The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

“Speak it yourself?” Joe asked.

  “No, no. Hardly!”

  The small, nearly bald storekeeper had a way of seeming busy and impatient even when standing still. There was no one else in the IGA but the old women and some Coast Guard men who were doing maintenance on the lighthouse across the harbour. The fishery in the lakes was lobster, oysters, herring, and winter flounder. The store itself was tiny, dim, not particularly clean, with thin stocks of tinned food, crackers, and candy on the shelves. Along the back wall, racks of wellington boots and Stanfields long johns — red or grey, take your pick.

  He had lost track of the calendar, as he always did on a cruise. Picking up a copy of the Cape Breton Post, he checked the date — Saturday, July 30, 1960 — and read that John Kennedy, the Democratic nominee for president, intended to strengthen the armed forces of the United States.

  ~

  Almost three weeks earlier he had left the Kennebunk River with Iseult. They’d spent six days cruising the southern Maine coast in clear light with favourable winds. They’d rowed ashore and dug for clams at Peaks Island and Bustins. At Little Spruce Head they had taken off their clothes on a scrape of white beach scented with balsam. Iseult was thin. Her long legs were beautifully shaped and she moved lightly, like a deer, approaching the green water. It had been stinging cold. He went in with a yell and a crash, the way he always did, and she’d slipped in as she always did, quietly, swimming out quickly beyond the lap of tiny waves, her long form slipping like a knife through the water.

  Iseult had disembarked at Camden, Maine, where their granddaughter Madeleine was waiting with the car that Iseult would drive back to Montreal while Maddie joined him aboard the Son. From Camden he and Maddie had sailed Penobscot Bay in bright weather, taking it slowly, dropping the hook at familiar anchorages. They encountered their first Fundy fog in Jericho Bay and lingered at Bar Harbor, waiting for another spell of clear weather before striking out across the Gulf of Maine for Nova Scotia.

  ~

  His daughters had pretty much talked him out of a Cape Breton cruise when Maddie had surprised everyone by saying she wanted to come along. Her mother was fiercely opposed to the idea, but Maddie was a stubborn mule. She had that from him, he figured.

  His goal had always been to sail north as far as he could reasonably go. Which meant, after he’d studied the east coast littoral, Cape Breton. The Gaspé Peninsula, Anticosti Island, and Newfoundland were farther but not reasonable — at least not for an old man in a thirty-six-foot yawl. On his first try, during the war, sailing the old Friendship sloop, he’d been stopped by the Coast Guard and ordered back to Kennebunk. That was the luckiest thing that could have happened to him: he hadn’t enough experience in those days to realize how little he knew about sailing small boats on the open ocean.

  But in his old age he was a fairly accomplished sailor. Since the war he’d sailed the yawl east as far as Grand Manan more times than he could count, and twice he had crossed the Gulf of Maine alone, dropping his hook at Yarmouth but not venturing any farther. He hadn’t fixed Cape Breton in his sights again until this year, when he’d made up his mind to do it, alone if necessary. Figuring he didn’t have that many seasons left — a case of now or never.

  “What’s wrong with Casco Bay?” Frankie wanted to know. “Bustins, Harraseeket, Harpswell — haven’t you always loved cruising there? Where you already know all the best anchorages? Why go so far from home? And Vic says” — Frankie’s husband, Vic McCracken, was a Trans-Canada Airlines pilot — “the airlines have learned that almost all men over fifty-five, no matter how experienced, just can’t react fast enough in any sort of crisis. It’s a scientifically proven fact.”

  “Don’t tell Joe what he can’t do,” Aunt Elise warned. “Not him.”

  Elise had been spending July with them. Her portrait business was as hectic as ever, but for the past few years she had taken the summers off and come down to Maine with them or visited Virginia in Europe. Her daughter was a diplomat at the Canadian embassy in Brussels and married to a Dutchman.

