Dance the Rocks Ashore

by Lesley Choyce

  She and I had grown up together. But she left school at fifteen to marry Bart Kinsmen. Bart had since gone off to sea with the armed forces and not written in three years. Debbie told me how she had always admired my brains, and I admitted that I had often admired her body, so we hit it off on that note. I could see that the summer wouldn’t be a total loss.

  We spent our one stolen night a week in the Rambler parked out near where the old wharf used to be, before the hurricane of ’62 ripped her off. There was a cozy little clearing in among the alders and plenty of room in the old man’s ’62 Rambler, a car he had kept all these years. I silently thanked him for this small luxury the first night that I noticed that the front seat went all the way down, making the interior of the car a sort of playground area for our nocturnal rituals. In fact, I soon learned that Debbie like the ritual to be exactly the same every single time. Nothing fancy, nothing new. Just the basics. But then who was I to complain? I admit that once or twice I would get worried that some of the other local ne’er-do-wells would sneak up on us at night as we were all wrapped around each other in that steamed-up car with the radio on. So I kept a baseball bat in the back seat just in case.

  Meanwhile, the old man was getting a bit edgy about why I missed work at least one night a week. News always travels in Mulgrew, but he only heard part of it. He kept plying me at dinner time with questions about political beliefs, drugs and screwy fad religious movements.

  Now, the sad part is that he would have approved of my surreptitious activity had it been clear to him and had I the sense to tell him. But in the end it had to come to this:

  It is a Thursday, full moon, warm as it ever gets on this shore. I’m out in the Rambler with Debbie, and I have the radio tuned in to an opera on the CBC, The Mikado. I hear a noise near the trunk of the car, like someone’s climbing on the trunk lid to look in. Debbie looks panic-stricken, her moans of ecstasy transformed into whimpers of terror. I don’t know what she thought was out there, or what I thought, for that matter, but somewhere deep in the DNA of my brain, a signal went out. I was overwhelmed by a protective and even somewhat violently aggressive urge. Without trying to piece my clothes back together, I jumped out of the car screaming and wielding the baseball bat, ready to take on whoever was out there. My pants fell down to the ground, and I kicked them away into the bushes, still snarling. Debbie, scared out of her wits, leaned out the door and pleaded, “What’s happening?” She, too, was less than thoroughly clothed.

  And just then there was a blinding flash of light and then a click, and then a series of blinding flashes. I was still holding the bat aloft, Debbie was hugging my rib cage, and we didn’t have the slightest notion as to what the hell was going on. And then I heard my old man say, “Well, I’ll be damned. I’m sorry to interrupt you like this, boy. If I’d a know’d, I guess I could have saved the film.”

  We never said a word about it to each other after that. He’d just wink across the dinner table once in a while. I thought he was satisfied, but I guess the loss of his job had given him more time to think about his family and the future of his son. When I returned to university in the fall, I wasn’t there but a day before I was summoned into the dean’s office. Sitting before me were the dean, Professor MacDonough and someone introduced as head of the university ethics committee. Professor MacDonough held out a series of four photographs to me, and the case was presented that, whatever I had been up to, it indicated an uncertain mental stability and, at the least, a lack of moral fibre. The ethics board had decided that for the good of the institution I was to be denied permission to attend school any longer. MacDonough indicated that not only was I lacking the common decency necessary to attain any academic achievement, but that a career in anthropology for me could set back the field a hundred years.

  Completely baffled and humiliated, I turned to go. The dean handed me the photographs, and MacDonough added, “And when you see your father, would you try to convince him that he should learn to spell. This is a civilized country, you know.”

  THE RECONCILIATION OF CALAN MCGINTY

  Calan McGinty’s cabin faced north, away from the sea. He was only five miles inland, but he felt as if the ocean must have been a thousand miles off as he faced the still, deep waters of Lake Ibis. The first perfect wafer of ice had developed overnight, creating a profound feeling of order. Calan knew that the wafer stretched the full twenty-three miles north from the base of the lake where his home was. The disruptive sea winds rarely ravaged the long narrow lake set between two ridges.

