Washika
Page 22
“See?” Henri smiled. “It’s really nothing.” They had reached the very top and there was only a slight breeze at that height. Henri could feel his knees begin to tremble but he fought it and pushed against the footrest with both feet.
“Look,” he said. “We can see all of the grounds from here. Look, down there, Sylvie. There’s Lavigne’s father’s car.”
The girl peaked over the edge of the chair and quickly turned her head back towards Henri. The wheel began to move, downwards. It had moved slowly before, taking on new passengers. Now, they could feel it, the whole frame of the wheel vibrating with new speed and, down they came, their feet rising upwards in the footrest and their stomachs reaching out for air. Henri kept his mouth closed. He could feel Sylvie’s grip tighten on his arm and, as they went by the loading ramp, he could hear the operator laughing, and then, backwards and up they went.
Henri could not think. He did not want to think. There was only one thing on his mind: dear God, dear, dear God, make it end soon and let me not be a fool and puke all over. And then, over they went again, and down, his stomach rising and the circus man’s eyes smiling and him speeding up the engine and Sylvie’s head buried on his arm. At last, the engine slowed. Sylvie lifted her head. Was it over? Not quite, but the worse was past. They were unloading. And Henri had made it without making a fool of himself. But he was not thinking about God now, or being a fool and vomiting all over everybody on the wheel. What next, he was thinking. What would they do now? Should they just walk around, stop and talk somewhere? Talk about what? Was he falling in love again? It was only a short ride on a Ferris wheel. She held onto his arm but only because she was frightened. Perhaps. Maybe she was in love with him. There, he was at it again. There he was, being a ‘have-not’ again.
They moved backwards and upwards, slowly now, as passengers got down and left, going through the opening in the fence on one side of the ticket booth while others replaced them going by the tall man taking tickets on the opposite side. Sylvie suddenly let go of his arm and waved to someone on the ground, Monsieur and Madame Lanthier; Madame waved a pink sweater at her daughter while her husband scowled and held up his wrist and pointed towards it with jerking movements of his index finger.
“Your father,” Henri said, not looking at the man below. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh nothing. He’s just telling me it’s time to go.”
Henri felt sick again. So, that was it. A ride on a Ferris wheel and then, good-bye. He might have known. He was a ‘have-not’ and would always be a ‘have-not’ and there was nothing better that a ‘have-not’ could expect. When they reached the very top, Henri was feeling better. For a while there, I almost fell again, he thought, but no, I’m not ready for that yet. Sylvie is wonderful and beautiful and all I’ve ever dreamed of; someday, perhaps, but not now. No, I’m not ready yet.
Sylvie turned to look at Henri, who was peering over the edge of the chair.
“Henri,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Henri, I’ll be leaving with my parents as soon as we get off.”
“Yes, I suppose.”
“Henri, could I write to you at Washika?”
Henri’s mind began to race: pencil, paper, not much time, wheel turning, parents waiting by the fence. ‘Have-not?’ Who was a ‘have-not?’ Henri? No, not him. He was with Sylvie and she wanted to write to him and they had less than a minute and Henri looked into her blue-green eyes and she touched his arm gently, and they kissed.
When they got up out of the chair and stepped down from the boarding ramp, Henri’s legs felt rubbery. They walked past the fence to Sylvie’s parents and she said, “Maman, papa, this is my friend, Henri Morin.” After Sylvie had said good-bye, he watched her a long time going down the thoroughfare with her parents. He held onto the metal fence and watched the wheel turning and their green chair, number eighteen going by. He stood there a long time getting used to the new feeling for he had never truly been a ‘have’ before.
PART IV
Chapter 47
The sky was a bright blue, with not a cloud in it and, on the outskirts of the bay, the water had lost its early morning calm and whitecaps were beginning to appear. The students sat with their life jackets leaning against the moist grey steel of the Madeleine’s cabin. A few sat in the two drive boats in tow, with their collars up, smoking and facing back towards Washika.
Alphonse stood at the wheel. He touched the throttle lightly and reached back for the tall wooden stool.
“Well Henri,” he said. “You passed a good weekend?”
“Yes,” Henri replied. “And you?”
“Ha! At my age, you know, they’re all the same.”
Henri sat on the wooden box. He leaned back against the railing. Behind him the engine pounded out a steady rhythm with her six pistons. He slid a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. Henri opened the pack and offered it to Alphonse.
“Well sure,” Alphonse laughed. “You know, you can always tell when a man gets to be my age. He rolls all the time, even weekends. So when he comes back after a weekend in town, he still has tobacco and papers in his shirt pocket.”
“Yes, I suppose we spend too much. But, in town or out with a girl, rolling? I don’t think I could do it.”
“After a while, you stick to taverns. And the girls, well, they become women and they know what it is to save money.”
