by Paul Almond
Oh Lord, thought Jim, and the woman gave a frightened cry.
“But maybe she okay ahead. We try!” Maurice skidded down the ice boulder on his rear end and set off at a fast clip.
“Don’t worry, ma’am, don’t worry, he knows the river, we’re all in this together, just keep going.” Jim, with the child in his arms, dragged the woman as best he could and tore across the ice. “Faster, please!” Her husband also grabbed her and together they made better time.
Jim heard the roaring grow. He turned. Behind them, as if Armageddon had struck, a tremendous surge of black water broke over the ice, heaving the floes on top of each other, piling the shards higher, smashing others. The river was finally breaking through the ice, a powerful wall of black water swamping all before as if a dam had broken.
The opposite shore was still faraway. Behind them, the torrent tore downstream. How long would the ice ahead hold?
“Check again!” Jim called to Maurice as he paused with the child in his arms. Maurice scrambled up another crag. The ice began to shake under them.
“She open ahead,” Maurice gasped. “We leave dis track. We head for downstream. Still good that way.” He gestured to their right.
A tremendous jolt shuddered the giant floe and Maurice fell tumbling down the slab with a loud cry, and lay with his leg twisted under. Jim handed the child back to the husband. “Run with her!” He pushed the woman on as he crossed to Maurice, grabbed him, put his arm around his waist, lifted him, and helped him hop forward with an agility born from the impending crisis.
Sure enough, behind them another great surge of water threw jagged mounds of shelf ice across the former roadway. Ahead, too, the whole solid covering was breaking up — black water began to intervene between them and the opposite shore. The noise alone was enough to terrify anyone. Jim felt his panic rising, but he’d beaten the black current before and he’d do it again. His father’s words came back: the only way to save yourself is to stay calm and think straight.
Jim yelled directions to the couple ahead and they veered off the sleigh track toward downstream. The floating ice floe seemed for the moment secure — not breaking up as they ran. Jim and Maurice overtook the couple. “Watch for cracks in the floe!” Jim shouted.
No sooner said than a giant slit in the ice sliced open behind them, right in front of the family.
The woman screamed, separated from her husband by a widening gap, now two feet. He reached out, she leapt, he caught her, then they both started to slip into the icy current as the lip of ice tipped. But the husband lurched back, tugging her over, through the water, regained his footing and pulled her on, as they slithered to safety.
“Give me the child!” Jim grabbed the kid so roughly it screamed. He didn’t care. In his right arm he held the child, in his left he helped the injured Maurice as best he could. They dashed across their floe as it drifted downstream on the current. For the moment, the black water was on either side, but not rising to attack over the floe.
“How long will it hold?” the father cried out.
“Don’t think. Just go fast. We’re going to make it.” But for the life of him, Jim did not see how. He had never floated on an ice floe in his life, and he had no great faith in its safety.
Then Jim saw their floating floe heading for a shelf of ice jutting out into the current from the far shore. “She gonna hit!” yelled Maurice. “She gonna hit for sure.”
But that shelf ice was attached to the shore. After it smashed their floe, what then? Would their own ice-pan capsize? Or continue on downstream?
Smaller bergs jostled and collided with each other, all the while making a horrendous noise.
“When she hit, we jump! Comprends?”
“Damn right,” said Jim. “Soon as she touches, leap across, no matter what. Get to the shore ice. It’s our only chance.”
The black water channel ahead narrowed. But floes kept crashing into this floe, tipping it and turning it aside, as the noise continued.
Just a few feet from the edge, the four stopped.
“Too thin?” Jim gasped.
“Sais pas. But we go. We go for sure.” The black channel narrowed a bit. They all tensed for a run and a leap, not knowing if it would be to safety or death.
Then the floe struck, the jolt threw them flat. Their pan reared up over the shore ice. With the surface slanted steeply they picked themselves up somehow, the child screaming wildly, and on all fours scrambled up to the lip, a good six-feet above the shore shelf. Behind them, the black water surged upwards, trying to drag them down.
