She glanced caustically at his suit. “Looks like you got the jump on us, there.”
“Yeah, well,” and he grinned, sheepishly, “gets lots of wear, this suit do. Been a godfather thrice, and best man twice—pallbearer twice, too.” He nodded, fingering his lapel. “Yup, gets lots of wear, this suit do.”
“Surprise you finds time for visiting.”
“Oh, I don’t do any of it. Truthfully speaking, I don’t like crowds much, so I just lends them the suit.”
“You lends them your suit.” She eyed him questioningly. “You’re asked to be best man because you owns a suit.”
He nodded, face serious, eyes intent. “Not many bothers with buying a suit in Cooney Arm. I dare say it got me a walk with you today, as well—or would you rather me knocking on your door in oilskins?” The eyes crinkled. He was grinning.
Not knowing if it was at himself or her, she gave him a cool stare and carried on walking. “You tied on there?” she asked stiffly, pointing to a few boats at the end of the wharf.
“No. Over here.” He pointed to the quay over by a fish store, a bit farther along.
She cut through another abandoned yard, picking her way across trampled beds and muddied trenches. He remained quiet, following as she stepped carefully over a knocked-down fence, rotting into the ground.
“Seems like good land,” he said. “How come nobody’s growing here?”
She shrugged. “Some left off gardening last year when they heard of the new plant coming.”
“Don’t seem wise to me, letting your gardens go.”
“Why not? Not much time for hoeing and planting if you’re working on the flakes or in a plant all day long.”
“That’s something you makes time for, gardening. What happens if you gets a bad year fishing?”
“Not supposed to, with the plants. Not like you needs the sun any more.” She crouched beneath a piece of railing, squeezing through a narrow opening of missing pickets. “Anyway, not everybody’s giving it up— most keeps their gardens back there.” She indicated a stand of pine back the way they had come, at the farthest end of the outport. He shot a glance over his shoulder, then back at the overgrown soil beneath his feet.
“Glad to know they’re not all thinking foolish,” he said, hopping the fence. “Cripes, up and down like a dog’s stomach, fishing is. Always good to have a cellar full of spuds.”
“Haven’t you heard of Unemployment cheques in Cooney Arm?” she asked with a tiresome look. “No more need for gardening and hunting and birding. If the plant’s not operating, everybody’s on Unemployment. I’m surprised you’re not all in your boats, rowing up and signing on at the plant. Not that far-fetched,” she said, annoyed at his unlikely look. “They’re moving about everywhere else on the island—resettlement and everything.”
“Resettlement.” He snorted. “Might be all right for some.”
Her annoyance grew as he paused, tossing a critical look back over the bleak-faced outport of Ragged Rock, for it was as its name suggested, a ragged point of land jutting out to sea, its fifty or sixty houses clutching at whatever stony bits of soil was afforded them. Those houses farthest out on the diminishing point appeared to be wedged into rock, some balanced on shores ten feet high, their pathways a muddied black streak that scribbled across the rock face like lengths of cable mooring them to their neighbours’ doorways, the scattered garments on their clotheslines flapping like wind-shredded sails.
Her eyes fastened onto his profile as he scanned the outport, arrested by a shifting of his features; yet nothing had moved—the brow, she thought, it was the brow—he’d relaxed it; such a black thing it was, hooding his eyes and rendering the rest of his features dark, sullen-like. And his mouth stiffened with intent; yet his lips so thick and finely sculpted she felt they might tremble ought he to relax them as well.
“And on the seventh day God rested,” he said, pulling a smile that registered anything but satisfaction over what he saw. “Yeah, nice place,” he added, as she kept her stare, saying nothing.
“You don’t think He should’ve took another day? Thrown in a few more trees? Some gardens, perhaps?” she asked.
“Well, He must’ve thought it was a job well done, else He wouldn’t have rested.”
“If that’s how you read the words, I suppose.”
“What words?”
“The ones you just spoke—on the seventh day, God rested.”
“Oh. Well, how do you read them, then?” he asked.
