On Whale Island

by Daniel Hays

  I don’t believe in bad ghosts, just unhappy ones.

  I had heard rumors of ghosts and gold on Whale Island. I followed them to Peter’s wife’s father, Russell Clayton, who talked to me three weeks before he died.

  “Well now,” he began, leaning against Junior’s boat-shed, “this is my father’s story. He’d be one hundred and twenty-one, if he were living. So it was his grandfather’s father, it happened then, over two hundred years ago.

  “This is what happened.

  “There was a square rigger, and she went ashore, on Whale Island. It was in the winter. And it was very cold, a lot of snow. . . . It was an awful storm, where she went at. . . . She smashed up quite fast. . . .

  “So, she had a lot of gold aboard.

  “Now, these people on the ship took the gold, and they divided it up amongst themselves. . . . And three of them built something, and they got across the narrows, and they left for Carleton. And it took them quite a while.

  “It took three weeks to get back to ‘um on the island, and they were all froze to death. It was very, very hard winters in them days, and you know what it’s like when a southerly comes in and them big seas come rolling in on them rocks . . . and the gold was buried . . . and this is how the story went.”

  The story continues. Within the last fifty years two families have lived on Whale Island during the summers, and they were hardworking fishermen. I don’t know if this was just men or whole families, if they owned the island or were squatters, but the story goes that both families left Whale Island suddenly. One even left all their lobster pots on the shore. That is like someone whose life savings are invested in his business—in a crane, for example—moving away without the crane. Rumor has it this family moved to the United States, bought a home, and retired. Did they find the gold? No one will say, but everyone loves to speculate.

  I am happy to share this island with any spirits. I am looking forward to meeting them.

  DAY 40

  Grueling hard work wood-hauling day! By our calculations, with an average log at 18 inches and a pile of wood 3.5 by 64 feet, we have 336 cubic feet of wood. Since 8 feet by 4 by 4, or one cord, is 128 cubic feet, we now have two and a half cords!

  It has not rained enough to fill our tanks, and the water sources we’ve been scrounging from are almost dry now. In the trees by his fort, Stephan found a good seep—a small well—and we’re nursing that, using buckets to scoop out the water. We inadvertently collect some sediment with it, which clogs the foot pump, but I joke that the floaties count as supplemental vegetables and are a good source of fiber. Plus I get to go outside to blow up the drain pretty regularly, with a good chance of being able to get someone wet even if they are sitting five feet away.

  Clam chowder, brilliant clear sunset, and ships floating along the horizon.

  DAY 42

  Red and foggy sunrise. Wendy is oiling our floor while listening to one of my favorite Partridge Family CDs. We’re sipping awful instant coffee. I’m singing along, not missing a word, and thinking how lucky I am to have a girl I can sing Keith Partridge tunes to.

  Wendy

  I took a solar shower today that Daniel set up for me. There was so much gunk floating in the water that I cried and yelled at him to fix it. Tomorrow we are going into town to go shopping and do laundry. Daniel has begun storing extra food for the winter. He says we may not get ashore for weeks at a time then.

  • • •

  DAY 46

  With the island’s water supply almost depleted we go ashore to buy some jugs of bottled water. I hate giving in to this. We drive an hour and a half to Galeville and decide to spend the night at a hotel. Stephan is glued to the TV and can’t be bothered with meals. I think of the money we’re saving on food. Wendy and I spend hours in the bathtub. Anyone who has roughed it knows the bliss of a long hot bath. I remember returning from my year at sea in my small sailboat. The first night ashore, in a single bath, I used two month’s worth of water.

  In town a little boy walks behind his mother. He is trying to drink a two-handed soda through a straw and he is having trouble. He has not yet learned to do two things at once. He doesn’t know how to let anything happen without paying serious attention. He can’t work a task with only half his being. Each sip causes his legs to slow down, provoking a “Hurry up” from Mom. He releases the straw, picks up speed, but then remembers he’s got a soda in his hands, and the thirsty cycle begins again. I watch three repetitions before they are out of sight.

