Dance the Rocks Ashore

by Lesley Choyce

  An aluminum storm door in the front. Intimidating. Should you knock?

  It’s unlocked. You walk in, opening the wooden door as well, which rings a small bell, but there’s still no sign of life. You must make your way to the kitchen. Someone will be there. The path through the house seems strange, alien, different. Maybe walls have been torn out and moved. The wallpaper is recent, the ceiling stuccoed. Your feet shuffle across carpet, not wood.

  For a moment you close your eyes and try to close the gap between the years, but it yawns wider and wider.

  In the kitchen, a familiar sound. The oil stove is running, pots of water boil on the surface. A woman is sitting with her back to you reading a magazine, the man is bent over looking out the back window at your car. They both turn at once, startled. The faces show fear, mistrust. Your father walks around the table squinting at you, picking up his glasses. His face changes. He’s astonished, he smiles. Your mother drops her magazine to the floor and begins to get up.

  In an instant he’s shaking your hand, patting your back. “It’s good to have you home, son.” Your mother has her arms around you and is laughing and crying into your shirt.

  You wonder if you still could turn around and get back to your car, drive on to the next town, predict exactly how it will look ahead. Things are not as you left them, not as expected. You’re frightened, you’d like to run.

  THE CURE

  I guess I’m one of those guys who believes in miracle cures. I don’t mean the religious kind, but, like, if my car burns oil, I’ll go buy a pint of STP, or if the radiator leaks, I buy some other stuff. When I bust something, I’ll try to stick it together with some sort of glue. When my kid cries, I buy him a Battlestar Galactica game, and last week when my wife decided that our marriage was on the rocks, I took her out and bought her eight hundred square feet of purple shag carpet. It’s what she always wanted and damn if it didn’t make her happy.

  The guys came and tacked it all down, and she just stood in the kitchen (the only room that didn’t get the purple flush treatment) and sipped a cup of coffee, and she beamed. I had to take out a loan to pay for the rug, and as I sat downstairs in the den figuring what the interest ran up to and listening to the hammering (over a perfectly nice hardwood floor yet), I realized something was wrong.

  The kid, Derrick, is in his room miming to a record of some rock group. I bought him the record when he said he was mad at me for not owning a Corvette.

  Now here’s the rub: I keep buying STP and glue and purple shag carpet, and it all works for a couple of days, and then you’re right back where you started from. Problems. My old man realized that, and he just stopped trying. Twenty-five years’ fishing down the Eastern Shore. One bad season and he said to hell with it and quit. He left my mother and me and moved into his shack down on the Causeway. Took the radio and nothing else. I went to visit him all the time. He’d be smoking his pipe made from an old bottle cap of some sort, and he’d nod like he was listening to me. He wasn’t nodding at me but at the guy talking on the radio. He ate salt herring and blue potatoes while he lived there. How a soul could survive on that I don’t know. He let us keep all the welfare cheques, and he never touched any of it.

  I rode my bicycle out here once during the worst hurricane we’d ever seen, and there was my old man sitting by the radio. A window was busted open, and the curtain (just a muslin rag, actually) was blowing in his face. He was nodding at the radio as usual and wasn’t at all surprised at my feat of pedalling out through the storm. I told him I was gonna go fishing with him next summer. We would start over, him and me, fix up the boat, catch us some lobster and drive them into Halifax. We’d get a good run of haddock and barrels and barrels of mackerel.

  He said one thing to me. “Ain’t no fish left in the whole damn ocean and that’s that.”

  I sat out the storm with him and pedalled home in the morning. My father had made up his mind that there really weren’t any fish left, and he believed it. To him it was truth, and like many an Eastern own peculiar truth, there was no changing his beliefs.

  When I went out there again, I saw a couple of broken boards in the side of the boat. It was beached, and the breaks were clean and simple. Nothing much, just a few pieces to replace. When confronted with the damage, the old man just said, “She’ll never sail again.” Truth, I suppose.