  Elise and Iseult had been driving up the coast every Sunday to photograph people at the Old Orchard Pier. Over the course of a month they had visited most of the agricultural fairs in southern Maine and coastal New Hampshire, from Fryeburg to Windsor, taking pictures of fairgoers, farmers, and carnies. They planned to assemble their Venice and Old Orchard photographs into a book. Elise had brought folders of old prints to Maine with her, and so had Iseult; the women spent the afternoons sorting through images from their days on the Venice pier and boardwalk.

  “Daddy, Johnny and I are just not going to let Maddie go,” Margo said. “And I have a much better idea, something that would really give you a bit of fun this summer. Don’t you think it’s time you applied to join the Cape Arundel? The membership committee would love to have you.”

  Margo and her husband, Johnny — as of early summer, the Honourable Mr. Justice Taschereau of the Quebec Court of Appeal — were keen golfers.

  “I don’t play golf, have you noticed?”

  “Daddy, that’s the wonderful thing about golf. It’s never too late to start.”

  They had him surrounded, and by the time Iseult stepped out on the porch to summon them to lunch, she probably saw that he was close to folding.

  Margo smiled at her and said, “Mother, tell Daddy he has to be sensible for once.”

  “Joe, be sensible for once,” Iseult said mildly. “And lunch is ready.”

  “Tell him he’s seventy three — ”

  “Joe, you’re seventy-three.”

  “I’m not arguing with you,” he said.

  She smiled.

  “Mother, this isn’t funny,” Margo insisted. “If he were going alone that would be one thing, but he can’t go alone, and I’m not letting Maddie go. So he’d better just give up the idea. Just give the golf club a try, Daddy, please. It’s not at all what you might suppose.”

  “All right, girls, you’ve told him what you think. Your father’s no fool. He knows what he can do and what he can’t.”

  “Well, she’s my daughter!”

  “Of course she is, dear.”

  “And I’m not letting him take her!”

  “Mother, you’re not agreeing with him, are you?” said Frankie.

  “You’re right, dear, she’s your daughter. It’s your decision.”

  “And I’m not going to let her go. It’s ridiculous. He’s seventy-three.”

  He knew damn well how old he was, and also what he was still capable of. What Margo was saying could not really be argued against. He understood and respected — not his daughter’s unfathomable desire to see him on a golf course, but her reluctance to let her daughter go, because it was herself she’d be letting go of.

  Maddie was the eldest of his six grandchildren. She had two brothers, Michel and Jacques. Frankie and Vic had Lizzie, Iseult, and William. All the kids had grown up around boats and were much better sailors than their mothers were. During the past two Augusts he’d handed the Son over to Maddie for two weeks. She’d cruised Penobscot Bay with two girlfriends as her crew.

  He would not take her unless Margo agreed to let her go, and he would not try to persuade Margo. After working it through carefully he had come to the cold conclusion that Cape Breton was more than he could undertake single-handed. He had no wish to end his sailing days with a disastrous, humiliating failure, so he had quietly put the plan on the shelf. There it remained until the bright, cool morning when his daughter caught up with him on the beach and told him that she and Johnny had changed their minds and were giving the cruise their blessing.

  Margo admitted that Johnny had been for it from the start. “He says she was in more danger riding on that boy’s motorcycle in Rome last year than she’d ever be with you on the Son.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Joe said. “It is a real voyage, I won’t deny it. I guess it seems a lot to take on. I certainly believe we can do it, though.”

  They stopped walking.
The tide was out, the sand was hard, and they were both barefoot, an inch of clear surf lapping lazily around their toes.

  “She is a young woman, not a baby,” Margo said, firmly. She was still trying to convince herself. “Johnny says we can’t stop her trying to accomplish things.”

  “And what do you say?”

  “Don’t you dare come back without her,” his daughter whispered. “Don’t you dare.”

  She was right, of course, and he knew that he wouldn’t.

  ~

  From Bar Harbor they’d planned a straight run of thirty hours, in four-hour watches, rounding the hull of Nova Scotia and aiming for Shelburne.

  His granddaughter was aware, the way a good sailor needed to be. Her eye and her mind logged details. She picked up signs other people missed. She had a sailor’s sensitivity to changing weather. All his life he’d been around people who missed clues, with no eye for detail, no sense of the world around them. Sailors with no nose for weather, bankers with no feel for the meaning of the numbers. Maddie could take in a chart with one look and remember every ledge, every rock, every sounding. She had shown him her sketchbooks filled with seabirds, island profiles, boats, many of them rendered with a single flowing line. His favourite was a beautifully detailed drawing she’d made of a winch.

