by Lisa Moore
Yes, my father died on the Ocean Ranger, John said.
They’d found his father’s glasses tucked away in his shirt pocket. John’s father had taken off the glasses and put them in his pocket. He couldn’t see a thing without his glasses. He must have stood on the deck as the rig was tipping, removed his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket, and then he probably jumped. His father would have had all his bones broken if he’d jumped from that height. But he might still have been alive when he hit, John thinks. John imagines he was alive. He has always imagined it that way.
My father knew they were going down, John said.
This is what you’d start with, Mr. McPherson said.
John opened the paper and it was more than he’d imagined and he kept a neutral expression.
… . .
Helen Making Wedding Dresses
HELEN HAD TRIED yoga and she had taken up running and when she was in her thirties she had started teaching a waterfitness program for women over fifty at the Aquarena, youth being her only qualification. She had worked those old ladies hard and she had learned how aqua-fitness was like everything else, dragging your limbs through all that water, jogging on the spot through a massive weight.
In the 1990s she had developed a hobby making wedding dresses, evening gowns, prom dresses, a hobby that became something of a business. She had nearly lost the house after Cal died; it took a long time for the settlement. She’d almost lost everything. The bank had threatened, but she had kept the house.
The family went without, certainly. But children don’t need much, Helen thinks. She had raised her kids on nothing. They had not been spoiled. She could certainly say that about them. She’d shopped at the Sally Ann. Children needed food, yes. They needed a warm bed. She and her kids had got through.
My girls are unscarred, Helen thinks. My girls are frugal and shrewd, but they know how to have fun. When her girls were young, Helen had an idea she wanted them to be free of guilt. It was not an idea she had been able to put into words. But it was what she had wanted for her girls.
John could brood. He spent every cent he got his hands on. The girls had been wild until they’d had children of their own, and then they’d become serious. They read parenting books and nodded at the wisdom and told their children, You were not bad, your behaviour was bad. I think you need a time-out.
Helen had called her own children little Christers and told them she would lash their arses or skin their hides if they gave her any sauce, or she’d threaten to horsewhip them. She had flicked her slipper at them when they were rude and, she reminds her daughters, it had worked well enough for them.
A good swift kick in the arse, she would tell them. They were going to get a clout.
Now Helen babysits the grandchildren and makes her daughters go out and get drunk. She bought the babies pacifiers when the girls were dead set against pacifiers, and said, Who’s a saucy baby? She smiled until the babies smiled back. A baby can smile back a couple of hours after she’s born. It’s not gas, like the books say; what bloody nonsense.
She fed her grandchildren ice cream for the first time when they were five months old and watched their little faces. She watched as they smacked their lips and thought about the cold and got their first real hit of sugar, and how gleefully they went after the spoon. Oh-da-dear.
Helen spoils her grandchildren as best she can. We don’t need to mention this to Mommy.
Maybe it is true that John was her favourite. He didn’t fit in when he was a kid. He was always hugging someone or wrestling someone to the ground. Johnny was a little scrapper. How many times have I told you? When will you learn? He shouted out in his sleep, a deep ongoing argument. If Johnny cried he’d claim something had got in his eyes and he’d rub them hard with his fists.
Dust from the stupid carpet, he’d say, and kick the old rug with his sneaker.
Cal had bought him Jesus boots one afternoon at a yard sale. Cal couldn’t swim but he coached John from the wharf. Come on, Johnny, you can do it. Two Styrofoam pontoons, one for each foot. The squeak when Johnny worked his feet into the holes. It had gone through her.
You never saw a father so proud of his kids. Helen could say that about Cal. Cal told Johnny that with these boots on, he could walk on water. The white pontoons kept Johnny upright for a few strides before his legs scissored out and he splashed down and went under, coming up laughing and gasping and punching the surface with his fists, swimming after the freed pontoons sailing on their way with the wind.
But after his father died, Johnny was afraid of water. Wouldn’t put his face under the shower head if he could avoid it.
And John has no children. John is capable of hard work, and when he drinks, he really drinks. He forgets to call. He travels when he feels like it, or he goes away on business. Sometimes he is remote. He can lie easily when it suits him. He is, Helen thinks, clutching the phone somewhere in New York right now, talking with a near stranger, the woman who will be mother of his child.
… . .
Helen and Louise Are Lucky, August 2008
AND THERE WAS Louise striding across the beach, and I said, Louise, I said, you’re fifty-eight years old and you have a bad heart. I said, If you attempt to rescue those children you won’t come back and I can bloody well guarantee it.
This poor young mother was racing up and down the beach screaming for help. She had two small children—what were they, Louise? Eight and six years old maybe, and they were on an air mattress and the undertow had carried them out, and there was Louise.
They were out there so fast, Louise said.
We go to Topsail Beach every weekend when it’s nice during the summer, Helen said. Bring a picnic, have a few swallies.
These youngsters screaming for help and the mother gone cracked, Louise said.
