I wept too. Not over poor old Grandfather Now who I’d never known, but over my father and his silent cries as he stood at the bow of his boat, looking back over the meadow where a fortnight ago his own house had been and where now was gouged earth and a spattering of black stumps like tombstones over a fresh-dug grave.
Once we’d motored out through the neck we turned towards the open waters, watching quietly as the two halves of the house floated before us. Forty miles up and the bay ended in a wide basin with a small outport, Hampden, sloping from its centre. To the right of the outport was a cliff jutting into the water, and it was to the other side of this cliff that Father steered us and our split-apart house. Nothing stood there except an abandoned, salt-bitten wharf and a large sandbar a little farther up from a river piling into the sea. A crane from a nearby log boom stood waiting on the wharf, and within a relatively short time the two halves of the house were hoisted off the steel drums and sitting on top of the wharf looking like one again.
Then, surprisingly, in a moment I shall never forget, Father looked to Mother, his dark thatch of brows curling over his eyes, and grunted, “This is as far as she goes. By jeezes, if I can’t work on the sea, I’ll sleep on it. No gawd-damned mortal telling me where I sleeps.”
Mother blinked with astonishment. But then, when she understood what he meant, that he intended for the house to remain there, its back squished against the cliff and wooded hillside behind it and her front step to be the wharf itself, she wagged a finger of warning in his face and hissed, “If a youngster falls over and drowns it’ll be on your soul, not mine.”
They looked away from each other then, but I looked to them both, a knowing stirring deep within me that the morsels for my well-being were stowed within my mother’s larder, and the key to its lock was in my father’s hand.
ONE
THE WHITE OF THE ICE-CHINKED BAY glimpsed through breaches in the trees, the coldness of its breath already on my face. The road veered to the left and then the bay opened wide before me, miles of pan ice glaring white beneath the sun and so tightly pummelled into the basin that it buckled upward, forming ridges some ten, twenty feet high in places. Hummocks they called these ridges, and scattered amongst them were the loftier heights of trapped icebergs, their wind-polished peaks sparkling like opals.
I fumbled for the handle on the rented car and tightened the window, hating the harsh coldness of the ice, hating how it crunched up over the beach, wedging against the roadside and near cramming the car against the black wall of rock to the right of the road. After a year on the gently contouring lands of Alberta, the Newfoundland coastline felt more rugged, harsh. Cutting around a sharp turn, I geared down, straining across the seat for a closer look at Father’s woodshed, the plaid bush jacket belonging to my younger brother Chris left lying on a pile of unsplit wood, the axe flung aside as though a call had sounded.
The car almost stalled, then jolted ahead the last few yards, rolling to a stop as the road ended on a sagging grey wharf that jutted thirty or forty feet to its left, into the sea. Encumbering the right side of the wharf, and wedged into the cliff behind it, was the house Father had floated forty miles up the bay from our old homestead in Cooney Arm. Sitting in his favourite spot, slouched against the side of the house with his feet dangling over the wharf, was Chris. He wasn’t sketching seals or humpbacks on this day, or paring birds out of wood, lips pursed in a melodic whistle as he plied and coaxed his knife around the curve of a wing or a beak; instead he was staring moodily out over the ice, his slumped shoulders carrying the forlorn look of a forgotten child.
I knew that look. Had seen it all through our growing up years, each springtime when Gran would take me back to Cooney Arm and leave Chris bawling on the wharf, reaching after us. For he too yearned for that old homestead where he would cling to my hand as I dragged him amongst the barred-up houses and wooden shacks of the small abandoned outport, answering his growing stream of questions of why God, why fish, why rain. Since the day Father gave in to the emptied fishing grounds and wrenched his house from those blessed shores we had often stood, staring back the way we’d come, longing for those huge fat days of summer with the wind sweeping sweetly over the finches and the meadow and the three little dears sleeping in the graveyard. And too, there were worlds in those barred-up houses in Cooney Arm, worlds hidden amongst the emptied bedrooms and drawers, whose voices remained locked into the wood as though awaiting the souls that once were to come back and reclaim them.
