Catching the Light

by Susan Sinnott

  “You should see the boxes of charts and books Mel has. Eighty or more.” Mom sounded more like herself, though she was still twiddling with her rings. Then they kept talking about those old logs and big dusty books, Dad starting to say something about sea stories like Moby-Dick and Treasure Island.

  Mom said, “Oh, Mel used to…” all excited, then stopped. And there was a little gap in the talk.

  “Want to get everything onto shelves in that back room.” Dad said and went on and on about those shelves and it was not like Dad to talk so much.

  Things were back to normal by the time Mrs. Brooks left, though Dad put his arm round Mom after and said it was okay. Everything would be okay. And Mom said she had a headache and needed a cup of tea.

  Jumpin’s, it was Cathy who needed the cup of tea.

  ***

  So lessons started and Cathy sat on her bed sounding out her list of words for the week over and over, writing them down in lowercase letters and reading them back to herself. Mom would come and shut the bedroom door.

  Once, Cathy started reading aloud at the kitchen table, a bit of Ramona the Brave she’d been having trouble with that now she could read okay. She thought Mom would be pleased. Mom was cooking but she turned everything off and just left it all half done and walked off down into Mariners Cove all without saying a word.

  Another time Dad told her not to say Sarah says anymore because it was getting on Mom’s nerves. So she didn’t. She really didn’t. But her mom still went up in smoke when Cathy told her she was putting too much salt in the stew—started banging cupboard doors as she put things away.

  “This is how I make my stew.” Thump. “This is how my mother makes her stew.” Thump. “This is how Dad likes it and I like it and everybody else likes it.” Plates banging together—and Mom got mad when you did that because it chipped them. “And I’m not changing the amount of salt I use just because Mrs. Clever Brooks doesn’t do it like that.”

  Cathy started to explain it was just that she’d seen the tiny amount Sarah put in hers and asked her about it, but Dad shook his head at her over his newspaper so she stopped.

  ***

  Mom had a funny look on her face the day Sarah came to the house to see how she cooked her fish and brewis, like when somebody says the temperature is going up to seventeen degrees but you know it’ll never happen because the wind is steady in the east. Sarah had asked her for the recipe—told Mom Cathy had praised her fish and brewis to the ceiling, so Sarah wanted to try her hand at it. Mom didn’t have a recipe, said just come and see.

  “Cathy. Go paint.”

  That was her mom when Sarah arrived. Cathy wasn’t even allowed to stay in the house so she never knew how it went, didn’t see Sarah leave. But Mom had a different look on her face afterwards—the same look she’d had after she sold that leaf rug to some tourist who was all gushy about how clever Mom was with her fingers, how artistic.

  Mom told Dad she gave Sarah some of that good salt cod Em Parsons had given him. Hoped he didn’t mind. Said someone had given Sarah a recipe for salt cod and bananas. Imagine. Bananas! Must’ve been a mainlander.

  Mom wasn’t as upset about Cathy’s lessons after that.

  Starting Point

  Cathy was a challenge, no question. Sarah called her teacher friends for tips. Motivation wasn’t an issue here but what if there was a learning disability she wasn’t equipped to handle? Sarah talked with the friend in psychology about how the brain decodes the written word, and fervently hoped Cathy’s problems were nothing more than being left behind in school.

  How could a girl who saw so much, learn so little? Sarah wondered about hearing loss but Cathy said her mother had asked Dr. Powell to test her hearing back in grade six and it was perfect. Yes. Most of us displayed selective hearing now and then, but Cathy seemed to have grown a soundproof shell.

  Yet she noticed such visual detail in the world around her. On their rambles through Mariners Cove, Cathy always had her pencil out. She would draw anything—a strip of plastic trapped between rocks, barnacles under a wharf, waves just being wavy. Ocean-sized talent.

  “Let’s talk about them instead,” Sarah said. “Tell me what you see when you draw.”

  But Cathy had no words for what she saw.

