That was the story the way I heard it back when my dad first told it to me and that was the way I made my plans. Of course you all know about plans, now don't you? Life happens to you while you're busy making other plans. John Lennon said that in a song after getting back together with Yoko.
I guess she heard the music rise up in her heart.
That same year John Lennon was shot to death outside of his apartment home. I don't know if he was making plans when that autograph-hungry screw-up dropped down into a combat stance and unloaded four hollow point bullets into the Beatle with the brains; but life or something like it sure as hell happened all at once.
"Do you want to know how to give God a belly laugh?" my dad once asked me about a hundred thousand times or so, but who was really counting? It was a joke he liked to tell. A joke is nothing more than a story, except it usually happens pretty fast. "Try telling him your plans. That breaks him up nearly every time."
Right, dad.
So Sheila headed for British Columbia and as far as I know she made it and was living very happily ever after with her hoped-for career as a marine biologist and folk singer. By now she had probably come out of the closet as a lesbian because there couldn't be any other possible reason why she didn't really love me or at least that's the story that I tell myself these days.
I'm a little older now but I still haven't learned all that much. I guess we all need our own illusions to cling on to. They anchor us and sometimes they drag and drown us down but it's a comfortable kind of swallow.
Meanwhile, I headed for Toronto and got busy in the classes and met my self a brand new girl and lost her and three years later I was headed back for home, a half a handful of credits shy of my Bachelor in Literature, with another broken heart and a wallet that had seen better days. I didn't know if I was going back, ever again.
So that was my story.
No degree, no money and one more goddamn broken heart.
God was laughing all the way.
Now while I was busy making my way from that Toronto roadside to the Cape Breton town of Deeper Harbour, my dad was working his way deep into the telling of one more goddamn old ghost story.
Mind you, he didn't think of it that way at the time of the telling. Dad liked what he did for a living. He didn't mind that he'd grown too old to work in the coal mine. The truth of it was he'd never been all that happy down in the shadows and the darkness but he couldn't really say that he regretted his early retirement. In fact, about the only thing that Dad truly regretted was the manner in which he'd first saw the Gray Lady of Deeper Harbour.
Dad often told me just how much he truly regretted that on the very first time that he saw the Gray Lady of Deeper Harbour he had peed his best fishing pants in a drizzle of weak-bladdered panic. However, he made it a point to leave that particularly soggy detail out of the story most times that he told it.
"I saw her standing at the shore line, just a few paces shy of the high tide's furthest reach," Dad said. "Moving and shimmering like smoke rising on a still autumn morning."
Mind you, Dad wasn't the only person in Deeper Harbour to have seen the Gray Lady dance but he sure as hell could tell the story the best. The man was born with a paint brush for a tongue and a lyre heart.
"She was wearing a gallows rope about her neck, the hang-knot wound tight and proper, thirteen times."
"You mean a noose, don't you?" the tourist woman asked, eagerly following the ramble of his story with all of the heated ardour of her fat, bored romantic Calgary-born soul.
That was how we always classified them. There were male tourists and female tourists. The female tourists always seemed to take to Dad's particular brand of tale-telling. I'm not quite sure why but Dad always claimed that women were a fey lot by nature, transient and intangible, their souls made out of water and smoke and wistfulness and they were not to be trusted.
I once told Dad that particular theory was nothing more than a clear-cut example of his own innate patriarchal Maritime-based misogynistic tendencies. He in return had blinked hard and asked me where I'd heard such language as that and I'd just wink and throw him back his very own fish hook grin.
"That's news to me," the tourist-woman's husband snidely cracked, stretching the word "news" out so that it almost rhymed with "noose". The tourist-man had small pig eyes and a sun burn that stretched so tightly across the beach of his balding skull that you would have sworn he'd pop open if he ever dared blink.
Dad dutifully chuckled. It wasn't the first time that he'd heard such a joke. He was certain that he had heard all of the jokes that could possibly be told about the ghost of a woman walking the shores of a Cape Breton mining town. He considered such jokes to be a natural hazard of the storyteller's trade. If you spun out a yarn long enough, sooner or later somebody was bound to try and tangle it up.
"Aye," Dad said, although he only said aye when he was talking to the tourists. For his family it was yup or you bet unless he didn't want to give them out any kind of a straight answer, which was most of the time now that I think about it. "A noose is exactly what I mean."
Dad had decided that the male tourists were usually the hardest to please – trained as they were in concrete, facts, and batting statistics. Your average male tourist prided himself on his ability to see straight through the old hocus-pocus but Dad had learned that as long as he did not rise to their gibes and allowed them their simple-minded sardonic victories, the story would win itself through nearly every time.
"No noose is good news," the husband went on, not knowing when to quit.
"Shh," the tourist-woman chided. "Why a noose?"
The noose was Dad's own addition to the tale. There were other witnesses and tale-tellers who swore that the Gray Lady of Deeper Harbour wore a long trailing pale silk scarf. Some said it was a fish net, some said it was a scrap of heaven itself. Now, that Dad had begun adding the noose to his version of the tale, others had tagged along after him and had begun to add that single suffocating nuance but as Dad would be glad to tell you – he got there first.