  DAY 47

  Stephan

  Very wet and cold boat ride back to the island. I was scared.

  It was a crushing return to the island for Wendy, who’s trying so hard to beautify this place, turn it into a home. First, the oil she carefully applied to the floor before we left has dried in small semichunky puddles. Next, the cabinet she had specially built doesn’t fit against the wall because of how the wall is leaning. The stained-glass “art” we carefully carried out not only broke in two places, it clearly would not have fit in anyway. All this triggers memories of failure and she sighs, sitting down in one of the two “Well, they looked good in the store” chairs. I try to comfort her and mumble, “Don’t worry, honey, it’s not like anyone will ever have to see this place.”

  On the bright side of things the rain barrels are finally full, 110 gallons. But of course we just bought and carried out a hundred dollars’ worth of fancy bottled spring water. This is about a third of the evidence I’ve gathered in this lifetime to prove that God has a sense of humor.

  DAY 51

  I took Wendy out in the boat; I want her to be able to handle it in case I get hurt. Given how the lesson went, I must now believe in my own invincibility. When she was at the helm I could not help myself from saying things like “Er, hon, I’ve never seen barnacles that big dead ahead!” or “Did you see that snail pass us?”

  Is this what’s called codependent, where you secretly don’t want your partner to get better at anything because then they will realize that you are not necessary for them?

  Sometimes when I am feeling low I think of this woman who loves me. There must be something good in me to be loved by her. She is too smart and heart-wise to have been tricked.

  The remains of hurricane somebody or other are heading this way. Only some wind and rain are expected, but any storm excites me. I long for an excuse worthy of my not having to be in control, and if that means a hurricane, so be it.

  DAY 53

  Windy night—I’m guessing there were forty-knot gusts. The windmill shook the house. It sounded like a power saw just outside the window. The voltage was hitting 16.2, several volts past cooking. From now on I must tie the windmill blades down before a storm; they move too quickly to catch during a storm. Big seas are washing over many rocks that I’ve never even seen wet. There is a natural blowhole we can watch spouting fifty-foot spurts when a wave hits right. The water comes in under a ledge and then spouts up from a crack in what looks like a whale’s back. We call it “Moby Dicking.”

  DAY 54

  Ferocious day of woodcutting. According to my calculations, we have 619 cubic feet of moist blue spruce, which comes to over four and three-quarter cords, short one pile of our five-cord goal. When I explain this to Wendy, she yells, “That’s it, I will never carry another piece of wood in my life, I am so fucking done!”

  So, having taken everything into careful consideration . . . we are officially done. I figure it took us about twenty-six days to cut, haul, and stack a winter’s worth of wood. (A week later Junior sees our woodpile and I ask him what he thinks. I get the Nova Scotian equivalent of a New Yorker’s shrug. The translation: “Eh, it could be worse.”)

  We ate crabs for dinner, small ones Stephan collected from the harbor. “Oh please, can’t we eat these? I caught twenty-two, please?” After trying to eat just one Wendy says, “Well, I guess that’s why we’ve never seen these at the market.” For dessert Stephan grosses us out with a discussion about their eyeballs, which
he says were especially chewy. We play gin rummy for an hour before a deep night’s sleep.

  DAY 59—SEPTEMBER

  Stephan

  Daniel and I went fishing today. We caught our own dinner. Mom made killer cookies.

  When I first met Stephan I was nervous with the same excitement I experience at a palm reading. Six-year-olds are still relatively new to the world, and have not paid too much attention to all the warning signs of life that their parents have imposed on them. Their souls are still very much awake, and I somehow fear that these beings, closer to God than I, will see through me and laugh. But I was ready that day; a twelve-day-old puppy was in my jacket pocket.

  I had just picked up my new dog, Godzilla, whose mother had been killed by a car. I was feeding him with an eye dropper. His eyes were barely open. He was the newest of beings and every one of his breaths seemed conscious; he was only just learning his body.