Jim managed to boost the older man up over the edge where he clung, looking down. Then Jim got the woman up, and finally the man with his kid. Just in time, for the whole floe shuddered, and began to slip backwards into the black current, taking them all with it.
Jim rolled over the edge and dropped. He reached up his arms. The father held out his child, let it fall onto Jim and then, because not holding on, tumbled backwards.
The wife screamed, “I can’t. I can’t jump.”
“So stay and get drowned!” Jim yelled to shock her into action as he reached for Maurice.
The husband recovered somehow, and clambering up, fell heavily.
Maurice quickly turned on his stomach, hung down his legs and let go. He gave a wild scream of pain as his leg twisted under again.
Jim, the child still in his arms, grabbed Maurice and manhandled him away from the edge. Jim and Maurice kept heading for the bank as the husband pleaded, “Jump, Millie, jump! Please!” He lifted his arms as the floe slipped surely back into the frozen river.
Jim could not wait: he had the child and older man to think of. They kept slithering along as the ice grew firmer under their feet.
He turned to look back. Before jumping, Millie had lain down sideways — but too late, as her whole floe slid under the black water and the man screamed, reached out to her. He made as if to jump in.
“No!” Jim yelled. “Your boy, think of the boy.”
The man covered his eyes to hide the sight of his disappearing wife, then turned toward them and, with an agonized cry, hobbled along to his own safety.
“Regarde!” Maurice pointed.
On the bank upstream, Jim saw figures running down toward them. Rescue was at hand. He slowed down, his panic controlled, and began to relax. For the second time he’d faced danger, and won.
But now five or six hundred miles lay between here and home. Would his luck hold out?
Chapter Eleven
“I just have a feeling,” Catherine said, “that Jim will be along any time now. He won’t like it there. I’ve always known it.”
“I hope you’re right.” But James had his own doubts. He bent with his shovel to clear the makeshift drain that directed the runoff each spring, diverting the rush past the house and down their driveway toward the road, a snowy ridge packed hard by passing sleighs. Catherine worked with a smaller spade at the lower end.
Spring had brought its usual deluge, streaming down from the melting snowbanks drifted high against the hill behind the house. Patches of barren ground had appeared, soon to spring to life with fresh crocuses and a fresh crop of vegetables from seeds planted in their garden, eyes cut from potatoes, and peas, parsnips, and cabbage. Wheat sown in autumn fields would push up through the moist earth nourished by manure spread by James who stood tall upon its dark pungent mound in his oxcart to fork goodness across the acres that the plough would then turn and harrow flatten, in another rich and fruitful season on his beloved Gaspé Coast.
But for himself, the seasons might be drawing to an end. Even with a breeze from off the warming fields bearing messages of fruitfulness, his aged frame felt more in tune with the stiff trees showing no hint of buds on their cold black branches, although for them, summer was on its way.
And worse, what would happen to his farm? “The old homestead” as the children called it — after all, had it not been their vital centre for forty years? — would it fall int
o disuse? Nothing about it looked old. In fact, it seemed so young, newly cleared, even after so many seasons rolling past, freezing rain, tempest and storm, frost and thaw, the fences of stumps easily weathering any onslaught winter could throw at them, guarding the boundaries of his acres as they would for decades to come. Yesterday on his first spring tramp, he’d seen that he’d have to put up a new fence down in the Hollow between him and the Nelsons, but on the whole, the farm was ready for another bountiful year. Was it all going to waste?
They were interrupted by the appearance of his granddaughter Jane who came hurrying over across the raised path beaten from the Byers next door. Catherine and he glanced at each other. What was up?
“Little Joey is sick,” she called from afar.