"She hung herself," Dad said. "Out of grief for her lost husband."
The male tourist laughed.
"That's a riot," he commented. "Say Lucy, do you think that you'd hang yourself if I ever went and died?"
"Odds are I'd hang myself off of the neck of the nearest good-looking sailor," Lucy coldly replied. "So fast that it would make your dead head spin."
Now Dad had been telling that story for a lot of years, since he had grown too old to work the coal mine. He had told that story to so damn many tourists so damn many times that he was certain that he didn't even have to bother speaking the words any more. He was sure he just needed to settle a stare onto whoever he was telling the story to and they would feel the words and pictures playing themselves out in that gray border that whispered between imagination and reality and without fail they would begin to fumble for the practical applause they kept folded neatly within their wallets.
"She was waiting out there in the darkness, wearing nothing but a skirt of tattered sailcloth," Dad would go on. That part usually got the male tourists going. There was nothing like a scantily clad female to kindle a fellow's imagination.
"Is that true?" someone would always ask.
That was how it went, most times. Someone would always try to put the kibosh to the balderdash.
I'm not quite sure just why folks feel they needed to do it. Perhaps it's because your average city dweller has been over-exposed to documentaries, news programs, reality television and dummy's guides to damn near anything. If something couldn't be historically documented, factually backed up or broken down into bite-sized sound bites than it just wasn't worth listening to. It was a sad fact indeed that the fine art of bullshit had decomposed down into nothing more than a heap of mouldering roadside mulch.
"It's as true as I'm telling it to you," Dad would always answer and then he'd smile that enigmatic fish hook grin of his. Now I know that Dad had practised that grin
of his nearly a thousand times in the bathroom mirror, so often that his reflection had become perpetually etched into the shower-steamed memory of the silvered glass.
The grin was a gimmick, a prop, and it reeled his audience in damn near every time. They'd pony up and pay him for his tale-telling expertise and then maybe they'd throw in a brew or two at the local tavern and that would prime the dusty pump and perhaps bring on another story or reminiscence or outright lie.
I ought to know. I had grown up listening to that man's stories since my ears first learned how to inhale. I've taken in nearly everything that man has told me and only spit back what I couldn't manage to swallow, most of which got knocked straight back in whether I liked it or not.
And yet no matter how much I spat out it always came back at me. There was an unwritten rule down here in Deeper Harbour regarding the sanctitude of your father's stories and how closely you ought to listen to them. A father's footsteps were planted deep for his son to follow in; deep like a river, deep like a rut; and my Dad's steel toed mining boots left prints that were damn near fathomless.
My Dad finished his story and then he looked up and saw me standing there at the edge of the small crowd of tourists who had gathered to hear him tell his tales. He nodded, just to let me know that he'd seen me, and then he tipped his hat to gather up his hard-earned plunder, grinning that fish hook grin of his all the while as if he'd seen me standing there the whole time.
And maybe he had.
People love to tell you how small towns are so friendly and open. Everybody knows your name, they will tell you. People help each other and sometimes they do. However, growing up in a small town I can tell you that secrets are tied awful tightly. People know things in small towns, things that are never going to see the light of day. They sink these secrets in their hearts and memories and sometimes they just throw them out to sea.
"Secrets are nothing more than stories that haven't been told yet," Dad once told me. "Did I ever tell you the one about the fellow who poked his murdered wife's corpse into a pickle barrel that he sank out in the sea?"
I knew how that one went. It seems that old murderer leaked the secret out into a barrel of beer and before too long the whole town had taken themselves a sip of that beer and they knew just where he'd sank her bones. They never bothered hanging him because they saw he was already hanging down there on the shoreline staring out at the sea water and the waves were talking to him in his dead wife's voice.
Stories.
I've heard an awful lot of them.
This one beats his wife and that one cheats on his income tax and that third fellow in back hasn't wept a tear since Marilyn Monroe passed away. The secrets of a small town are deep or shallow and they tangle amongst each other and sometimes they are kept and sometimes they are broken and sometimes folks just talk them out.
"So, did you just get into town?" my dad asked me, right after the crowd of tourists had cleared away.
"Not more than a half an hour ago," I said. "It took me that long to find you."
He hadn't changed that much as far as I could tell. A little more tattered around the edges and the salt stained tide of gray-goodbye-forever was slowly creeping up from his temples across the pepper-pot of his hair. He still had that ice pond gaze that seldom thawed, as if there were something more than the truth swimming around down somewhere deep beneath his eye-holes and every now and then he'd blink.
"You weren't looking that hard, now were you?" my dad remarked.
He'd pegged it dead true. This time of the year my dad kept his dockside vigil handy to where the tour buses unloaded and I ought to know that. It was a tactical fact that he'd pre-tipped more than his share of bus drivers and tour guides; buying their loyalty so that they would point him out as a local attraction whenever the buses pulled into town on their long slow winding pilgrimage around the Cabot Trail.