  His mother — her great-grandmother — had paid a woman on the other side of the Ottawa River to look into a blue bottle and see the future. Ashling, they called it, whatever was revealed: a dream, a vision.

  He had always had a suspicion there was a rough justice in the world, that most things happened for a reason. You didn’t always know the reason but it didn’t mean the future was uninvolved with past. The opposite, in fact.

  One afternoon on the Gulf of Maine, halfway across to Nova Scotia, blue sky, blue water, they were munching pilot crackers and cheese when all of a sudden Maddie said, “There’s a big fish out there.”

  “A whale? You see a spout?”

  “Not sure. But he’s out there. Fetch the binocs, Granddaddy, please.”

  She had the helm. It was blowing maybe fifteen knots east-southeast and they were on broad reach, making good time. After going below for the binoculars, he sat down beside her, and a few minutes later the whale spouted: a jet of water straight as a spear, so close that the moisture flecked over them and they could smell the fish-rank stink.

  A minute later the whale breached twenty yards off their port quarter, flying out of the water like a dolphin and crashing down onto the surface, the biggest animal he’d ever seen, bigger than the Son. He didn’t need binoculars to catch the silvery white pattern on its back and the massive dorsal fin before the whale sounded again, disappearing possibly directly under the boat. They waited, tense, scanning the waters all around, neither of them saying a word.

  Another hiss, and they saw the spout maybe twenty yards off the starboard beam. Then nothing, silence. Slight creaking of rigging as the Son sped along. They kept scanning. Suddenly the whale breached again, flying across the surface before smashing back into the sea. Seventy or eighty feet in length, twice the length of the Son. This time the whale flapped it flukes as it sounded.

  “What do you think it was?” Maddie asked.

  “Don’t know.” He’d seen plenty of humpbacks and minkes, but never a whale that size.

  She handed over the helm and went below, returning with a fat paperback, Moby-Dick, that she’d been reading since Camden. Flipping through it until she found what she was looking for, she read in silence while he kept a lookout. The whale sighting had shaken him. Not fear, exactly, but the way he sometimes felt when he woke from a dream. Rattled. There was something powerful out there moving below the surface, and he had been ignoring it only because he did not understand it.

  Most of the time he was able to sustain a sense of himself as complete, a finished man. A comforting sense that his life story had been filled out for better or for worse. The truth was, he was still empty. So much remained beyond his grasp, things he would never feel or answer or know.

  His granddaughter was lost in Moby-Dick. “Find anything?” he said.

  “I think so. Listen to this.” She began reading aloud. “Finback whale, Balaenoptera physalus.”

  Under this head I reckon a monster which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and Long-John has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the whale whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the Atlantic. . . . His grand distinguishing feature, the fin . . . some three or four feet long, growing vertically from the hinder part of the back, of an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end. . . . The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet rising like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with such wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from man. This leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable Cain of his race, bearing for his mark that style upon his back . . .

  “I guess he’s referring to the pattern, Granddaddy. Did you see it on his back?”

  “I did.”

  “‘Banished . . . unconquerable . . . the mark of Cain . . . ’ I suppose Melville means that fin whales are loners. The whalers saw only one at a time, like us. Have you ever seen one before?”

  “No, never.”

  “Thanks for arranging it.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Certain young people, like Maddie, had thinner skins. It wasn’t that they were delicate so much as not insulated. Iseult had never been insulated; neither had he. They had damaged each other, damaged themselves. She’d hated and blamed him for the death of their first baby, and in his worst moments he’d blamed her for Mike’s death. But they had collected themselves, kept the family together, sustained. She hadn’t left him for the swami after all. And he had eventually pulled himself out of the neck of a bottle. Suffering had brought them together, though at the time it seemed it would tear them apart. Their marriage had been there to save them from drowning.

