Beach Reading

by Lorne Elliott

  A wave washed over my ankles and back again, dragging the sand from under my feet. I stepped in further. It was almost too cold, but the longer I stayed the more lovely it felt. I walked out up to my knees and stopped. There were a few jellyfish floating around which I avoided and walked out further, to my waist, stopped again, and turned. If I pointed my face just right I could hear the wind equally in both ears, and knew I was facing right into it. I washed my body with sea water, then to get it over with, crossed my arms over my nipples and fell backwards into the sea, dunking my head and immediately resurfacing.

  A new man.

  Or only a boy, really. I remembered, for the twelve-hundredth time that day, that I had never been with a woman, and I contemplated this woeful truth as I floated there, bobbing in the waves which made little slapping noises around my ears.

  Perhaps my lack of success in this area was one result of my unusual upbringing, or some innate strangeness I’d been born with. Undoubtedly I had been a very odd child. When I was nine, for instance, I latched onto the belief that my parents were not really mine, but that my real parents were these incredibly wealthy and cool people who had loaned me to “Dad” and “Mom” to make sure that I wouldn’t grow up spoiled. By the time I was eleven it occurred to me that if I was right, my real parents had better show up quick. They didn’t, so I was forced to accept the obvious: that I was the heir to the throne of a foreign country, switched in the cradle to protect me from a rebel group who was trying to overthrow my real parents’ kingdom, and awaiting my triumphant return to assume my place as their legitimate monarch. No letters to any existing royalty exploring my suspicions were ever answered, and Mom, when she heard about it, took me aside for a talk.

  “I don’t remember you being switched, Christian,” she told me. “And anyhow, you’ve always behaved like one of us.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Every one of you children, at one time or another, has thought they weren’t ours.”

  “No way!”

  “Afraid so. And I must say, it’s very complimentary.”

  “You’re saying that we might be related?”

  “There’s a slim chance, as repugnant as that might seem.”

  “Are you secretly wealthy and cool?”

  “Not terrifically wealthy. I like to think I’m pretty cool.”

  “You’re not royalty by any chance?”

  “Sometimes I’d like to believe that.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  She thought for a bit, then answered. “Because it’s unlikely. Or at least, not as likely as the idea that we are all here, on this earth, as we are, now.”

  The way she said it, irrefutable, shook the foundations of my universe. This was serious. It was all real, it was all happening now, and, with the implication that it would not last forever, it was all a bit terrifying. That night I had nightmares where it was up to me, child genius, to find The Cure for Death.

  “I think you should spend some time with Christian,” I heard Mom say to Dad next morning. So, when next he had time off work, that’s how we ended up taking a trip together to L’Isle-aux-Coudres, where he used to go when he was a boy. We pitched two tents and camped under spruce by the sea. It rained that night, and at first I didn’t quite know what I was supposed to be doing there. Then, with his work behind him, Dad loosened up, and I guess so did I. We played chess, and at first he just went through the motions, making the effort to stay engaged. He used a sober and conservative attack strategy while I harried his flanks with my cavalry, and imagined bold and artistic flashes of military brilliance. When he castled, I accused him of making up rules, and later, since he was apparently allowed to do that, I suggested that under certain conditions my bishop could move across the squares and not just diagonally. He challenged this, finally allowed it, and then added that in that case, he could jump with his queen, and also enlist the men he had captured as turncoat mercenaries. We played a few times more, with the rules becoming steadily more fun until the game finally fell apart by the sheer weight of its own complexity.

  The first clear night he pointed out the stars to me. There was the big dipper, upside down so that it would be spilling down its handle, and on the other side of the North Star, Cassiopeia.

  “You won’t be able to see Orion, this time of year,” said Dad. And he told me about the Hunter and the Dog Star, the hunter’s dog, at his heels.

  “What’s he hunting?”

  “Taurus the Bull and Aries the Ram.”

  “Pretty easy hunting. Farm Animals.”

  We picked berries and he showed me some edible plants. We tried fishing but caught nothing. We rented a boat and he let me row, the tide pulling us down river then back again as he explained it to me. He said it would be at its highest on the night of a full moon. Something bothered me about that, and a day later I asked him about it.

  “It’s not any more ‘full’ than when it’s a half-moon,” I said. “There’s no more moon, just more light on it. So why is the tide higher?”

  “You’ve been thinking,” he said. “That’s dangerous.”

  “Come on. Tell me.”

  “What are the gravitational conditions that would make the tide higher?”

  “More mass.”

  “And..?”

  “If it’s closer?”

  “Proximity. Yes. Also?”

  “Also nothing.”

  “Don’t get frustrated. So..?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Maybe it’s not just the moon that’s creating the tides.”

  “What? The sun?”

  “And the other planets and stars, to a very minor extent. But apart from the moon, yes, mainly the sun.”

  “So then…?”

  “Figure it out yourself. You can do it.”

  I placed rocks on the sand in different configurations of the earth, moon and the sun. I figured it out.