“Bloody governments,” Father told us, “is why the people were forced to move, gawd-damned arse-up governments, screwing up the fishery and forcing people to move in search of work.”
Yet, despite Chris’s thirst to return to Cooney Arm, he balked that first summer when Gran and I were readying ourselves in the boat, going back to plant Gran’s garden. One hand clinging to Mother’s, the other reaching for mine, he stood, his mouth quivering with both want and fear. Mother’s skirts he chose, and his tears wet his face as he peered out from behind them, watching the boat leaving without him. Come fall, day before school when Gran and I returned, the boat brimming to the gunnels with spuds, turnips, carrots, and cabbages, he was sitting on that very spot, back to the wall, legs dangling over the wharf. Piles of shavings from his carvings floated towards us on the water as he held out long, slender arms to Gran, sobbing as he told her of his many dreams, one in which the moon swallowed her house whilst she turned to water inside.
“Poor boy,” said Gran, holding him to her. “Poor, poor boy.” Tears crept from her eyes as he proudly presented her with three small drawings, astonishing her with his flair of lines. The first depicted her crouching in her garden, snipping turnip greens, her knees embedded in the earth. The second showed her with a broom made of cabbage leaves, sweeping her garden free of caterpillars. The third had her kneeling beside a potato bed, her knees again embedded in the earth, her hands curled in prayer, her hair loosened and swept into a cloud of wind. “My, my,” she kept saying, “my, my” as she gazed at her broom made of leaves, her hair swept into a cloud, “my, my.”And yet it was his manner of drawing that so touched her, his faint, wispy lines so effectively capturing her likeness yet barely discernible on the paper in places, and so easily erased by the slightest smudge of a thumbprint that she held her breath whilst others examined them for fear of being erased herself.
As he grew so did his drawings, his lines lengthening with his limbs and enveloping his pages, his images becoming more and more dreamlike as he sprawled across the table, the wharf, beach rocks, the woodpile, sketching the abandoned houses of Cooney Arm and their spirits swarming through their windows, Father’s decrepit stage sitting before two moons, me floating laughingly in the curl of a hurtling wave, Mother billowing out sheets that fluttered into clouds. Always his images appeared wispy, airy, as though seen through a mesh, a veil of light. And always there was no beginning or ending, each image arising from nowhere and fading into nothing, and all in between a swirl of lines appearing to be one, as in a spool of thread unravelling itself into thought.
He rose now as I stepped out of the car, softly calling his name. He was two years younger than me, yet taller, his eyes the same glistening brown as Father’s, his hair the same thickness and coarseness, but fair and full of light whereas Father’s hung darker than peat across his brow. I ran to him and was engulfed in his arms, my face smothered in the myrrhy smell of Father still clinging to the corduroy.
“Why are you here?”I cried. “Why aren’t you with them?”
His voice was strained. “Did you go? Did you see him?”
I shook my head, wiping my eyes on his sleeve. “I called from the airport. I— Mom says he’s fine. His heart’s badly damaged—but she says he’ll get better. Why aren’t you with her, Chris—you know she wants you there.”
My voice faded. I knew why he wasn’t there. We were one and the same, Chris and I. During those times when outside forces threatened our world—like when Gran fell to the
floor with a dizzy spell, or our youngest brother, Kyle, was choking on a marble, or Father chopped his hand with the axe—we’d fled, Chris crouching into my back as I crouched behind the house, the both of us hiding from what was probably a far simpler incident than what we were conjuring up with our frightened thoughts.
“But why didn’t you drive straight there—from the airport?” he asked.
“Mother said to come get you.”
“What—she didn’t think you’d be crazy to see him?”