Catherine thrust her spade in a snowbank. “What’s wrong with him?” She quickly adopted what James saw as her professional manner. Known in these parts for her healing abilities, she had kept all but one of their children alive, a tribute to her powers, and to the medicine pouch, long since depleted but often replenished, that James had gotten from Magwés. All that Micmac wisdom had been passed on to Catherine. She had even come a couple of times with him to visit the band in Port Daniel and met again Full Moon, her brother, One Arm, and her son, Brightstar, now a handsome and accomplished fisherman and trapper, likely to inherit from his uncle the chieftainship of the band. Catherine had spent a lot of time with those Micmac healers and medicine women.
It had been hard for her, that first trip, James knew, for it brought back memories of the earlier pain on learning that James had married before. That secret would die with them both: no one would learn of John’s ancestry, and Catherine had even told a little white lie at the office in New Carlisle, and to the census takers when they passed by. Officially, John was her second child.
“Me brother’s terble hot and crying, and he even started to cough!”
James’s heart sank. Not whooping cough! That disease had taken so many of the Shegouac children including, thirteen years ago, their own daughter Elizabeth. Catherine saw the alarm in her husband’s face. “Now listen, you two, don’t go jumping to any conclusions! Of course he coughs. He has a lot of mucus from the crying. We’ll get him right as rain in a few hours. Go home, quick, and tell Mariah I’m coming with my bag.” She smiled at the child, a warm and certainly calming look that had its desired effect.
“Oh thanks, Grandma. I’ll run right off and tell them.”
James marvelled at his wife as she hurried into the house. “Tell Hannah to give me a hand with the shovel,” he called after her. Just a bit more work and he’d have this spring runoff under control.
* * *
James had just gotten into bed when he heard a knock at his bedroom door. “Come in.”
Hannah entered. Earlier, to accommodate the growing children, they had added another modest side building accessible through the back wall of the house, and divided this room into four. He had been thinking about taking down one of the partitions now the children had left, to give them more space, but then decided against it: Jim and any wife might need that for themselves. Oh-oh, Jim again — if only he’d stay forgotten.
Hannah was looking particularly vulnerable. “Is anything wrong?” he asked.
“With Momma sleeping over at Mariah’s, it must mean little Joe’s in a bad way.”
“Not at all. It just means someone should be looking after him during the night. You know, Mariah has to rest; we don’t want her getting sick as well, do we? Far better your mother take over. You know how often she spends the night at others’ homes.”
“But that’s my little cousin, Joe, he’s only five months and so cute. What if he dies?” James could see she was about to cry.
James opened his arms and his daughter, even though now twenty-two, came over and lay for a moment, letting her tears flow as if she were a little girl again. Nothing like the good strong arms of a wise daddy when you’re in trouble.
She soon calmed down. “Poppa, would you read me a story?”
James was put in mind how he’d gather the children around and read to them: the best way to get them interested in learning to read for themselves. “Of course, of course.” But he realized, without a school, all his good intentions went for nought. What about his children’s children, too? The thought made his ire rise — he just had to get that school built.
Hannah went to the books in one corner and brought over three or four. James glanced at the covers of The Last of the Mohicans and Two Years before the Mast.
“I can’t read which one it is,” Hannah said, “but I want Peter Parley.”
“Peter Parley it will be.” He handed the others back and picked out that one. “Now you come lie beside me and promise me you’ll shut your eyes and try to drift off. You can go back to your own bed when you’re ready to sleep.”
Hannah dutifully climbed on the bed beside him, and curled up.
James began: “When the winter had passed away, with its snow and its dreary winds, and the green grass was already springing up in the meadows, the two robins were always heard on their favourite tree. Early in the morning, one of them would ascend to the highest bough, where he would pour forth his lively little song, and at evening he would again take his lofty seat, and repeat the same strain, with almost endless variations.”
Hannah reached out and touched him, as if to stop the reading. “Poppa,” she said, “I’ve changed my mind. I wish you had taught me to read when I was little. I think I would have enjoyed that. Your school is a very good idea.” With that she shut her eyes again, and James continued his reading, pleased at her remark. If only the rest of Shegouac would be that easy.