  At the end of a week, we went back to Montreal. I fell asleep south of Quebec City, and woke up as we were entering our driveway. But though I couldn’t articulate it then, I had made a discovery: The cure for not going camping with your father and boating and stargazing and making up rules for chess and figuring out how the tides worked, was to do all those things. The cure for death is life.

  ***

  Back on the beach on Prince Edward Island, I got out of the water and walked back to my belongings. All fatigue was completely washed away, but I was hungry now, so I took a potato out of the bag, washed it in the surf, scrubbed it on a red rock and ate it like an apple. It was tastier than you’d think. On a day like that, boiled cotton would be tasty.

  I saw a gannet pumping along the coast and, over the dunes, Bonaparte gulls with their military bearing and hangman’s hoods. Maybe this goddamned job was not going to entirely suck. I spread out my poncho, sat down, took out my notebook and listed the birds I’d seen in the park so far. Besides the ones I’d spotted while riding my bike I wrote, “crows, black-bellied plover, semi-palmated sandpipers, kingfisher, osprey, and sanderlings.” Next to this last entry I made a note: “What are the sanderlings eating?”

  The tide slipped notch by notch down the foreshore. The sun sank and reddened. The air turned cooler and I stood up and walked the quarter-mile up the beach and back, then picked a place near where I’d swum to pitch my pup tent. Because the sand wouldn’t hold the pegs, I tied the guy lines to large pieces of driftwood which I dragged from the quarter-acre field in the dunes. That would also provide my firewood, but I’d have to carry in drinking water.

  The wind was veering toward the town of Barrisway, which I could just see across the inlet, past the end of the point to the west. I took my binoculars and looked at a fishing boat returning to harbour. I crawled into the tent, ate another potato, and examined my thoughts to see whether I was ready to feel sad about my father. I felt a sudd
en twinge when it occurred to me that he would never have begrudged me for how happy I was feeling.

  2

  The next day, I woke up to the sound of a long swell on a smooth sea that rose and fell like something breathing, under an unruffled surface. It snapped and thudded on the shore, then a long wait till the next one. The sky was overcast, but the clouds were breaking up to the north and the wind had veered a few points towards Newfoundland.

  I crawled out of the tent and waded into the ocean, swam for a while, dried myself with my shirt, and crawled back into my tent. I pulled out my banjolele, tuned up, and went over my new scales in G, D and C.

  “Anybody in there?” said a voice outside, and I poked my head out the tent flap. A big girl in a red checked shirt too small for her was standing beside a twelve-year-old boy wearing the same make and size of shirt, but for him too big.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “You owe us money,” said the girl.

  “What?”

  “You’re camped on our land, so you owe us money.” She sighed like she was saying it solely out of a sense of duty.

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Twenty bucks.” She sighed again. “We’re suppose to kick anybody off our land unless they pay us. And we do need the money, so I kinda see the point, but I told Wallace already there’s probably a more civilized way than just, like, demanding cash from strangers. I mean, God, what are we, highwaymen? But when I tell him that he just starts singing some song he knows about ‘The Bold Deceiver.’ So like I say, we could use some cash and you did sleep here, so if you got thirty bucks…”

  “You said twenty.”

  “No I didn’t.” Her eyes darted around and her mask of authority, anyway not too firmly affixed, slipped a bit further.

  “Yes you did.Twenty bucks.”

  “OK. Twenty bucks, then. Or we have to steal your stuff. At least that’s what Wallace told me.” But she seemed less and less committed.

  I was sitting in the doorway of the tent now and I hadn’t let go of my banjolele.

  “Not a lot to steal,” I said.

  “There’s your bike,” she suggested, but with almost no conviction now. She peered at it more closely, then at me. “You a girl?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a girl’s bike.”

  “I know. But it works.”

  She was looking at me with more interest.

  The boy started to say something. “D-d-d-d……”

  “Go ahead, Brucie,” she said, looking at me like I’d better not make fun of him.

  “D-d-d-do you play that thing?”

  “Not really,” I said, ignoring the stutter, and seeing out of the corner of my eye the big girl relax slightly. I put my fingers into position and did a G scale three times, then a transition into the relative minor, resolving on the highest note of the D. I looked up and they were looking at me wide-eyed, like I was an angel. “Do that again,” said the girl. So I did, with a little fillip in the middle.

  “Let me try,” said the little guy with the stutter, and I held it out to him. It briefly occurred to me that that might be the last time I saw my banjolele, but I didn’t think so. They were music lovers.

  He strummed the open chord and started to sing.

  “Like seeds in spring, beneath the snows, Love stirs deep in my heart…”

  And right through the whole song without a stutter. He strummed only the open chord, but I could hear in my head the accompaniment as he sang, a cycle of three chords, fifth, relative minor and a first. He had a beautiful singing voice, and the song itself was heartbreaking. Women were the only thing worth living for, it said, and as he sang he acted the part of somebody who believed just that, helpless in their presence.

  He finished the song and the big girl applauded. “Good job, Brucie.” Then to me: “He’s good with music.”

  “Want a potato?” I asked. We’d forgotten about the money. I dragged the bag out and we sat on the beach together in the beautiful morning.

  “How long you been playing?” said the girl.