  Wendy pointed to a child crawling under some picnic tables. This was at a shared friend’s wedding, and Wendy’s husband was somewhere else. I crawled under the table. “I’m Daniel,” I said, holding out my dog. “Wow, that looks like a Bear,” said Stephan. “Can I hold him?” And thus, with some distraction, our first meeting was on, and Bear had been properly named. I think the puppy magically allowed me to be simple and enjoy Stephan as the gift that he was, not so different from the puppy really. I kind of envied that.

  Stephan’s only suit was slowly shredding as we wandered under all the tables. He was a little rounder than most kids, had messy blond hair and eyes like his mother, ocean blue. He was mostly smile, his face revealing his excitement, his joy.

  Wendy’s eyes are big and blue. She has dirty-blond hair and is built like my sailboat, ready for any seas. We both worked at the same wilderness school for wild teenagers. I worked out “in the field”; she worked in the office. Wendy was very much a local girl, pregnant and married before graduating high school. Having grown up a liberal East Coast city boy, the idea of being married at eighteen, with child and debt, was new to me.

  Wendy worked with six therapists for three years before suspecting that something was wrong in her marriage, that she had the right to not accept what she believed to be God’s plan for her. Her life began to have an independent meaning as her coworkers spoke of her value, her skills, how her laugh lit up others’ hearts, and how her warmth became the keystone on which our office thrived. Wendy began thinking that maybe God had intended for her to be a verb in her own life.

  I took Wendy out to dinner near the end of this marriage. We had Mexican food and a beer. We talked, and she was miserable. At work she had always put up a front of the happy wife—that being part of what she “had to bear.”

  I encouraged her to get out, and not because I was there for her. I was still in my own adolescent search for the woman of my dreams, and Wendy, with a child, was not even a remote possibility.

  I did, however, wonder what being in a family with a child and Wendy would be like. I immediately experienced the fear Sartre describes in walking by a cliff’s edge: not so much that I might fall but that I was free to jump. That something in me wanted all these things, craved some sort of stability in a manic life.

  I began to love Wendy as she began using the word “divorce” in nearly complete sentences. I saw a little girl waking up, questioning her life, and not, as I feared for myself, trying to become the perfect résumé. I began making a lot of extra Xeroxes, losing pens, needing paper clips, and thinking up any other excuse I could to be around her. I felt like a goofy sixteen-year-old. One night after her separation I watched her sleep. It was our first night, and it was intense to me, somehow shaking the foundations of what had become a fairly lighthearted activity for me. All night I gently touched her, felt her heart beating, her softness. Her soul seemed to hover where my hands caressed, and my own soul stirred in a new way, something different than the familiar gonging of lust.

  During my first baby-sitting session with Stephan, we went food shopping. Their cupboards were quite bare: some cereal, pepper, milk, and a can of tuna fish. Stephan and I had a great adventure in the supermarket buying a cart full of groceries, Stephan sitting in the cart and laughing while slowly being buried in food. The only rule was that sugar could not be the first, second, or third ingredient of anything he put into the cart. I got my first taste of how thorough a small kid can be, as he read almost all the junk-food labels in the store in his quest for sweets.

  We filled the cupboards, we filled the fridge, and food overflowed onto the countertops. When Wendy got home from work she cried—I thought out of happiness, but it was really out of fear that she would have to cook, something she had been forced to do and hated. So Stephan and I made a huge lasagna, and Stephan stepped in it only once when it was briefly on the floor. (Note: A lasagna noodle is fully cooked when it adheres to a child’s foot or leg.) The meal was great, and then I helped Stephan with his piano lesson, and the night was long and wonderful.

  Two years later I asked Stephan if I could marry his mom, before I’d asked her. It was obvious to me that his approval would be required, that he was part of the deal. He quickly said, “Yes, you make my mom happy.” I had money then and bought her a big diamond ring, and I asked her, and she cried, and I cried too.

  DAY 60

  Wendy

  What an incredible sunrise. I was looking out at the ocean and suddenly saw the very first part of the sun come up over the horizon. I watched the whole thing happen, and it was beautiful. I’ve never been quiet enough to watch the whole thing before.