She hesitated, the burden of explanation too much, then quickly said, “It’s not God that rested, but those who rest in him. Like when we says ‘the joy of a home.’ It’s not the house we means, but those in the house— Oh, never mind,” she said carelessly to his blank look. Brushing past him, she ran lightly past the fish store and out on the quay. “Which boat’s yours?”
“The grey one with the yellow engine house,” he said, catching up. “Why do you think those words—about God resting—mean something other than what they are?”
“Because the Bible’s wrote like that. Anyway, it don’t matter. That’s a nice grey.”
“Yeah, well, I got it figured the Lamb of God isn’t a bloody sheep,” he replied irritably, “but you’re onto something altogether different here, with this ‘resting’ business.”
“It’s how the saints reads it.”
“What saints?”
“Who cares what saints! All the saints. Would you rather just walk and forget the ride?”
With lightning speed, he shifted tones. “Nay, nice day on the water. Come on, I helps you down.”
Prompted by the urging in his eyes, and feeling too far committed now to back down, she allowed him to help her into his boat. Within minutes he had them untied and bobbing off from shore. A thrust of the flywheel and the engine caught hold, dotting the air with puffs of smoke. She looked back, always liking the receding shoreline and her distancing from Ragged Rock. Such an ugly place, she thought each time she found herself drifting from its shores—and her house the ugliest one amongst them with its dulled, yellowish paint, blistering like old, fevered skin. The rest of the houses looked no better—bits of colour against grey, barren hillside. Why would anyone settle on such bleakness, she wondered, when all up and down the shore on either side of the settlement were such nicely forested coves and inlets?
The water, was her immediate reply. The biggest piece of naked land next to the holy fishing grounds is where any good fisherman would launch his boat. She glanced sideways at Sylvanus. His eyes were upon her, intent with curiosity, as though she were some prize he was wanting to pry open. Surprisingly, she didn’t find the thought disagreeable; yet she felt no such desire about him. A fisherman from Cooney Arm. What could a fisherman from Cooney Arm have that she hadn’t already rejected?
An hour’s putting, and with nothing but shoreline and grey water all around her, she started shifting restlessly.
“Soon be there,” he called out over the drone of the motor. “Another twenty minutes. Pretty place, eh?” he said as they came upon a tidy little cove, all meadow and green, a couple of houses seeking shade beneath a grove of birch, and a cluster of stages and wood-houses hugging its shore. “Little Trite. Only Trapps live there. Never known to be friendly,” he added as some of the Trapp youngsters zipped rocks and curses over the water toward them. He motored past, the beachy shoreline giving way to a cliff whose smooth face rose a hundred feet straight up. “And that there’s Old Saw Tooth,” he said, keeping a wide berth of the jagged ledge, which jutted out of the sea like the unhinged jaw of the rocky face it curled toward, and the waters foaming from its maw. He paused, as if examining for the first time the roiling waters and jagged teeth upon the otherwise calm ocean.
“It’s what took Father,” he said quietly, his eyes caught upon a molar. “And brother Elikum. Got caught in a gale. Pitched their boat upon them teeth—according to the Trapps. They seen it.” He shifted his gaze back to her, smiled sadly, then directe
d her attention a bit farther along the headland to a narrow channel opening up the rock-walled cliffs. “Through that neck is Cooney Arm. Be prepared—bit rough going through the neck.”
Minutes later they were cutting around the head. She gripped her seat apprehensively as he steered them through the neck and the water grew more choppy. He cut back on the throttle as the boat hove up on a swell flung back by a sounder crashing against the cliff face.
“Always rough in the neck,” he said again as they sank sickeningly down its other side, immediately heaving upon another. Fright gripping her, she grasped her seat, staring at him accusingly, the blue of her eyes colder than the sea as they swerved and lurched over the catacomb swells. “Almost through,” he said assuredly, cutting back further on the throttle, and within the minute they were slithering over the last swell and slipping onto smoother waters. “There she is, then—Cooney Arm.” He rose as though it were some grand dame he was announcing.