Alphonse slid off the stool and stood at the wheel as they approached the point where the gulls nested. Henri looked out at the birds and how they became excited and lifted off the rocks and circled the Madeleine. They looked exactly the same, white with grey on their backs and long yellow bills with small, yellow bead eyes and feet like a duck: Larus argentatus, the herring gull. Henri had looked it up in his father’s library. They were exactly the same as the gulls that gathered around the metal drums in the parking space on Chemin de Notre-Dame where people went to eat their noon lunches by the river. But here, at Washika Bay along the shores of the Cabonga, the birds were not the same. In town, most people looked upon the birds as just another form of nuisance to be endured. At Washika, however, the gulls were an important part of the Cabonga Reservoir, an element that contributed to its splendor. Many things were different at Washika. Even the air did not smell the same.
“Alphonse?” Henri said.’
“Yes, Henri,” Alphonse replied before Henri had time to say anything further.
“Alphonse, would you like to live here at Washika?”
“I work here.”
“Yes, I know. But, would you not like to live here someday? Maybe somewhere in off the beach?”
“Ha! You noticed it, eh?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been here, what, a month and a half? And already you see the difference.”
“From Ste-Émilie, you mean?”
“Ste-Émilie, Lac des Montagnes, Louville, any large town. You’re lucky to see it so young. Me too, I learned it a long time ago. I didn’t always work here. And I didn’t always live in Ste-Émilie.”
“But you like it here?”
“Oh yes. Still, there are some here who don’t know anything. They hope all the time to find work in Ste-Émilie, or the Capital maybe. Somewhere, where they can drive to work in the morning, and visit the tavern on their way home at night. But, they don’t know. They’ve always worked here.”
“But you wouldn’t live here,” Henri continued. “You would rather live in Ste-Émilie.”
“I didn’t say that. My woman might say that.”
Alphonse laughed and slapped Henri on the shoulder.
“Here, hold her steady,” he said.
Henri got up from the wooden box to stand at the wheel.
“There, just like that,” Alphonse said. “I won’t be long.”
Henri sighted over the tip of the anchor to a sandy cove shimmering in the early morning heat. The sun was at its highest and only slightly to the left and Henri guessed that they were head
ed almost due south.
“Where we headed, Alphonse?”
“Pàgwàshka Bay,” Alphonse opened the door and went out on deck.
Pàgwàshka, at least there was always a wind. That’s what the old ones said. No bugs and no water. Pàwashka, they said, was only a quarter the size of Washika Bay, with mostly dead trees, chicots, dotting its shallow waters and the shore. There was always a good wind, from the north, but it was not a good place for tugboats. For the drive boats it presented no problem. Even the Russel, with its two-cylinder engines and the steel cage around its screw propeller, could get around in there without too much difficulty. But for a six-cylinder tugboat like the Madeleine, the shallow water at Pàgwàshka Bay always meant trouble.
Henri held onto the wheel with one hand. He touched the throttle lightly with the other. The lever had been painted grey, like the Madeleine, but now it was ebony, mostly, from the paint being worn off, fondled by Alphonse and her captains before him. Henri felt near the lower portion of the lever, where it had cracked once and was now smooth and shiny from the bronze the welder had used to mend the break. Henri wanted to tell Alphonse about Sylvie. Later, he might speak to Lavigne and the others about her, but not yet. Things were just beginning. There was nothing solid yet. Telling them now, so soon, might spark their interest: if Sylvie Lanthier were willing to go out with Morin, she would probably like to go out with me…or some such nonsense. How many would think like that? Worse, how many would put it to the test? No. Later, when Sylvie was certain that it was he, Henri Morin, that she wanted and no other person would do, he might flaunt his love affair to the crowds, and never have to worry, or maybe he would come to speak like Lavigne and all the other ‘haves’ that he knew.
The door opened and the sound of the engine changed. Alphonse fastened the door open with a hook and eyelet.
“Okay Henri, I’ll take her,” he said.
Henri returned to the wooden box where he had been sitting, where he could feel the cool breeze rushing by the open doorway. He cupped his hands around the lighter and lit a cigarette.
“Alphonse,” he said. “How old were you when you first met your wife”
“Too old. There were no women in the camps and we didn’t go down often. When you reached a certain age, it was time.”
“What do you mean, too old?”
“All my friends were married. I was an uncle to all of their little ones. When my woman came along, well, I was too old to say no. It was time to be serious and give up my wild ways.”
Henri looked at him. It was difficult to imagine Alphonse Ouimet being wild. Henri could see him only as he was now, his deeply tanned face with the white hard hat tilted sideways and the thick, brown moustache and the piercing brown eyes squinting across the glaring water ahead.
“But you married her. You must have loved her?”
“Love? Well, yes. That came too, later on.”
“Was she the first girl you ever went out with, Alphonse?”
Alphonse laughed. “She was the first I married,” he said. Alphonse let go of the wheel and leaned out of the open doorway and glanced astern.
“There’s Gérard,” he said, stepping back into the cabin.
Henri stood and leaned out through the open doorway. Less than a quarter mile back, he could see the Sophie, riding the water with her bow high and her squat cabin appearing even smaller than it was. The Sophie was one of those two-cylinder tugboats, Russels, that were often used for rounding up logs within a corral of boom timbers.
“Is he coming to work with us?” Henri said.
“We might need him at Pàgwàshka. Besides, they had no work for him today.”
Henri looked out through the windows, beyond the anchor, to the approaching shoreline.
“I met a girl on the weekend,” Henri said quickly.