  My mother became the same morose person as my father. “Your father ain’t never comin’ home,” she said. She turned the oil stove up a notch, which the old man would never have allowed her to do, thinking it far too unfrugal. She planted herself by the stove like the old man by his radio, and that was that.

  I quit school, moved into town and later got into the business school where I learned bookkeeping. I vowed never to move back Down East.

  But the truth was that this purple rug thing was too much for me. The city trucks were trundling by, spreading salt on the icy roads. I thought of my old man throwing the same salt on his barrels of fish. I thought of how the street salt had rusted through both front fenders of my Pinto, only two years old. I thought of all the work involved in trying to fix those fenders, in trying to fix the kid’s mini-bike and in trying to satisfy my wife’s next craving, which was for a heavy-duty Filter Queen vacuum cleaner that would loosen dirt from deep down in the pile of the carpet.

  So, late one Saturday morning in January, exit one disgruntled suburban accountant. Sylvia’s on the phone now and thinks I’m just stepping out. I wave once and close the door, snug against the weather-stripping, behind me. The old Pontiac station wagon is in worse shape than the Pinto, but I take that. I drive straight to the rotary in Dartmouth, and then I go round and round the thing. I do fifty consecutive trips around the perimeter. It’s great because I never see the same people and they have no idea that I’m in this orbit. Every other driver shoots his vehicle off on a tangent to the new bridge or the airport or downtown Dartmouth or the Eastern Shore.

  There it is, the route (Number Seven) back Down East. The sign looks more appealing each time around. I think of all the poor buggers like me looping their Toyotas and Fords around the rotary morning after morning on repetitious trajectories to jobs in Burnside at unheated building supply warehouses; jobs at the north end of Halifax for book distributors; jobs at downtown offices where the same old jokes are told over and over; jobs selling pantyhose in Simpson’s, where customers pride themselves on belittling the sales help. Three more orbits and my station wagon cuts loose down the old Number Seven. I swear it was even hard to break the wheel out of the locked-in pattern. It fought against me as I carelessly sliced in front of a cement truck whose driver lay hard on the air horn.

  I wait impatiently through the lights and traffic by the cluttered Dartmouth shopping centres, then zip up the hill past the vocational school and east as the clouds begin to shed the first flakes of yet another snowstorm and the wind whips up from the northwest.

  Damn if I don’t just get beyond the last string of cigar-box vinyl-sided houses and a Mountie slips in behind me, starts flashing high beams, and I have to pull over. I think back to my more passionate days of adolescence, and, caught in a momentary panic that somehow the cop knows exactly what I’m up to, I kick the accelerator to the floor. The engine coughs and backfires, and I look at the fuel gauge. The needle is drowning below the E line. (Curses on you Sylvia. You had the car last, and why do I have to put has in it for you all the time?) I pull immediately over to the side of the road, hitting my brakes almost too hard. I see the police car tilt forward as the driver, ready for a chase, brakes hard to keep from smashing into me.

  I calmly take out my license and registration, imbedded in the hinterlands of my Genuine Simugrain wallet. Stuck to the license is an absurd ancient picture of my father and mother hugging on the sunniest day imaginable at a wharf in Murphy’s Cove...that was when we actually took short trips down the coast together fishing, just for fun.

  “Sorry,
the accelerator sticks sometimes. I’ve been meaning to get it fixed but . . .” I look up meekly at the attending Mountie, and for Chrissakes it’s a woman.

  “You wanna come back in the patrol car for a minute?” she asks, not really waiting for an answer.

  Inside her car, she tells me that she was parked back at the A&W stand saw me doing my merry-go-round on the rotary.

  “Just what the hell were you doing?”

  “Indecision,” I tell her. “I just didn’t know where I wanted to go.”

  I stare across the highway to the big glass windows of a furniture store. They have a display of tartan chesterfields in the window. “A Family Tradition,” reads the big gaudy sign over the assortment. People are filing out to their cars in the dirty snow of the parking lot. They look across at me with the cop. Poor jerk got himself caught for something, they’re thinking.