  So one rainy morning Sarah plonked herself and Cathy down on her chesterfield in front of a painting by an artist from home in Regina. It was all movement and colour and she asked Cathy to describe it. For minutes she listened to the two of them breathing, which was encouraging in its way, but finally Sarah said, “So what is it?”

  “A market.”

  “What else?”

  One shrug. Two shrugs.

  “Is it around here?”

  No. Sarah asked how Cathy knew. The colours were all wrong. And the fruit was different, on those tables. And the clothes. Beards. Bare feet. Sandals. Yes. It was Tunis in North Africa, and there followed a session with an atlas and a Sarah Brooks monologue, a Condensed History of Tunis. Any questions? No.

  “So what strikes you most about that picture?”

  “Noise.”

  “Really! Oh, I agree with you but I thought you’d say colours.”

  Cathy said yes, noise and colours, and Sarah said tell her more about the noise. It was shouting all piled up, like school only louder. And the wheels on that cart. And hens. And that donkey braying. One big racket.

  “So tell me about the colours,” Sarah said.

  They were straight-out-of-the-tube colours. Thick, strong, and in your face. Not mixed. Edges real clear. Different from home. Everything home was in-between colours, running into each other, thin and smudgy. Cathy had been leaning forwards more and more but now she looked round at Sarah. “I’d like to paint in Tunis.”

  Art had kept the world out, but perhaps art could let the world back in.

  Step Two

  Her first lessons were nearly all reading. Cathy said she didn’t need writing as well but Sarah said of course she did. It was reading the other way round. How could she start passing exams if she couldn’t write down what she knew?

  Sarah gave her a hardcover notebook and said start writing a journal. Cathy picked it up and put it down a few times. So many empty pages. There was no help from an all-white page, not even a few words to start you off: complete this sentence…. The book didn’t even want to stay open. Cathy had to stretch it out, flattening the pages so they creased along the binding. She gripped the pencil, wound her legs round each other, and hunched down over the first page.

  MUNDY MONING

  Sarah said don’t worry about grammar or spelling for now. Just try to put your thoughts down in straight lines. But Cathy’s thoughts floated round in lumps. She gripped her pencil tighter. She could write about that art book Sarah had given her—a discard from Gander Library.

  I LIK SARAS BK

  Mostly Cathy just looked at the pictures but she did try the two-colour thing—a lighter crayon for the lit-up parts and a darker one for the shade. She used yellow and brown and drew bowls and shiny stuff round the house. She’d tried changing the source of light but her mom got upset when Cathy moved the lamps. Had to be careful not to stretch cords across places because Mom walked through one last week and the lamp fell over and broke the shade.

  That was two sides filled. Cathy put her head in her hands, dug her nails into her scalp to let the steam out, then looked sideways at the clock by her bed. Thirty minutes was enough.

  ***

  She was early at Sarah’s so Cathy sat cross-legged on the picnic table and read over those two journal pages. Then the dog was circling the table, barking, and Sarah came out.

  “May I have a look?”

  May I. Nobody said that round here. Can I. Let’s have a look.

  “Wonderful, Cathy. Some great thoughts. Now, how about breaking them up into bite-sized pieces—a period ma
ybe here and here? Easier to read. And lowercase letters, please.” The phone rang and Sarah said sorry, she was expecting a long-distance call.

  Cathy closed the journal and drew that big maple on its front cover. The cover was a creamy beige colour with a cloth feel to it, like the book was still in its underwear. She studied the shape of the tree, how the branches came off, how the whole tree bent left above the roof where the wind caught it. She was doing the twigs when Sarah came out.

  “That was my sister,” she said. “She has exciting news—she’s expecting a baby.” Sarah had a funny look on her face, kind of pulled in. Her voice was all bright and cheerful but her face wasn’t. “And only married in the fall.”

  How could she draw that? Cathy tried to see what had changed—the mouth mainly, only Sarah turned away before Cathy could fix it in her head and when she turned back again she was wearing a wedding-picture smile.