As the shoreline approached so it seemed that his time for such talk was quickly coming to an end. And he wanted so much to share this event, his becoming a ‘have,’ leaving the world of the ‘have-nots’ finally. He wanted to share this with Alphonse. It felt strange to Henri but it was as if he needed Alphonse’s approval.
“Good, good!” Alphonse said, smiling. “Now Henri, I want you to go stand at the bow. Watch carefully, and steer me through where there’s deep water.”
The Madeleine’s engine slowed and Henri went forward. Holding onto the anchor, he looked down into the clear water and the sandy bottom. From astern he could hear the guys talking and then, he heard the chug, chug, chugging of the Sophie as she came alongside. Henri lay down, flat on his stomach. The wood of the deck was warm on his chest and he stared straight down. The bottom seemed to move swiftly by even under the Madeleine’s slowest speed. Henri kept his eyes on the bottom and concentrated as best he could at his task because he knew that Alphonse and the Madeleine were depending on him.
Chapter 48
The bottom seemed so far away. With his hands cupped around his eyes, Henri stared down through the water, still very deep, and he watched it moving past, sand mostly, like on the beach, a huge boulder once and several waterlogged timbers sticking up out of the sand at an angle. But it was all far away, down deep enough not to be of any threat to the Madeleine. Henri watched a school of minnows swimming beneath the Madeleine. That should have been his warning clue. The little minnows were hardly ever seen in deep water. The grainy sand became more distinct. There was a sudden jolt that pushed him forward on the deck. They were aground.
Henri looked back at Alphonse. He could not see his face. The sun glared down on the cabin windows making everything black inside. He heard Alphonse shifting into reverse and the engine revving, and then shifting again and the engine revving once again. Then, it was quiet. The boys leaned over the sides and spoke softly among themselves. Alphonse came out of the cabin, a fresh cigarette dangling from beneath his thick moustache.
“It happened so fast,” Henri called from the bow. “I’m telling you, Alphonse. It was deep and then, all of a sudden, it was only two feet.”
“That’s the way here,” Alphonse replied. “It’s nothing, Henri. We’ll get her.”
Astern, the Sophie bobbed listlessly while her captain, Gérard Laporte, leaned against the low cabin of the tugboat, rolling a cigarette and looking very pleased.
“Problem, Alphonse?” he called towards the Madeleine.
“I suppose you could say that,” Alphonse said. “Shouldn’t be too bad.”
“Want me to snub?”
Gérard hooked onto the Madeleine’s port gunwale with a pike pole and pulled the Sophie alongside.
“If you want,” Alphonse said. “With this gang though, we should be able to rock her enough.”
“I’ll snub just the same.” Gérard looked up at the students leaning over the port side. “Looks like you guys are going to get a little wet for a change, eh.”
“Oh, they’re real little ducks, these guys,” Alphonse said. He turned to Henri and the boys behind him. “Get all the peaveys we have, Henri.”
Alphonse went astern. He untied the drive boats and set them adrift. From a hook on the cabin wall he took down a coil of thick, yellow rope and made it fast to stern. As the Sophie approached the Madeleine, stern first, Alphonse swung the remaining yellow rope onto the deck of the little tugboat. Gérard came out of the cabin and fastened the rope to the metal tow post to stern. He returned to the cabin and, with frothy sounds coming from its exhaust pipe, the tugboat began to move forward.
Everyone was astern except Alphonse. The fellows watched the rope curving like a snake in the water and then straightening and, finally, lifting out of the water, taut, as the small tugboat no longer moved forward. Gérard revved her two pistons and her stern sank leaving her gunwales only inches above water. Both engines screamed: the Sophie going forward and the Madeleine in reverse. Nothing. Gérard shifted into reverse and approached to within three yards of the Madeleine. He shifted again and shot forward as quickly as a two-cylinder tugboat could shoot. Nothing.
“Okay, my little ducks. Time to show your stuff!”
Henri handed out the peaveys. The rest of the fellows grabbed pike poles from the rack on the cabin roof.
“Okay now,” Alphonse spoke to the fellows. “The idea is not to lift her. You couldn’t do it anyway. Just rock her. Get a good hold in the sand and rock her from side to side. Okay, let’s go!”
The boys jumped overboard, ten to starboard and ten over the port side. Alphonse went back inside. The two engines rumbled softly, sending up a foamy froth between them and, above water, the yellow rope strained between the tow posts sticking up through the decks to stern. Alphonse stuck his head out of the cabin doorway.
“Ready?” he called to the guys below.
“Give her hell!” a voice yelled back from somewhere in the water.
The Madeleine’s engine revved, louder than the Sophie’s but they could see the froth the smaller tugboat made with its exhaust and they could tell that Gérard was pushing her for all she was worth. And sometimes, when she slacked off a bit, her stern would rise up and they could see the metal cage around her screw propeller. The water was three feet deep where they stood, and the boys drove the points of their peaveys and pike poles into the sandy bottom and, leaning them against her hull, pushed hard on the Madeleine. They groaned, leaning into their poles and, gradually, the tugboat began to rock from side to side and her momentum increased as the groans grew louder with each roll of her squat grey hull.