  I remain very cool — I can do that under pressure sometimes. I listen to static messages on the police radio. It’s like someone trying to communicate from a distant galaxy.

  “You were speeding, too, you know.”

  “Sorry, I still haven’t adjusted to the kilometre signs.” A poor excuse; I’ve used it far too often. I rambled on. I changed the subject a dozen times. I complimented her on her astute observations and asked her what it was like to be a woman cop. I sympathized when she told me that sometimes she’d stop a drunk and he wouldn’t take her seriously. She knew how to use force, she said. Karate, judo, she was nobody’s fool and had busted a few ribs of those who thought she was. She was from, of all places, Sober Island, sixty miles east. She liked being a Mountie. We talked about someone who was a friend of someone that we both vaguely knew as kids. In the end, no ticket. We even hit a quite genuine feeling of liking for each other.

  When I arrived at my old man’s fishing shack, it was bitter cold. I had been the only car out the Causeway since the snowstorm several days ago. I liked the way my tires sounded on the crusty snow and the deep clean impression they made. Only problem was that I wish I could have covered those tracks. Like they did in the old cowboy films.

  But I was still convinced to go ahead with my plan, dumb as it was. At least it was a plan. I had bought ten cases of beer in Sheet Harbour — the only Liquor Commission store for seventy miles in either direction. I’d hole up in the old man’s shanty and drink ’em, one after the other, until I made some sense out of things. Now this might sound ridiculous, but I swear it’s a very sacred old tradition down this shore. Some men died from it. Some claimed they learned from it. Some ended up working for the government, and some went nuts. My uncle Cally did. Went right crazy. Swore he’d seen God, and they packed him up and sent him to the nuthouse, where he seemed to have quite a following the one day I went to see him.

  But my old man never went in much for drinking. He’d always get into fights, and only with his friends. Finally he realized that he didn’t have any friends left. Claims he gave up drink ’cause there wasn’t anyone left to fight with. But he’s long dead anyway.

  If this had been another part of the Shore, men would have been out here every day checking their boats like worried mother hens. But this set of shanties was stark and deserted. Nobody fished these waters once the Russians started dragging the bottom, killing the seaweed which in turned killed the small fish which in turned killed off most of the larger stock. My father had been a kind of pioneer in failure. He’d seen it coming and had given up altogether. A real doomsday prophet. And looking at his old shack, I realized what doom looked like.

  It was a tired little one-room board cabin. The winters had painted it a grey you’d never find a paint to match. The unboarded windows were unbelievably intact, too far a trip for any vandal to bother with. I wrested open the heavy plank door, one rusted hinge busting in rebellion. It wasn’t until I was inside that I realized how frigging cold it was. The wind was lancing through various cracks in the wall, and little thin highways of snow were creeping toward the centre of the room, driven by the restless wind.

  Hell of a place. Clean, though. Almost no dust anywhere, even though nobody had touched it since my old man died. Even a neat stacked pile of hardwood under the bed. (My old man said he couldn’t sleep at all unless he had a full load of wood under where he slept.) I tore off some old wallpaper — newspaper, really — and heaved it in the stove, an old forty-five-gallon oil barrel that had been patched a hundred times with can lids and metal screws and homemade stove cement. The walls of the thing were paper thin but allowed the heat to come quickly as I threw some kindling, bone dry, onto the paper. I caught one quick glimpse of the headline, “Newfoundland Joins Confederation,” before it blistered with flame and I had to plop the lid down.

  I immediately regretted having burned the document and tramped back out to the snow to haul in the beer. Waves pounded an old ice-covered wharf, gulls clung for mercy on the roofs of other buildings, and the car sat quietly rusting in the salt air. (No block heater to plug into you tonight, sweetheart.) I kept telling myself I was home.

  Without dampers to cut down the air, the heat from the stove moved rapidly through the house despite the drafts. I could see the smoke being pulled down by the wind and off across the ice of the inlet toward a graceful tear-shaped island that looked to be the very heart of peace in this bitter winter torment.