  ***

  Sarah laid a little notebook on the picnic table and a big dark red book like a Bible with gold letters on the front. She said she wasn’t too concerned about spelling but maybe they could look up one or two words in the dictionary each session and they’d start a list of words Cathy had trouble with in her journal, like journal and thought.

  She pushed the book over and waited and Cathy stared at it, not touching it, and the silence went on and on so in the end she had to say she didn’t know how to use a dictionary.

  The next few days she was saying the alphabet to herself over and over, faster and faster, because the words Sarah made her look up all had a ton of letters.

  Ogust August 22 1995

  Tht 2 color stuf is grt fr trees aftr its raned rained.

  It would be even better when the snow came and the snow stuck to one side and blew off the other. Every twig would show up. But Cathy wanted to show the mood of the tree, not just a copy with every hair in place. Mood was one of those words they had talked about.

  Mood: noun: a temporary state of mind.

  She hated it when the dictionary used a bunch more words she didn’t know and she had to look them up too. She ended up with so many fingers marking so many places that she ran out of fingers. Her father’s dictionary was big and heavy and sometimes her fingers came out feeling nish.

  Sarah dusnt no the wurd word nish. She shud luk it up in the dictionary.

  Mood: noun: a temporary state of mind.

  Temporary: she knew that one. Like jobs that didn’t last.

  State: noun. Cathy thought state meant mess because her mom always said, “Look at the state you’re in: your hair, your room, your sneakers.” But state just meant how things were. So mood was a temporary state of mind like feeling great or feeling down. But that didn’t work for a tree.

  Cathy stopped and wiggled her fingers. She was trying to write lightly but she pressed even harder for lowercase letters and it took longer.

  More studying meant less time to paint but if it meant she’d be able to paint better in the future, Cathy didn’t care. If she could start passing exams maybe she could get a job one day, have money to buy paints, pay for art lessons.

  Mostly Cathy skimmed through the writing in Sarah’s art book, but she liked the look of “Gesture Drawings” so she forced herself through that part, looked up enough words to get the idea. It was like walking through woods with no path: some words were so matted together you had to go round or start chopping.

  Just a few quick lines and those gesture drawings could show where the weight went down to the base and the direction of movement. Cathy drew Mom’s cat, Missy, stretched up tall because she was checking out a bird on the window ledge so she was only sitting on a small bit of bum. The bird flew away and the cat sank back and you could see the weight spread out, more bum touching the ground. Cathy drew her again. The cat started licking her feet. Trust the cat to act like she didn’t care.

  Gesture drawings were great for moving targets, like baseball players and figure skaters on TV. Hockey players moved too fast. She went down by White’s store and drew everyone who came by, leaning against the clapboard near the door, bending one knee up so her foot was flat on the concrete below, then resting the pad on her knee. Nobody took any notice until Ma Tucker wanted to see and got upset.

  “Well, I know I’m big, Cathy, but you’ve made me look like a house.”

  “I’m just showing where the weight goes. I’m not trying—”

  “Don’t you talk to me about weight! That’s ignorance that is. Pure ignorance.” And Cathy’s mother knew all about it by lunchtime.

  ***

  August 25 1995

  Mood: noun: the atmosphere or overall tone of something. Sarah was surprised Cathy knew the word atmosphere. Jumpins, you didn’t grow up in a lighthouse without knowing about atmosphere. Sarah said people could make atmospheres too and Cathy said yes, some guys were big atmospheric disturbances like that smartass, Hutch Parsons.

  She’d sketched him and his crowd in their kayaks last week but she had to draw fast before they got too far away. Usually that was where she liked Parsons—far away and going farther. Funny, she drew most of the kayakers in two gestures: one for the person and one for the boat. But with Parsons she drew everything in one gesture. Maybe it was because most of them looked like they were just sitting in boats, separate from them. Parsons looked like part of his, like he’d grown out of its bones.

  August 26 1995

  Mood: noun: the atmosphere or overall tone of something.

  Tone: noun.