I circled my arms around his waist, resting against him. “I needed to see you,” I whispered. “Mom says you’re taking it hard. Ohh, Chris, it must’ve been horrible.” I buried my face in his shirt, needing a stronger smell of him, of Father. His arms tightened around me, a soft moan catching in his throat. The shrill chewk chewk chewk of a fish hawk warned off a predator. Over his shoulder I watched the bird of prey flapping out of the woods, the white underside of its wings fanning out against the sky.
“Kyle. And Gran,” I said, looking to the house. “They’re at the hospital? I forgot to ask Mom.”
“Kyle’s driving the truck—”
“Ky’s what?”
“He’s seventeen, Sis.”
“Lord. And driving Dad’s new truck? That should get him on his feet soon enough—Kyle driving his brand-new truck.” I stood at the edge of the wharf, looking down onto the second of Father’s brand-new purchases that year—a sleek, fourteen-foot rowboat that had cost three years’ savings. Its stem looked straight as an arrow, its flared bow extending upwards and outwards, lending an air of lengthiness and grace to its rounded sides. Meticulously painted the deepest of greens, it now sat motionless on the ice, Father’s heavy winter coat laid neatly across a thwart, his gun and lunch bag tucked inside the cuddy. I raised my eyes, staring out over the sea packed tight with pan ice. Its surface was rugged but so white and pristine that it echoed silence into the vastness above it. And yet an insidious groaning sounded from beneath as it continually crushed against itself, grinding and gouging itself to bits. It made me shiver, thinking about Father, seeing him as I’d seen him a hundred times, holding on to the gunnels of his punt, shoving it over that shifting, heaving mass, jumping from ice pan to ice pan across loosely opened channels, and whenever a lead presented itself, leaping aboard his boat and paddling across it.
“Hunting them damn old seals,” I muttered. “No wonder he’s tore up, heaving his boat over that, year after year. Couldn’t he wait? Couldn’t he wait for the ice to break?”
“He was excited,” said Chris. “About his boat. Couldn’t wait to try her.”
“Well, how come he was by himself, then? Didn’t he have nobody going with him? You can’t launch a boat over ice by yourself.”
Chris’s face twisted with self-reproach.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You were supposed to go with him? How come you didn’t, then?”
He looked at me, his honeyed hair and face warm as summer. But it was his eyes that always held me, their cherry brownness so soft, so momentous with emotion that even when they were glimmering with laughter I hurt for them. “Why, what’s the matter? Chris, what’s the matter?”
He looked away from me, his lips so tightly compressed they quivered. He swiped at them with his fist, an act that lent a hardening to his mouth. I fell quiet, watching self-dislike take hold of him like a cancer.
“Chris. Chris, you don’t think it’s your fault, do you?”
He beckoned me towards the house. “Go. Get washed or something, I sees to the gear. Then we’ll go see him.” He hoisted himself off the wharf onto the ice, grabbing hold of the boat as the ice swelled and ebbed with the sea beneath, crunching against the wharf.
“What’re you doing?” I asked as he took a box of gun shells out of his pocket and opened them for a quick count. I threw up my arms with a quick show of temper. “Ohh, for gawd’s sake!”
“I got someone going with me.”
“Right, sure you do. When? When are you going—aren’t you coming with me to the hospital?”
“Tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning I’m going.”
“And who’s going with you? Who?” I demanded as he didn’t answer. “Ohh, for gawd’s sake, what’s the big deal about a bloody old seal. We don’t even like seal, Mother hates the stench of seal—it’s only Father, and you think he’s thinking about seal right now?”
“Just—go get ready.”
I stared at him, seeing his face tighten with guilt. “You got yourself thinking something now then, you do,” I said softly. “And how’s Dad going to feel, you blaming yourself—never mind Mother. She’ll be hooked up alongside of him she hears you’re out on that ice. Chris, you can hardly keep up with Dad—how are you going to do this on your own?”
His face darkened and he made to speak, but the shifting pan of ice beneath him suddenly hove upon a swell, sending him grabbing awkwardly for the gunnels. “Go,” he yelled. “Else you’ll leave without me.”