  I stared at the island a long while. I think my father had called it the Parson’s Nose. I can’t remember why. I thought about it as I jimmied the first beer cap off against the door latch. I settled in front of the fire, angry all of a sudden that I still wasn’t satisfied. I had come this far...I was away from the agony of the purple carpet, the civilized life, and I still wanted to go further. Halfway was still defeat to my blood. Only the cold leaking through the walls gave me the contrast I needed. The assurance that the winter could still claw at me, challenge me, make me feel half alive.

  Then, on the third beer, someone was at the front of the shack. The door swung open and a stark figure of a man with at least ten devastated thin jackets on came in. He was laced with snow in his hair and beard, and he hobbled on crutches. A foot was missing, which accounted for the supports.

  He closed the door and shook himself like a dog, sending melted snow droplets spraying around the room. Reaching inside one of the battered coats, he pulled out a transistor radio, set it on the window sill and turned it up to a distorted full volume.

  “That’d be a bit better,” I heard him say. “Reception ain’t a bit good at my place.” He motioned out the window to a tiny fishing shack made of green aspenite and bits of loose tarpaper. “Hockey game. They’re playing the god-forsaken Russians.” The radio crowd let out a blast of cheers — a Russian goalie must’ve taken the puck in the guts.

  “Oh, really? So who the hell are you?” I asked him. It seemed ludicrous that anyone else was alive here, but then it felt good to be talking to a local again.

  “Oh, sorry, my boy. I forgot me manners for sure, livin’ here all these years. Last bugger to move out lived right here in this place you’re in. Didn’t move, though. He died. But to answer your point, name’s Chopper. ’Cause of me foot, ya see.” He dangled his stub in the air. “Got drunked up and fell asleep one February. Forgot to stoke the fire. Would’ve lost ’em both if it weren’t for the helicopter come and carry me away. Chopped me left foot off...frozen just like a chunk of salmon. Oh, well, so she goes.”

  “You mean you live out here? Thought everyone was gone with the fish. Here, wanna beer? Moosehead.”

  “Nope. Sorry, can’t accept the offer. I only drink once, maybe twice a year, and every time I drinks for a month straight. Ain’t got the money to do that now. Besides, she be cold out and alcohol can make that dangerous.”

  “Yeah, I see. Oh, well, what the hell.” I killed the third bottle and moved on to the fourth. Four beer hadn’t even given me a buzz yet. I was disappointed.

  The old guy drifted off towar
d the radio for a minute or so but then got up and wandered toward the stove. “Most snow I seen this year. But the wind is a good one. Bring in more fish by spring. Wait and see.”

  “I thought all the fish were gone. My father thought so when he was livin’ here.”

  “No lie? That was your old man who holed up here for so long? I knew him well, but we never got along.”

  “Really. How could that be?”

  “Well, you see...he lived here to hide from somethin’. Never did figure out what. I moved here to find somethin’. Come to think of it, though, I never figured out what, neither.”

  He paused and smoothed the wetness out of his grey beard.

  “But I’ll tell ya this. When your papa died, there were more herring in this cove than you could shake a stick at. I salted down a decent ton that year and could have done more if I had the spirit.” He spied a wooden barrel over in the corner and sort of hopped over to it. Without asking he pried open a cork in the top.

  Then, Jesus Christ, this foul smell like the very armpits of hell filled up the room. I had never smelled such an odour in all the polluted civilized world. He quickly popped the plug back in. “Bit over her prime, I reckon. Salt herring. Shame to see it go to waste. I give it to your father ’cause I worried over his health. Don’t think he ever ate a one. Said to me, ‘No damn fish left on this whole shore.’ Barrel just sat there all them years, I guess. Sorry about unleashing such a worrisome stench on ya.”

  By the time I was finishing my first case, I didn’t care much about the smell and had got into a long explanation about my family and living in the city and all. Then I went outside to take a pee and found myself staring at the island. It was long and majestic, the spruce trees carved by the wind to provide the outline of a perfect dome. Maybe I needed to get out there, but not just yet.