Grand she was, thought Adelaide, taking in the green-draped hills towering over the cove and the falls frothing white down her front, landing droplets that glistened like sequins onto the meadow grandstanding beneath her. He cut the motor and she rose to the thunderous downpour of the plummeting water and its rush across the meadow into the sea.
“Bear Falls. No wonder you can hear it twenty miles away,” she said in wonder. The right side of the meadow, the side nearest the neck and the cliffs of the headland, was bereft of houses. It was onto this side that he steered his boat.
“Yup, the falls is wild now with the spring thaw. She’ll simmer down, soon enough. That’s Mother’s house.” He pointed to the first house on the other side of the brook, its coat of paint long since faded into the rotting clapboard, its roof sagged into its centre as its foundation found comfort, many years before, into the thickly sodded soil upon which it stood. A vegetable garden, thrice the size of the house, sprawled off from its back and partway up the hillside, its picket fence winding crookedly around hillocks and ditches, keeping out the goats bleating and hopping alongside with swollen teats. A couple of sheep tugged on patches of chamomile through the wider openings nearer the gate, fattening themselves from the winter’s lean, their thickened fleece ready for knitting.
“And there’s Mother,” he said, grinning at an old woman up in the far end of the garden, anxiously shooing away a goat who must’ve gotten its snout far enough between the pickets to nip at her rhubarb shoots. “And the rest is mostly brothers and kin,” he added, and she noted the pride with which he invited her to look toward the eight or ten colourfully painted houses that completed the outport, all differently shaped with add-ons and extended roofs. Yet, unlike the wedged, shored-up houses of Ragged Rock, which were precariously balanced on stone outcroppings, the homes of Cooney Arm were neatly laid out around a flat, grassy shoreline, their gardens, like his mother’s, sprawling out behind, with groupings of pine and aspens screening doorways and windows. Not so different from Ragged Rock was the smoke spewing out of the chimneys and the host of flakes, sheds, stages, and outhouses lining the water’s edge.
“You hardly sees the flakes and stuff once the grass starts growing,” he said as if hearing her thought. “Up to your waist, the grass grows. Looks pretty nice then.”
“Aren’t there youngsters here?” she asked, noting the quiet as he helped her out of the boat.
“Dinnertime. Always quiet this far up, though. Mother can’t stand youngsters bawling. That’s why she built so close to the falls—to drown us all out whilst we were growing up, she used to say.” He grinned. “I think she got the sounds of the brook permanently fixed in her head somehow, for even now she never hears nothing I says. Or makes out she don’t, for she got no trouble hearing when she wants to, I noticed.”
Adelaide walked up over the landwash onto the meadow beside the brook. “How come nobody built on this side of the brook, then?” she asked as, the boat safely onshore, he caught up to her.
“Too close to the neck. Strong winds gust through that channel in winter.”
She glanced around the meadow that soon enough would be fraught with grass and wildflowers. “What odds the wind if you lived here,” she said quietly. “Everything so quiet—and nice.” She wandered ahead of him, her feet squelching through the wet sod, her ear tuned to the brook as it pummelled mightily beside her, stripping the turf to the rock beneath, yet its sonata, light, merry, finely tuned to the songbirds flitting amongst the naked, multi-limbed branches of the mountain ash.
The brook deepened as they neared the falls, and she looked upon the tumbling waters with reverence. Despite its being the fountain from which the brook flowed, it appeared as separate from the water gushing from it as it did from the hidden lakes feeding it. Cresting the ridge at the top of the hill, it fell heavily, smashing against the rock shield behind it and foaming furiously downward. She drew closer, leaning a knee upon a spruce that had been ripped from its roots and washed down the incline and was now lying partially submerged in the deep, rioting pool gathered at the bottom. It riots louder than me when I was a youngster scrubbing Mother’s floors, she thought, feeling the water’s turbulence drumming against the tree trunk and rumbling up her thigh. Rushes of soft, wet air swarmed her face and she drew closer still, as if sucked into the wantonness of the tumbling waters. Gazing above to where the trees split apart at the top of the hill and the frothing white waters blended into the pearly white of a cloud mass, she thought for one wild moment that the water gushed from heaven itself. Just then, the sun brightened behind the cloud, diffusing further the line where sky and water met. And when the cry of a songbird rose over the rhapsody of the falls, as might a soprano leading a choir into its final amen, a hush fell upon Adelaide.