  As he sat down by the edge of the water with a cup of tea in one hand, Calan could feel the sun climbing the hill behind him, finally breaking the crest and sending new volumes of colour to the valley.

  Calan had been born no more than five miles to the south by the sea. It was a ragged, broken-down house that he was born in, just yards from the heave of the Atlantic. The old cedar shakes of the house were years beyond repair from the time he was born.

  As a young boy he had studied how the sea and wind had conspired to fray the once-straight edges of the wood shakes. The cracks in the covering revealed the horizontal planks, which had more cracks and which allowed the winds of winter to bite into the heart of his childhood home. The whole of the two-storey house was covered with a green mould which slowly consumed what was left of the place. This bothered Calan immensely. He blamed his father for letting the place rot. His father blamed the sea.

  “That damn stinking ocean. She’ll tear her down altogether one day. I seen what she could do. Calan, never trust her. She’ll cheat ya. I mean it. Look at the bitch.” He was already staring out the window in disgust. Calan looked out at the boiling cold maelstrom. The November winds churned it up and around. It could have been seething with snakes. It jumped the seawall in front of the house and splashed across the hood of an old hulk of a car that had once been driven by Calan’s father. The sea had jumped the wall on another day, drenched the engine, stealing the life from her for good. Now the sea had gnawed away at the fenders and frame, slowly, year by year, like a greedy cancer.

  Calan’s father had worked on the sea once. Worked on freighters out of Halifax and on trawlers out of Sydney. Saved his money for all those years and then bought a Cape Islander brand spanking new and lost her within a year. It wasn’t until after he lost the Margaret Elizabeth that he married Marie Doiron and settled back into the house that had once been his father’s. He was fifty when Calan was born and long past trying to make anything out of anything.

  “Don’t do one bit of good, son. Sure I’d fix up the outside of the house. But what for? The government’ll charge me more taxes, and the salt water’ll creep under the paint as soon as the tax man leaves the premises. She’ll look the same in a year’s time. To hell with it.”

  Calan’s mother, a young woman whose parents had moved down from Anticosti Island, had tried to create a semblance of order in the kitchen. Calan would sometimes open the drawers to the cabinets just to see how orderly all the forks and spoons were, piled in their proper places. Old McGinty sat in a room just off the kitchen smoking a pipe made from a tin cap and a hollow piece of wood. He carved delicate little canoes out of spruce wood with a knife fashioned from the jawbone of a whale. As far as Calan could tell it was the only pleasure the old man got out of living. That and spreading a litter of wood chips and tobacco ashes all over the house for his wife to try and clean up. Sometimes the wind leaking through the winter walls would spread the stuff to all four corners of the first floor and into Calan’s room, where he, too, fashioned miniature things out of wood, always careful to capture the wood shreds in an old tobacco tin.

  The second floor of the house wasn’t used, a household rule established by McGinty. “It ain’t safe up there. Them beams might give way. B’sides, the rooms take the wind much worse. You’d likely freeze t’death.” Nonetheless, every once in a while Calan’s father pried out the nail that sealed the upstairs door closed a
nd went up by himself, when he thought no one else was around. It would usually be sunset, and not always summer, and the old man would sit by the south window facing way out to sea. And the sea would be flat and still and not a bit like the madhouse he usually tried to ignore. And old McGinty would be smiling to himself as if he saw something a million miles out. Calan, lying low on the stairway, realised that it wasn’t cold up there, between the sun streaming in and the heat rising up from the cookstove below. And he’d lie there for as long as he could without being discovered.