  It feels like the beginning of fall. I could see my breath in the air this morning. The leaves are falling off the only trees here that are not spruce.

  For the nine years that I’ve owned this island there has been no dock. What we’ve done is unload the boat on the beach or rocks, depending on the tide. Then with an easily tangled jumble of rope and two pulleys, we haul the boat out to a big anchor, and there she waits, midharbor. . . . Over the years I’ve occasionally had to swim out to deweed the pulleys, and this water is never warm, since we’re only some one hundred miles south of the icebergs’ home territory. With winter and its big storms and ice, the awareness I must maintain about any boat in the water will cause an aneurysm, so it is time for our own dock!

  There is a pile of rocks on the beach in our harbor. The rocks are all about as big as one person can pick up, maybe two hundred of them; this is where an old dock once stood. Around here docks are not the elegant New England treated-lumber-planked affairs that I grew up seeing. Here you can do one of two things. You can build a box big enough to hold a Volkswagen out of scrap lumber. Maybe it is made out of stuff that washed ashore, or maybe from trees you cut from your backyard. You secure this box to the bottom by filling it with rocks. After at least two of these are built—one in deeper water than the other—you then plank over and connect them with straight whole trees of whatever thickness you want. This is the sort of dock Junior and his boys built, and the sort that ends up as a pile of rocks in your harbor after a really big storm. The second local dock type is a slipway resembling a strip of railroad track turned over, with the railroad ties resting on long logs bolted to the biggest rocks available. You do this on a sloping shore, extending from minimum low tide up to above storm high tide at an angle shallow enough to haul out on.

  The pile of rocks here are from the first type of dock, last rebuilt maybe fifty years ago by a family that lived and fished here. This sort of dock offers a lot of resistance to the ocean, especially to winter ice, and is better suited for a sheltered area. Our small harbor is terrific in all but the biggest storms, but those are exactly what you have to build for; whether it’s a yearly or fifty-year storm doesn’t matter—it could start in twenty minutes. A slipway will be better here, so I scheme until I have a sufficient mental picture to work with. I’m so excited that I almost draw a plan, but then decide on no plan. I like being creative in the moment, and a plan scares me.

  AB
BY’S FAVORITE GAME in life is to convince Bear that she’s right. She’ll bark, changing tones and facing a new direction and perking her ears just so—and Bear will ignore her until she hits a new note and some special act of dire attention, and then he’ll become convinced that something is there, and so they’ll both bark. She becomes thrilled that he’s paying her attention . . . then there is a pause and it begins again.

  DAY 61

  Stephan

  I saw Mom and Daniel having sex. Great pancakes for breakfast. We played horseshoes today.

  DAY 62

  It was a blowy night. The house trembled and it was as if we’d put a quarter in the slot of a vibrating hotel bed. It was a board-game sort of morning, so we had Monopoly with our coffee, followed by some baseball excitement on the lawn. We listened to radio reports of a crashed airplane off Halifax, 219 dead. We can hear the various rescue ships searching for debris on our VHF radio. I wonder about what went through 219 people’s minds as they were going down, what wishes, fears, regrets. It is the part of life that most interests me, the it-all-boils-down-to-these-last-moments part.

  I’ve lived those moments of peeking at death several times: in a small sailboat on a big ocean in a storm, clinging to a rock cliff fifty feet above the ground, and once accidentally shooting myself and waiting in stunned silence for blood or pain to tell me where the bullet had gone in. All three times I was overwhelmed with a sadness that here I was about to die and I couldn’t share the experience with another, that I would have to do it alone.

  I recently took out a million-dollar life-insurance policy so that my last moments do not include any guilt about not providing for Wendy and Stephan. I tell Wendy, “Sure, it would suck, but you’d be able to get a new car!” I also took out a quarter-million-dollar policy on Wendy because I’ve always wanted a Humvee, and before we were married I actually had the money in the bank for one. So if I ever do become a bachelor again, it will be with a Hummer, and I’ve promised to get vanity plates that read: WENDY.