“It’s where I’m building my house, starting tomorrow,” he said.
She startled back to find him so close, his eyes as rapt upon her face as hers were upon the falls.
He grinned. “I takes after Mother, I suppose—loves the sound of running water.”
“Does it calm your mind?” she asked.
“My mind?” He grinned. “There’s them who believes I haven’t got one. Must be why they kept banishing me when I was a youngster.”
“You got banished?”
“Yup.”
“Why were you banished?”
“Oh, I was always too serious.”
“Did it bother you?”
“Being serious? Nay. I liked boats better than tiddly, was all.”
“Being banished, I mean. Did it bother you being banished?”
“Nay. I never chased after anybody that much; liked being by myself too much. Still do. Bobbing on the water in a good stiff breeze, feeling everything big and strong about me—that’s what I likes. Drowns foolishness when you sits on something as deep and strong as the sea. Plus, I loves the quiet.”
His words rang in her ears like a church bell. And in that moment, with the glory of the falls still rushing through her veins and the sun finally breaking through the cloud, the promise of another world dawned in his eyes, and her heart flared like a struck match.
“It’s heavenly,” she near whispered. Her stomach quickened as he lowered his eyes onto her mouth.
“What’s heavenly?” he asked.
“The quiet,” she said.
“Yeah. The quiet.” He raised his eyes back to hers, their browns more warm, more molten. “But it isn’t quiet, is it?” he said. “The wind and the sea—they’re talking all the time, luring you outside, driving you back in. Feels like I’m always fighting or chatting with the weather. Not like that in the woods, though. Don’t like the woods much—that kind of quiet. More silent than quiet. Always feels like it’s too heavy, that kind of silence, presses in on me.” He paused. “Sounds a bit foolish, do I?”
“No. No, I just never thinks of the weather like that.” She shrugged. “Either it’s raining or it’s not. Coming straight down or at a slant.”
“Yeah, for sure. Hard knowing weather in bigger p
laces, when there’s houses all around you barring it out. Now, a place like this”—he gestured toward the meadow—“you sees it all the time, especially summertime. Like youngsters, the way the wind plays with the grass. And the flowers, too.”
She nodded, drawn into his thought, his pretty words, watching as he ran his hand through the coarse, thick hair draping his brow, liking how it fell back again once his fingers left off.
“Yup, heavenly, for sure, this meadow. As good as straddling a boatload of fish. Well, almost, anyway,” he added with a grin. “Nothing as heavenly as a boatload of fish. Live and die in a boat, I could.”
There it was. The silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Barely able to restrain a groan, she turned from him, retracing her steps back along the brook. A window had just been opened for her into another world, a kingdom of princes and castles. And its vision was thrilling, staggering, even, during those moments when she gazed into his molten brown eyes. But no hooded eyes had she. Regal he might be upon his meadow, but it was all a disguise for the beastly fisherman reigning within, waiting, wanting to infuse her body with a dozen squalling infants. And who reigns then, huh? Who reigns in a houseful of shrieking, squalling babies?
Misery, she answered herself. Nothing but misery.
Yet here he was, catching up to her, his fingers strong and warm as they touched her arm, his eyes liquid soft as they invited her to come sit. He closed his hand around hers, all tender and firm as though it were a finch he held, and pointed toward a white speckled rock near the brook, wide and flat enough to sit on. She allowed him to lead her, but he might as well have been the fevered Apollo, for her back was like an oak as she sat, her heart shielded by bark.
Pulling away her hand, she sat, folding her skirt around her. “So, what makes fishing such a heavenly thing for you?” she asked, supplanting his nicely pressed suit with oilskins—a guarantee against forgetting that this was no prince sitting beside her, merely a fisherman, anchored to the sea, and the momentary lapse into fantasy back there, just that, a fantasy.
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