  Calan’s mother died before his father. His father died the winter they took his house for taxes, and Calan lived in a number of nearby households skirting the harbour. They were all relatives, or people who claimed to be relatives, of McGinty. When he was sixteen he took up working in the woods. Cutting pulpwood mostly. He worked in a crew of cursing, spitting, heavy-drinking, hard-working men for a while, till he saved up enough money to buy a rusted out pulp-truck. He holed up in a barn for two months of one of the most bitter winters and rebuilt most of the truck body out of wood. The wood came from trees he’d cut and finished himself after hours of painstaking labour. Using blades more than saws, it was as if he had restored the body to one piece, the workmanship was that fine.

  He enjoyed working alone the best. When he was nineteen he began hauling eight-foot lengths of firewood by the truck-load to families near the city. With five hundred dollars in his pocket, he bought a piece of land at the foot of Lake Ibis from Charlie Conrad. Conrad thought the offer was too high. Only a couple of acres of spruce, no road access, not another soul living on the lake. Calan insisted and Charlie accepted.

  The house was built very slowly and methodically. He planned every detail well in advance and hauled firewood only when he needed money for hardware. The house was fashioned from trees standing on the land. The walls of logs were made double, two walls instead of one, and filled with dried moss to keep out the winter. There was fulfilment in creating order and perfection. When the lighting was just right, the log home could be seen reflected in the still waters of Lake Ibis, as if in a painting.

  Calan finally felt in control of his life. He didn’t work more than he had to to make money. At fifty dollars a cord for wood, he figured he only had to sell fifty cords a year to get by. He appreciated the symmetry of his plan and had no trouble getting customers, who would watch Calan meticulously measure height, width and length of a load of wood for them when he delivered his goods. The rest of his time was spent in making cabinets or furniture or what he called wood pottery.

  He would no doubt have been content to continue according to his plan had it not been for Janine. He was making a delivery to a home in Waverly when she approached.

  “I hear you live out near Inglis Harbour.”

  Calan smiled politely. “That’s right.”

  “I, uh, just bought an old place out there and wonder if you’d mind selling me a cord of wood for the old cookstove in the house.”

  “Sure. Next week. You be in by then?”

  “By Wednesday. About noon, okay?”

  And she walked off across the street, forgetting to tell him where to deliver or what her name was. This made Calan feel confused and a bit angered. He didn’t like uncertainty. At first he thought, to hell with her, if she’d too dumb to tell me where to deliver. But then he knew that the Harbour was small enough that somebody would know who she was and where she was living.

  Then his Waverly customer came out of his house yelling and waving his arms. “Stupid bastard! Look at what you’re doing. You ruined a dozen rose bushes. You think I wanted six cord of wood piled on top of my wife’s roses?”

  Calan was embarrassed and insulted. He apologized and only took half of what was owed him for the firewood and drove home, feeling anxious and uncertain.

  When he found out that the girl’s name was Janine Desjardin, and that she had moved alone into the house he grew up in, he almost decided not to keep his promise. He didn’t want to go back there, though it was only five miles away. He walked around his own completed hand-built home and studied every notch and groove again as if rebuilding it. He admired his own work and wondered what the girl would think of it if he showed it to her and let her see how different it was from the house by the sea. Why would she want to move in there? The place must be ready to fall down. And why did he find the thought of her so annoying? Or was it intriguing? He tried to remember what she looked like. Like wind chop. Like waters rushing against each other. He went out and proceeded to cut up the cord of wood into neat twelve-inch lengths and split them into perfect quarters, so he was certain the wood would fit in the old cookstove at the house.

  Janine was sitting by the seawall when he pulled up in his truck. She was looking off at the horizon, a line which seemed to dip and rise incoherently where it intersected with sky.

  “Great day,” she said, walking over to greet him. She seemed so full of life, overflowing with it. But the abundant energy seemed to control her. She didn’t know how to handle it. “Nice wood. Look, here, put it right here in the porch, some under the steps...some...over there...ah, hell, put it anywhere.”

  Calan unloaded an armful but held it against his chest, uncertain where to set it down. His bewildered look made her laugh. She buttoned up a couple of buttons that she had forgotten to do on her flannel shirt.