He turned his back, stowing the shells in the cuddy along with Father’s lunch bag, his shoulders tensed with that old stubbornness that sometimes arose within him and that was always a reassurance to Gran. “Bit of backbone does him good,” I heard her say to Mother once after Chris wore them both down in one of his rare upsets.
I marched in a huff to the house, then stood looking back. Chris was slumped over the boat, motionless, staring out to sea. He could slump for hours like that, without moving. Like he had no bones, as I’d often thought of him as a youngster, finding comfort in whatever seat he happened upon, whether it was a rock, a pillow, or once even a bottomless bucket turned upside down that he’d slowly sunk further and further into till his knees were flush with his chin and I had to yank him out of it.’Course it wasn’t a comfortable seat he’d been sinking into; he simply hadn’t realized he was sinking, his attention snared by a fly caught in a web etched between two pickets and buzzing furiously as a spider worked its way around it.
“Flies don’t feel nothing,” I’d said after he’d been pulled from his reverie as well as the bucket and was besieged with sorrow for the fly. It was always his way to be so absorbed by a thing that his eyes would fill with the hugeness of it and he’d forget a simple thing like hooking the fly from the web if he wanted to save it—as though he felt totally removed from the thing, or that he was the thing itself. And in those moments when his mind was called to something, like why he didn’t hook the fly from the web, his eyes would so fill with self-reproach that I’d quickly divert his thought and then stand back watching as he almost immediately dissolved into something else. Always I marvelled at his absorption in the ordinary. Always I marvelled at his unordinary presentation of it later with his pencils.
Where are you now, I wanted to call out as he continued gazing out over the ice. As if hearing my thoughts, he flashed me an impatient look.
“Right then,” I muttered. Pulling open the door, I stood for a moment, my crossness with Chris colliding with the acidic smell of Mother’s bleached floors, of lemon-tinged wax and pine-smelling cleansers. Above all was the poignant smell of lavender, Mom’s favourite scent, infiltrating the room from its bundles hanging from the kitchen ceiling and growing in planters along the window benches, its feathery purple blooms prettying the window since the first I could remember, whilst its oils permeated the dryness of Mother’s winter skin. I leaned against the door, breathing deeply for a moment, allowing the scent to embrace me. As a youngster I thought the scent was Mother’s, and the lavender a pretty plant that smelled like her.
I stepped deeper into the house. It had been a bit more than a year since I’d been home, and my eyes flitted anxiously over the wide, open space of the kitchen and living room, the windows flushed with light, the dark wooden table and chairs spruced to a shine, the black polished woodstove, cold today, but so eternally cracking out heat in memory that I hovered unconsciously towards it, holding out my hands, and shivering in the stillness of the emptied house. My eye
s lingered on the warped wooden legs of an old rocker, so utterly Mom’s as it faced a window looking away from the water, her faded blue shawl draped around its back, a pile of well-marked books sitting on an end table beside it.
Across the room, near the window overlooking the water, was Gran’s rocker, her woollen shawl hanging from it should she find a draft, a basket for her knitting beside it, her oil lamp from Cooney Arm sitting nearby so’s to give her the soft yellow light she was used to. A breeze tinkled at the kitchen window. I turned, half expecting to see Dad leaning one arm onto the window bench, the other on the table as he gulped back tea, staring out the same window as Gran, searching for fish, seals, birds, boats, and whatever else the sea flung towards him. Echoing through the rooms were Chris and Kyle’s shouts as they rode the humpty between Mother’s and Gran’s rockers or cushioned themselves amongst pillows bright as wildflowers springing from the sofa.
A nice house. Mother kept a nice house. But it was Gran’s house where I’d spent the first seven years of life. And ever since the move from Cooney Arm sixteen years ago, when me and Gran moved in with the rest of the family, I’d never felt quite right. Like a sprout from a different seed, suited, yet with a scent unlike the rest. Backing out of the house, I quietly closed the door.
What They Wanted Page 2