"I'm always down here where the fishing is the best," Dad said.
He peeked into his hat at his earnings. He shook it with a thick jingle and grinned like a child who'd found themselves an extra-candified Halloween sack of goodies.
"A good haul?" I asked.
He counted it out by touch, whistling tunelessly as he tallied up his take. It wasn't for me to be asking how much the man earned.
"Not bad at all," he said. "Come on up to the tavern with me so we can talk for a while. Or would you rather come down to the shack and we can open up our selves a can of beans."
I told him the tavern sounded just fine to me.
He pocketed his earnings. The coinage and foldable cash made a heavy stuffed metallic sound in his pocket. If he'd stepped into the harbour right then he would have sank like a stone.
The man had done well for himself.
He always did.
"You're buying," he added.
I guess nothing ever changed.
The tavern looked the same as when I'd first left this town three years ago. The TALES FROM THE CRYPT pinball machine had been plugged in and was nearly running back when I'd departed but by now it was unplugged and maybe dead forever. There were a few new stinks and some of the old ones had begun to fester. There were a couple more ceiling lights strung up higgly-piggly for the sake of the tourists who didn't want to strain their eyes as they strained out every last drop of local colour from the faded canvas of Deeper Harbour existence.
"Given half a chance a tourist will wring a rainbow dry," my dad always told me, and I guess he was right at that. "They want their money's worth and a little bit more, every time."
In the winter time the bartender would turn the extra lights down and turn the tacky Christmas lights back on and the local crowd would squat down before the blue-white glimmer of the hockey game as the roll-your-own smoke spiralled upwards and tattooed itself upon the irrevocably stained wood grain ceiling. People would sit there, night after night, talking of the rumoured return of the coal mine and the possibility of a new call center setting up and a half a hundred brand new jobs that never came to be. They would sit and make wet ghost-ring hieroglyphics on the black bar counter top with the bottoms of their beer glasses, overlapping the memory of the ghost-rings that their grandparents had left behind. They would sit and talk and watch the rings slowly almost fade away as they waited for the summer and the next crop of tourists to roll in.
"I'll have a bottle of water," I said.
Dad snorted at me in pure ridicule.
"This is a tavern and you'll have a draft of beer with your father," he told me. "Water is bad enough when it gets into your boots. Why in the hell would you want it in your belly?"
"I like water," I said.
"I want to drink a toast," he informed me. "We'll need beer for that."
"I can toast with water," I said.
"You were brought up to know better than that," Dad corrected. "If you toast with water then somewhere in the world a seafaring man will surely meet a watery grave."
It was true, he had told me that nearly every Christmas when he would stand before the Christmas turkey with his glass full of rum and cheerfully declaim "The only thing that should be mixed with a glass of good rum is your own spit."
So I relented. Dad held up four fingers and the bartender brought us four glasses of cold draft beer. I resisted the urge to check the contents of my wallet. If I was broke Dad would just have to foot the bill, like it or not. I sat there and watched as he carefully salted down his beer glass from the shaker on the table.
"To eliminate intestinal drag," he said, with a wry grin, just the same as he'd said every other time I'd seen him salt his draft ale. My Dad was nothing if not a creature of habit.
He took a swallow. It sounded good going down. I followed with a swallow of my own and the beer tasted damn good indeed and I cracked a smile. I guess his chronic alcoholism was as contagious as his fish hook grin.
"I thought we were going to make a toast," I said, taking another swallow.
"The pump needs priming first," he said. "So how goes your
schooling?"
"I'm taking some time off to figure things out."
"So you've quit," he said.
It wasn't a question. There was no sense in lying to the man. I never could manage that trick. You might as well try to out-preach the Pope.
"Yes sir," I said. "I've quit."
He smiled that fish hook, smug and ironical and then he raised his glass, figuring he had won.
"So how is my mother?" I asked, determined not to let him win this round.
The fish hook flattened out.
"Your mother is fine," he said through tight dry lips.
"Talked to her lately, have you?"
I didn't need to ask. I already knew that my mother and dad didn't talk very much these days. I don't know if they ever had.
My dad's real wife saw to that - the woman in the water, the Gray Lady herself.
"We don't talk too often," he said. "I don't have much call for libraries these days. There are too damn many stories in them."
My mother worked in the local library. In fact, she'd built it. The library was a passion for her, wrapping herself up in the art of document and factuality. I think she was comforted by the immutable nature of her profession. Even the fiction never changed – King, Koontz, Rice and Roberts with the occasional Sydney Sheldon, the inevitable Margaret Atwood and the undeniable Farley Mowat.
"You've never steered clear of a story before," I pointed out.
"It's not the stories I'm steering clear of." he said. "You know that."
"I bet she misses you," I said. "You really should talk to her, every now and then."
"Talking to her is what got me into trouble in the first place."
He had a point but I'd be damned if I'd let him know that.
"She's a wonderful woman," I told him. "You were a damn fool to let her get away."
"All women are wonderful," Dad said. "Try living without one. Oh wait a minute, you are."
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