  “Is that a beaut of a house or what?” she asked him, ignoring his indecision as to where the wood should go.

  “A little worn, I guess, but not bad.” She had walked away from him even as he answered, and he followed her into the kitchen.

  “Say, could you help me get this stove operating right? I don’t seem to have the hang of it. Grew up in a city, you know, Montreal. Good place to be from. Great place to leave.”

  “You should open that damper in the back. Like this.” The stove was rusted shut in half a dozen places, and it took him a long time to get it operational. “There. Pretty rough shape, but she’ll do for now, I guess.”

  Janine was flitting around the kitchen. The place was a disaster. All the old things from Calan’s past, all the new clutter of this girl from Montreal. The worst of both worlds, he thought.

  “You lived here, didn’t you. They told me. Whatever could have possessed you to move away from the sea?”

  Calan walked over to the doorway to the upstairs. Nothing nailed shut. No door in fact. The rust-frozen hinges must have broken off when someone tried to open it.

  “You’ll need this fixed, I reckon.”

  “Not really. I like it better without a door.”

  When the really bitter wind of February blew down off the ice pack, it ignored the valley of Lake Ibis but tortured the village along the coast. Calan suggested to Janine that she come move in with him. It wasn’t unexpected to most of Inglis Harbour. It didn’t even surprise Janine, who seemed to accept all things. It was a surprise to Calan, though, to hear himself asking her. The thought of this strange young women had so disrupted his comfortable life of routine that he often wished that she hadn’t ever arrived. Nonetheless, when he asked, she was sitting by the cookstove huddled for warmth and burning the last of the wood she had bought from Calan. She told him how happy she was to hear the invitation but admitted she was satisfied with the old house as it was. In fact, the place looked much the same as when Calan had first seen it.

  Calan made a few new calculations: sixty dollars a cord and sixty cord a year. No big deal. That would cover having electricity put in and the costs of the baby and, he figured, whatever else came along.

  He had had every intention of getting Janine to the hospital that next October, but the doctor or Janine had somehow miscalculated and everything started happening too fast. The lake had just formed that first perfect wafer of winter ice that imposes a carpenter’s level on the surface of the world. The morning light had just brought colour back to the valley.

  Calan wa
s out splitting wood, and the labour pains were well under way before Janine yelled for Calan to come at once.

  “Too late for driving, Cal. Stay here with me now. I need you.”

  The pains came at irregular intervals, closer and closer together but then further apart. “Calan, what’s an ibis, anyway?” She winced.

  “A black water bird, like a crow on stilts. Not all that common, but we see a few here on the lake every few years.”

  She gulped for air. “Didn’t think crows lived near oceans.”

  “They don’t, usually, but we’re five miles inland. Feels like a thousand sometimes. Do you like that feeling of being far from the sea?”

  Janine didn’t have a chance to answer. The pains came in persistent waves now, thirty seconds apart, then right on top of one another, and Calan, who was scared and feeling helpless, comforted her through the delivery and at last held up a baby girl for Janine to see. He cut the cord with the knife he had sharpened to a razor’s edge and boiled for a half-hour.

  And through the whole thing, Calan was in awe of what he saw, yet it seemed to have none of the clean, refined elements of the act that had started the process. It frightened him. The blood, the fluids, the seemingly misshapen child that emerged from an opening far too small for the task. The pain, the tears, the complete staggering chaos of the event. It didn’t make a bit of sense for it to happen this way. And when he held his new daughter near the fire for warmth and the mother slept, he himself cried at the perfection of the child and laughed as he spotted a seam in the wall that had cracked and was allowing the now-gusting wind to intrude into his house.

  In the spring, the ice dissolved and the lake overwhelmed its banks, pushing its excess waters into the narrow stream that linked it with the sea. The sound of the torrent was like the crying of the child when things weren’t quite right.