  “A couple of months.”

  “You s-s-sound good.”

  “You too.”

  The girl’s name was Roberta, or Robbie. “We were both named after Robert the Bruce,” she told me.

  “Who’s that?” I said.

  “Robert the Bruce. You know, and the spider?”

  “Sorry.”

  She looked at me in growing disbelief. “You never heard of Robert the Bruce?”

  “No.”

  She kept looking at me like I hadn’t heard about the existence of gravity. “We’ll get Wallace to tell you.” She jumped to her feet. “Come on…” she said. “And bring that banjo thing.”

  They started walking away and I followed them down the beach and up onto the land. The path went around a pile of driftwood like broken statues, then past wild rose and bayberry and into the spruce forest, plastered by the wind on the seaward side into a thick mat, but once behind, a protected grove, reddish brown and dappled. We came out by the side of a sea-pond with water the colour of whisky and we rounded the end where there were more wild rose bushes and labrador tea. We walked around the back of a dune, down through another smaller spruce wood, and into a clearing where there was a farmhouse and a barn. Scattered about the yard were junked cars overgrown with weeds, and in the middle of the lawn an old spindly tractor. The remains of what once was a dock stuck out from the shore and a small heavy skiff lay half-sunk by the water’s edge.

  The house, with its porch that went right around, was well-built but had seen better days, and a blue plastic tarp covered part of the roof, inexpertly tacked on with nailed planks. In the yard was a big linden, a row of balm-of-Gilead trees lining the dirt road in, and behind, the dune which had ringed this side of the sea-pond was moving in and had half-buried some of the spruce. Soon it would be engulfing the porch where it wrapped around the back of the house, but it was happening so slowly that marram grass had taken root on the crest.

  Just as we came around the front the screen door exploded open and a large man burst out. “Robbie! Brucie! You!..” He stopped, looked at me and then remembered he had things to do and did not want to be distracted. “…Whoever the hell you are. Get over here. We gotta move that tractor into the barn. Get the damn thing outta sight once and for all. And put something overtop of that oil patch, or cut the grass. No! Damn! The mower doesn’t work. Scythe! That’s it, there’s a scythe in the shed. Shit! No, its handle’s broken. But we had a what-do-you-call it? Swipe, there’s a swipe. Where the fuck did I put that? Robbie, you see that swipe? Brucie? No? You? Whoever the hell you are… Who the hell are you anyway?”

  “He was camping on the beach,” said Robbie. “I wanted to charge him for it like you said we should, though I still think that’s horseshit, but he played a song, then said he didn’t know who Robert the Bruce was so I said you’d tell him.”

  “You don’t know who Robert the Bruce is?” he said. He looked as astounded as they had. All other plans could wait. This was a problem that demanded immediate attention.

  “Or the s-s-spider,” said Brucie.

  “Jesus Christ,” he snorted, with disbelief that anyone should be so uneducated.

  “So, who was he?”

  “Robert the Bruce was one of the ancient Kings of Scotland.”

  “A-a-actually only a g-g-g-general.”

  “Yeah well that’s the way you tell it.”

  “H-h-h-he was!”

  “OK! General, then. Doesn’t make a difference. The point is, he was sitting in a cave after a battle, all bloody and scarred. Some English bastard had stabbed him from behind, and he had already killed about a thousand of those sons-of-bitches, so he was bleeding, and his ear was ripped off nearly, and he sewed it back on with twine. Must’ve hurt like a bastard. So he’s lying t
here, bleeding, wounded, his whole army wiped out…”

  “He r-r-ran away.”

  “He didn’t run away, Brucie. Christ! He was hit over the head.”

  “From behind.”

  “Right. From behind. Which was against all the rules of war in Bannockburn or Glencoe, or wherever the fuck it was. Doesn’t matter. Point is, he was feeling pretty out of it. And he was lying there.”

  “Wounded.”

  “Pouring blood. One eye all swole up.”

  “V-v-vomiting. “

  “What?”

  “You said they’d p-poisoned him.”

  “Who said?”

  “You said. Last t-t-time.”

  “Oh yeah. They’d poisoned him, that’s right, that’s why he was wounded in the first place. They’d invited him over to a dinner the night before the battle, I remember now, and there were all these hoity-toity stick-out-your-little-pinky tea-drinking English bastards sitting around, and he only went over because though he was their sworn enemy, he was a trusting Catholic soul who always believed that his enemies had a chance at mending their ways, but they poisoned him, thinking, ‘He’ll be dead now for sure.’ But he had a noble constitution…”

  “And he drank oil.”

  “What? Oh yeah. Although he was a trusting soul he still suspected those English pricks were up to no good, so he took the precaution, the wise precaution when you’re dealing with backstabbing pricks like the English, to drink some olive oil before, which coats the inside of your stomach so you can’t be poisoned. And they were all “how come he didn’t die? He must be superhuman, some sort of a God,” as he marched away straight as an arrow after the truce, but it didn’t completely stop the poison from working and that’s why next day when they ambushed him he didn’t just wipe them out entirely, ‘cause he was feeling poorly ‘cause of the poison.”