* * *
Long after Hannah had gone back to her own bed and was sleeping soundly, James found himself tossing and turning, wrestling with doubts.
Going back over his life, he’d certainly had some escapes that were nothing short of miraculous. He’d been attacked by a mother bear and Tongue had rescued him. He’d thwarted a cougar attack and been healed by Magwés: the scar still itched on occasion. And then, after heading into certain capture and a grisly punishment on the Bellerophon, his Captain had surprisingly given him his freedom. So many times in the intervening years, he had escaped danger and lived. But, on reflection, these did not really provide the proof for a living God he needed. The inescapable finality of the end was approaching so rapidly...
As Catherine would say, had she been beside him: you’ll feel better in the morning. But then, was not the night a time for questioning? Soon, he would be going into the darkness forever. Or into the light. If only he could arrive at some assurance of which it would be. Speak to me, he asked, please Lord, speak.
In the vast darkness of his bedroom, James lay and waited for the response.
But as he looked out into the void, it formed itself into great jagged cliffs, icy chasms that were charcoal-black as scorched logs, a vision of desolation. Nothing moved, not even himself — as if the flames of hell had passed through and left their charred remains. Such was a view of life without God.
And what about that stranger he kept glimpsing in their rumpled mirror? That lined face with its great drooping moustache and its white mane and even tufts sticking out from his ears, and that old floppy hat. Who on earth was that? Where was the upright clean-shaven Midshipman? Where had young James gone? He felt so much more akin to that young sailor who had swum through paralyzing icy waters to safety and gone on to build his cabin by the brook.
A short trip at the best of times, as old Will Garrett use to say, sailing these seas of a paltry lifespan. Why should he be “Ol’ Poppa”? Why not young Poppa? His brain was still sharp as a gibbin’ knife. All right, so maybe the limbs didn’t always do what he wanted. But whyever did the Good Lord invent this cruel joke called age? Surely, when you spend seven decades on earth, the wisdom you have acquired striding down endless corridors of weeks, passing along the vast roadways of year-laden decades, all this — was it accumu
lated only to be crammed into a rough pine box and consigned to the cemetery of St. Andrew’s in New Carlisle? No church yet in Shegouac — but no! Don’t start diverting your energies from getting that school.
And the same question applied to his farm. For what reason on earth had he worked so hard from dawn till dusk, just to let all this fall back into wild bushland from which those dense spruce forests would again spring?
There seemed no answer. Perhaps he should not worry. Perhaps he should let the Good Lord take care of the farm on his behalf. But did He even exist?
Get up, he ordered, you’ll feel better. But last time, he had just ended up sleeping by the open fire downstairs. Best stay tossing and turning on the soft mattress Catherine had stuffed with her chicken feathers. Best stay under the woollen blanket she had woven from their sheep. Soon, they’d get shorn again, yes, he’d better ask young Henry Smith to come and help. Washing fleeces, what a dirty business! And he had no doubt that Edward Hayes would soon ask for Hannah’s hand and off she’d go. Why else would he be building a house? And then, the house would be truly empty. Just him and Catherine, for even the tough Eleanor would soon pass on. Yes, as always, he came back to the same dead end. No Jim. And no God. Spinning circles, leading nowhere. Unhealthy, even he could see that. But how to stop?
Only by finding a solution. So keep on the quest, because he knew the Holy Grail, if he ever found it, brought peace. He turned on his side, fluffed up his down pillow, and just as he began to fall sleep, he heard a banging on the front door downstairs.
He sat bolt upright. Another nightmare? The banging came again. He swung his legs out of bed, put on his slippers and hauled on his jacket — so cold in the house; the fire had gone out.
Who on the earth was it? Some family beset by an urgent illness, wanting Catherine’s advice? Or much worse, his son-in-law Tom Byers with bad news? He padded across the hooked rug covering the upstairs planks and started down.