ideas or principles that seemed counter to each other, she still held onto some sense of the rightness of things. She would say that she grew up in an age when right and wrong were instilled in children, but she knew that was mostly hogwash.

  The world was a mess in 1917, the year she was born. Europe a tangle of bodies and military hardware, blood and bones on farmers’ fields. Sense and purpose of history and beliefs had created what was up to then the ultimate horror and chaos.

  The greatest paradox of her own life for Sylvie, however, was the realization that she was not born on the island. She was born in Truro, on a kitchen table among women who had gathered there from all over the province purportedly to come up with new ways to stop men from drinking alcohol. It was a Women’s Christian Temperance Union meeting. Even though Sylvie’s mother was weighted down substantially by pregnancy, she ferried ashore, took a bus to Halifax and train to Truro, and there she was.

  Women had been gathering in groups like that for decades, trying to figure ways to blot out the evils of alcohol. They had some success here and there. Sylvie’s mother, Grace, was not obsessed with eradicating booze, nor were many of the women who had gathered. Instead, they talked of many things. Most were rural women and felt a deep kinship. Some were bold enough to speak of new rights for women and ways to help women in trouble in rural areas of the province. What to do with men who beat their wives and got away with it. (Part of that was the alcohol problem, of course.) What to do to help women who wanted to fish, to teach, or to work in factories. Certainly they were being treated unfairly, as if unfairness was the way of the world and couldn’t change.

  Grace and the others around her believed the world could be changed. And they talked about it until tears streamed down their faces. They sang old Christian songs and cried some more, even though most admitted that they weren’t there to have anybody saved by Jesus. They wanted to save themselves.

  Grace was there with her husband’s strong approval. A raw-knuckled fishermen and cabbage farmer, Sylvie’s father, known locally as Crib, was a simple believer in possibility. “Anything is possible if you have spunk and the right equipment,” was his favourite saying. He drank some but not enough to do him much harm. Heck, Grace drank some homemade raspberry wine now and then too. So did many of the women at the temperance meeting. Only a handful of the hardcore purists were left in this faction of the women’s group. The really hardliners had split off to form an organization that would debate whether or not the death penalty was appropriate for men who abused alcohol.

  So there was this political, socially-minded backdrop for Sylvie’s birth, ten days earlier than expected, on the kitchen table in Truro. Tears of joy fell on her forehead as she was cuddled and swaddled and passed around for everyone in the room to see. There were three midwives attending and they did good work. No men were necessary. Grace stayed on for five more days after sending a message by telegram to Crib. Crib would later say that he hated the wait to see his new little daughter, that he felt like a man who had ants all over every part of his body, he was that restless. But he respected Grace on this one count.

  Before Crib arrived to take Grace back to the island, the women had each bonded with Grace and with the baby. They would never see one other again, as it turned out, but Sylvie’s birth meant something. Meetings and discussions had continued from early morning to late night. The world was a mess, the worst of it was war and the men who waged war. And the women who let it happen. The world needed saving, it needed fixing. God would not do it for them in the twentieth century. Men were too stubborn to change. Women would have to do it and they would need power and, as Grace would add,“the right equipment,” which to her meant education and attitude.

  Grace and Crib talked all the way back to the island. A year later, Crib signed up to fight in Europe. Crib agreed with Grace and everything she had to report about the Truro resolutions concerning peace and world justice. “The damn problem is we have to finish this damn thing first and get past it. Then we can talk about peace.” Crib left his baby daughter and went to a war where he never fired a bullet or suffered anything worse than dysentery. But he had seen the brutality and ugliness of war close enough and was damaged by it in some way he could never frame into words. He had helped carry hundreds of wounded men in and out of hospitals. H
e returned home vowing never to leave the island again. And, aside from a few jaunts into Mutton Hill Harbour, he kept that vow.

  Grace and her newsletters from the women’s group. Her father and his nets, his knife blade “nibbling off ” the outer leaves of cabbages. The smell of summer savoury grown for the Lunenberg sausage makers. The pet moose that she would never let go from her thoughts. Rocks on the shore. Seals lying in the sun, whales watching for her in the mornings of spring. An island life. And yet, she had not been born on the island.

  On the day Sylvie left for sea, she baked as usual and took her breads and muffins and cookies down to the Aetna, where they were too polite to remind her that there were not enough customers to hardly keep the place open. She dropped off some cookies and zucchini bread with Bruce’s family. Bruce talked nonstop on a telephone to people in all parts of the world. What was it that he did? It didn’t make much sense to her even though he had tried to explain it. And even though Bruce knew what his work was all about, each time he tried to explain it to someone on the island, even he ended up admitting that it didn’t sound plausible. Sylvie hugged Angeline to her and shook Todd’s hand when she said goodbye, not letting on what she was about to do. Elise gave her a long, cool drink of water from the hand pump at the sink.