Nobody else could swim, Helen said. So next thing, there’s Louise striding across the beach and into the water and she’s giving it to her, batting the jellyfish out of her way.
I didn’t care about the jellyfish, said Louise.
You know what that water is like, Helen said.
I didn’t mind the cold, Louise said. And people were standing up on the beach saying, Who’s the old lady. Look at the old lady go.
Louise was in the paper for saving the children on the air mattress. Her white hair smoothed down and the zebra towel and a big smile.
We had seen what was going on and Louise stood up, and I said about her heart. I said to her, Louise, let someone else do it. She just stood up and ran down the beach and dove right in. And then the crawl. Which we’d learned as children. Head down in the water and turning to the side for breath and the arms straight and the fingers straight, and each wave passing over Louise. She just kept going and there was a flare on the ocean and Louise was almost a silhouette, and I could see the heads of the children but I couldn’t hear them, whatever way the wind was blowing. And when Louise got there, she hung on to the edge of the air mattress and she must have been trying to calm the children, or just catching her breath. Everybody on the beach up to their knees in the water.
She’s too tired, someone said. The old lady is tired. The old lady won’t make it.
This is my sister they were talking about. And I’m going, She better Jesus make it! Then a speedboat came around the spit of land from the next bay, and not a second too soon I’d say, and the boat was upon them in a minute and turned a hard turn, throwing up a wave of water, and they cut the engine.
And everyone was pulled into the boat, first the children, and then Louise.
… . .
Minor Redemptions, October 2008
BARRY’S CELLPHONE RANG and he unsnapped a tiny leather case on his tool belt and the thing was invisible in his hand.
There was a kind of carpenter who cleaned up after himself, and Helen gathered Barry was that kind. He’d worked big sites but he could do the small jobs too. He had built a boat alongside his father and he mentioned this while looking at the sky one evening
, and Helen found it very Old World and romantic. But this was not the old world. Or, they still lived in the old world but it was not romantic.
We all learned that way, Barry said. He was steady, neither fast nor slow, and sometimes he stood holding his forehead, working out the math of an angle. She had noticed a small tremble in his pinkie finger when he stood that way.
He kept a pencil behind his ear. It was solitary work and he sized up everything he did. He knelt on one knee, and placed the spirit level, and drew the pencil over the wood, and put the pencil back behind his ear. His work required physical strength, and that wouldn’t last forever.
Helen could guess that Barry had not saved; he had the face of someone who worked hard and spent what he earned. It was a wrinkled and tanned face. And the eyes. They were the kind of eyes people would remark on, and they were hard to get used to.
Helen listened when Barry’s cellphone rang. The ring was a theme song from a TV show, but she could not place the tune. Something from the early eighties, something the kids had watched back then.
She guessed that Barry was Catholic. They knew each other, the Catholics did. She could tell without asking. It was in his posture and the way he spoke. He was from the Southern Shore. His stories had to do with sacrifices that paid off, and minor redemptions. There was a self-deprecating humour to his stories, and he was willing to let a silence stand. There was respect for privacy and a belief that pleasure required mystery and that there was mystery behind every bald and ordinary fact.
Helen could picture Barry in his twenties with a sink full of dishes and cans of Vienna sausages stacked in the cupboard. She could see the apartment. The people who would have visited and slept on the couch for months, and the women who would have hung around, halfway lost or on the way to somewhere else. Maybe he had been hard on women.
Barry was a self-taught carpenter, and his was a kind of knowledge that accepted how fast everything else was and it refused to be that fast.
Finicky, he said. You want to take your time. Helen had hired him to cut two arches from the living room to the dining room and to expose the fireplace and put down hardwood floors, and he would also do the painting. She wanted two bookshelves moved. And she wanted big windows in the kitchen.
The sills are rotten, she said. She ran her fingernail over the wood and the paint crackled up in pieces.
I’m not a painter, Barry told her. Helen would have to wait before he committed to the painting. He would have to see.
There are other guys will paint for you, he said. He squinted at the ceiling, his hands on his hips.
If need be, he said.
Helen had seen that his work was in demand. You won’t be available, she asked.
I’m pretty steady on, Barry said, up until June. Then I can’t be had for love nor money. He winked at her. She saw he was reliable even though he could have afforded to be sloppy. There’s only a few master carpenters in town, he said.
In October he put down the sub-floor and she stayed out of his way. It rained most of the time and there was fog. It was cold and she felt it in her wrists. If her friends visited, she introduced them to Barry and he nodded or he touched his cap, but he was absorbed.
The hammer was methodical and from the third floor, where Helen was, it sounded as though it were full of thought and knew how to drive an argument home. Not insistent, but declarative and certain.
She would be in her study sewing and would forget, for long stretches, all about the hammer.
Sometimes Barry would call out that he was going for coffee. Or that he was packing it in for the day.
I’ll leave these tools, he’d say.
He would tell her it was a nice evening. He would call out to her about the sky.