  There was a load of stuff about tone but most of it was no good for trees. Voice blah blah, music blah blah. Sarah said don’t get sidetracked by the blah-blahs until you need them. Sidetracked was something to do with trains going the wrong way. Where was she?

  Tone: noun: the general character of something.

  Yes. The mood of the tree was the general character of the tree. Cathy wanted to draw the snarl in that bark’s face that looked like it wanted to grab you, and those soft branches on the larch that looked like they wanted to give you a hug.

  ***

  Sometimes they walked miles during lessons, talking. Sarah said getting used to hearing words and using them in conversation helped reading too. Often Cathy was so tired after those walks she had to lie down and close her eyes—not leg-tired; brain-tired. Sarah said yes, think of it as a marathon. Her brain had to cover miles of thinking as fast as it could because the rest of the class was way up ahead. But she’d catch up. She said Cathy hadn’t shown any signs of this whatever where your brain was screwed up—couldn’t see letters in the right order or something. Cathy hadn’t realized there was such a thing.

  So as they walked they talked about Mariners Cove and people and boats and weather and things on the radio. And why did Sarah not have a better name for Dog? Well, he was a stray, too old to learn new tricks. They’d tried—all kinds of literary names like Huckleberry and Oliver and Ishmael. Sarah wrote them down for her afterwards. And Ulysses, which was Dr. Brooks’s favourite because he could abbreviate it to Hey U. But their big hairy mutt only ever answered to “Dog.”

  Sarah asked questions about everything. One day it was the names of birds.

  “Cormorant,” said Cathy.

  “Whole sentence please.”

  “That is a cormorant.”

  “What do you know about them?”

  Well, they were big and they sat low in the water and you could pick them out when they flew in a V because their V was so messy. Great in the water. No good in the air.

  “What’s it doing?

  “Drying its wings. It is drying its wings. Must’ve went diving for fish.”

  “It must have gone diving for fish.”

  “Dad says went diving.” They walked out of sight of the cormorant.

  “I expect when he’s writing an exam he’ll put must have gone diving.”

  The Gang

/>   As they rounded the point in their kayaks, the boys saw three cormorants take off, struggling to get airborne and looking as if they’d crash any minute. There were people on the shore behind: Sarah Brooks and the Lighthouse.

  “Joined at the hip these days,” Jack said. His boat was just ahead of Hutch’s. “See them together everywhere.”

  “Look like a bat and a ball,” said Hutch and the guys cracked up. “And she is kind of batty—the Lighthouse, I mean.”

  “Don’t let Jenny hear you say that.” Jack glanced back at him. “Cathy’s in her class now and Jenny looks after her. She’d have your head.”

  “So what else is new. Your sister’s always having my head for something.”

  “And you’re always innocent of course.” That was Paul on his other side, paddling with Bud.

  Jenny Sheppard was off doing something with her mother that day so she wasn’t behind Jack in Dad’s old double kayak as usual. Andy was there instead. So it was an all-guy group today, which wasn’t usual either. There was often a girl or two wanting to come with them, which was fun although it slowed them down, and Hutch preferred it when he could paddle all-out, all of the time. Jenny never slowed them down.

  He urged Dolph ahead now, pulling hard to outstrip the others, and a song welled up from deep inside—nothing particular, just berm-berm-berm—but it fit the rhythm of the ocean, the mood of the day. But he couldn’t maintain the burst and his arms were screaming and the others caught up, telling him he was a show-off, and he had no breath left for a comeback.

  It was their last chance for the core crowd to kayak together before Paul and Bud went back to St. John’s on Labour Day. Bud Powell was a year older than the rest and going into grade ten, changing schools. Hutch never really thought of him as a townie because his parents were from here and he and Bud had played together all the time as toddlers. But Bud’s father taught at the university so they’d lived in St. John’s forever during the school year.

  Paul was different. He was a real townie, but he was okay in spite of that. His parents taught in the History Department with Dr. Powell and had started coming to Mariners Cove with them years ago. Bought a place from one of Hutch’s uncles. Paul played soccer with them and was on an all-star hockey team in town—he was a good guy.