  ~

  At Shelburne, Nova Scotia, they bent a set of smaller, heavier sails before continuing on for Cape Breton. It was a week of four-hour watches, rugged ocean sailing, easterly winds and fog and never being quite sure where they were on account of a powerful offshore tidal set. Navigating with a compass and a taffrail log, they dropped their hook at Liverpool, Chester, Halifax, Sheet Harbour, and Canso. The RDF picked up weak Morse signals from lighthouses, which they tried to triangulate on the little chart table above the icebox.

  Fog did not frighten Maddie the way it did some people. Three or four times while she had the helm they’d caught sudden blowdown gusts, maybe forty-five knots, the Son heeling violently, burying her rail in the drink. Maddie had deftly eased the main sheet while keeping one hand on the wheel, face glowing, perfectly calm.

  Finally they had slipped through the locks at St. Peter’s and come into the Bras d’Or lakes. After the fierce easterlies and ocean swells it had felt like entering a tropical lagoon. The lakes were an inland sea, saline, estuarial, and warm. Madeleine had been diving off the boat and swimming every day since they’d passed the locks. They found easy anchorages near shore and saw no one but herring fishermen, bald eagles, and women who rowed out to offer baskets of oysters. They had come into Baddeck feeling grateful for having made the arduous trip and for its being just about over.

  ~

  Baddeck was lonesome and isolated, a tiny little burg, prim, with its courthouse and churches and Legion Hall and Red Ensigns flapping. The only vessels in the harbour were some stubby Nova Scotia lobster boats and a couple of ancient herring trawlers. They had not met one other cruising sailboat since leaving Bar Harbor.

  Mr. Albert MacIsaac seemed to own or control pretty much everything in the town. He owned the IGA and was more or less the harbourmaster. He rented Joe the mooring for fifty cents a day and
arranged to have their laundry done by a woman in the village. MacIsaac knew the schedule of Sunday Masses and had quietly offered to sell Joe a quart bottle of clear liquor, apparently some sort of Nova Scotia moonshine.

  Eager to stretch their legs, he and Maddie had walked the village. The houses of Baddeck were small and tidy. He felt eyes watching them from inside the little houses and sensed the existence of a larger, rougher world that began at the fringes of town, where the paved streets ran out and there were tarpaper shacks and cinder-block dwellings roofed with tarpaper — the cellars of houses that had been started then abandoned. There were chickens, silent, staring children, noisy dogs, and rotting boats. A muddy Pontiac had rocked by them, three husky young men in the front seat, heads swivelling to stare at Maddie. In her striped pedal-pushers and tiny shoes like ballet slippers she was probably the liveliest girl they’d seen in that fish town for a while.

  Maddie had been hoping to find a restaurant or takeout shack, but there was nothing beyond the town but empty road and mountains, so they’d returned to MacIsaac’s, picked up their grocery sacks, rowed back out to the Son, and made grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. Afterwards Maddie stretched out on the pipe berth with her journal and sketchbook and Joe went forward to take a nap in the V-berth. It was a fine afternoon for sleeping, the air soft and grey and both of them still recovering from the rigours of ocean sailing. He felt a sense of accomplishment.

  They wouldn’t be sailing back to Maine, not this summer anyway. His plan had always been to find winter storage in Nova Scotia and fly home from Sydney or Halifax. Albert MacIsaac had offered to haul up the Son, store her in his boatshed, and paint her top and bottom, all for three hundred dollars plus the cost of whatever fancy exotic yacht paint Joe might wish him to use, which would have to be special-ordered from Halifax or Chester. Early next summer he would send up a crew to sail her to Maine unless he felt like doing it himself, which he didn’t suppose he would. Once was enough.

  He had fallen into a deep sleep and a dream set in the twenties, when all the cars were black and high. A bridge was falling down. Grattan, in uniform, was berating him, saying he’d cheated in the construction, used rotten iron, pig iron. They were standing in waist-high grass at Windmill Point watching the bridge crumbling. The grass was whipping in the breeze with a noise like bed sheets tearing and Grattan was about to drive his car out into the current to save the people when a sharp knocking on the hull broke Joe out of the dream.