You should see this, Helen, he would say. There’s a bloody big red sun. That was Catholic. That was a Catholic thing to say.
There was a strain of loyalty in him that Helen could almost smell. Of course he didn’t go to mass or take communion. None of them practised any more, her generation. They’d gone to confession as children and been cowed by the idea of original sin, and they had been confirmed, and they still prayed.
None of them really believed, but they had been led to think that whatever existed was out there, whether they believed or not.
Barry stood up straight when he answered his cellphone and looked out the window. There was a bird feeder attached to the glass with clear suction cups, but the birds never came to it.
He said: What time should I pick you up? When he hung up, he whistled a part of the cellphone tune.
He has someone living with him, Helen realized. Someone he drives places, someone depending on him. He was not available.
… . .
The Portal
THERE WAS A smashed portal, and that is key. But everybody knows this already; there is always a key, there is always a portal. A wave of ice hit the window and it smashed. The metal lid had not been drawn shut over the glass, as it should have been, and the window smashed and water got over the electrical panel and short-circuited it. The men had to operate the ballast doors manually and they didn’t know how. But everybody knows that; so let’s just take a moment. Just slow down.
Imagine instead a man with his feet up—for the sake of argument—and a cup of coffee cradled near his crotch, and maybe he’s reading the manual. For the sake of argument: he has a manual open on his lap, and he’s going to place a call later to his wife, and he’s also got a book. It’s a long shift. Later on he will read the book.
Do we know what they had on the rig for supper that night? Helen does not know. She is imagining pork chops with applesauce and she is imagining big steel pans of mashed potato on the steam table, dusted with paprika, smoothed over, decorated with parsley. The men won’t eat the parsley. The Newfoundland men won’t. Cal wouldn’t.
The rolls were good. The rolls had butter melted over the top of them and they were salty, and there were stainless steel bowls of ice with smaller bowls in the middle full of pats of butter, and each pat is between two squares of waxed paper … But we should think about the manual. We should think about the portal.
It wouldn’t be a cup of coffee, it would be tea. And this guy has been on duty in the ballast room for about forty-five minutes and he’s leafing through the manual. If it’s coffee, it’s instant coffee. This is the part of the evening Helen likes to think about best—when the man in the ballast control room is having his instant coffee.
Imagine his surprise when the ocean forms itself into a fist and flies across the ballast room through that portal. The ocean burst through the window sometime between 7:45 and 8 p.m. So there is time for the man to have his coffee after supper.
We can imagine that in a moment.
First there’s the idea of ballast.
But first there is this: The ballast operators learned on the job or they learned through private study. Which means they leafed through the manual. They read it through.
There was a manual and they read it; or they did not read it.
Where’s the bloody manual?
The ballast control operators had been promoted from the drilling floor. They had marine experience or they had drilling experience, or they didn’t have very much experience in anything. They had no experience.
But they were in charge of maintaining stability. The company liked you to learn on the job because that way you learned the way the company wanted you to learn. They wanted you to learn a certain way, and that way can loosely be called, or referred to, or otherwise spoken of as their way. You learned their way. The company’s way. Which was: Don’t answer back. Which was: Do you want a job or not? Which was: All you have to do is read the manual. There will be long hours in the ballast room while you are on duty and that’ll be a good time to peruse the manual. Later on you might get a few courses, but it’s all in the manual.
There was a policy concerning who got promoted to the ballast control room, but the company didn’t follow it. One fell
ow didn’t have any drilling or marine experience at all. But he had a good attitude. It helped if you had a bit of university education. Or an education went against you. It was all about whether you wanted to learn. If you expressed interest. It depended on your attitude.
The portal and the fist of water, a piston driving itself through that portal, a fist of ice with stone knuckles; the ocean has become part monster, part machine, driving its paw-piston through that plate of unbreakable glass or whatever the hell and smashing it to smithereens … but forget the portal.
It’s still quiet in the ballast room.
Very quiet.
We know what’s going to happen so it’s hard to appreciate the quiet, but let’s just take a moment to do that.
Let the man have his instant coffee. Helen likes to imagine the time before things started to go wrong. When things start to go wrong it gets spotty. She’s easily confused. She tries to run down the corridors, she tries to find out where Cal is, what he’s doing, but she gets lost. He’s in his bunk but he won’t stay there. She doesn’t want him in his bunk. She wants him playing cards. She wants him with the other men. They would have been anxious, but they had faith in the rig. They had faith in that monstrous-large hulking mass of metal. It’s easier if there are a few men sitting around a card table and Cal is one of them. It’s easier if he’s playing a hand of 120s. As far as she knows, Cal never played a game of poker in his life, and if he bet it was with quarters. She gives him a pocket of change. She lets him win a little. She can see his hand cupping a little mountain of coin and dragging it towards him. She sees the way he lays down a heart he’s been hoarding.
Inside the control room there’s also a panel with brass rods that allows the ballast control operators to control ballast manually, and here’s the thing.