“You stay the jeezes away from my property,” the old man roared at Ben, and walked off without a glance at Trapp, who at the sound of the gunshot and the yelp from his dog stood frozen. He turned to where the tan-coloured heap of fur was shuddering through its last breath. From a distance of thirty, forty feet, I could see the rapid heaving of its chest. Running to the dog, his shoulders loosened, and Trapp crumpled to its side.
Ben was staring in horror at the dying dog, at Trapp. He remained impassive to his mother’s cajoling sounds as she wrapped her arms around him, trying to steer him towards the road. With a choked cry he pushed her aside, watching as Trapp, his hands clenched into fists, shoved them beneath the lifeless clump of fur and hoisted the dog into his arms. His slight frame staggering beneath the weight, and four white paws dangling about his knees, Trapp started up the shore.
From where I sat I could see the wet on Ben’s face, hear his sniffles as his mouth screwed up and it looked as if he would cry. Suze caught hold of him, and after a slight scuffle between the two, she dragged him along by the arm, cursing the Trapps and their damned surly dogs and threatening Ben with a month in bed if the bite got infected and he came down with rabies. A last backward look at Trapp, who was vanishing now behind a bend in the beach, and Ben shoved away from his mother, bolting, with a slight limp, towards home.
It was another seven years before I saw either Trapp or Ben again. It was the beginning of summer and I’d been to the post office for Mother. Instead of the road, I’d taken the shoreline back home, climbing around the outcropping of rock that separated Hampden from our house on the other side. The base of the outcropping could be navigated only during low tide, and was chancy even then, with wet kelp and rioting waters that licked coldly at my ankles each time my foot slipped into a crevice. With the surf and a relentless wind pummelling past my ears I didn’t hear their voices till I was nearly upon them.
They were in a slight inlet, sitting in a dory that was bobbing on the water and tied to a rock with a short rope. Trapp sat the closest to me, wearing the same straw-coloured mane, but with ruffs of chin hair and sideburns that gleamed like copper in the strong summer sun. He was slight like a girl, yet his arms were long and ropy as he hung them outside the boat, paddling his hands through the water.
Sprawled in the stern of the boat, absorbed by something he was drawing or writing on a notepad, was Ben, all knees and elbows, the slight edge of a moustache lining his upper lip and tight, dark curls capping his head.
I’d heard bits and pieces about them both through the years from Suze during her visits with Mother. Trapp—even his kinfolk called him by his last name—had shown himself to be the smartest of the clan, and according to Ben, Suze reluctantly reported, he was the smartest student from that part of the bay, and amongst the smartest in Memorial University of Newfoundland, where he’d been on the dean’s list.
And Ben, Suze was always quick to say, was the nicest, sweetest boy, whose dark, shiny curls were a draw for women and girls alike, and who, despite his having grown up, was still taking tea with old ladies after church and drawing them pictures of their cats. The fact that Ben and Trapp had become like brothers made for a bad taste in Suze’s mouth, one she was always spitting out in disparaging Trapp’s cagey look or his sly look or his shifty-eyed look. Equally incensing for Suze was that ever since that old man shot Trapp’s dog, Ben was always dragging the bugger home for supper, for Sundays, for sleeping over—and on and on Suze would rhyme off the ways Trapp unnerved her when he was in her house, watching her, watching the youngsters, watching Ben, watching everything that moved, as though he’d never seen the insides of a house before, or them that lived there, having a chat and busying about.
Crouching behind a slate of rock, I watched them, just as I had all those years ago on the beach in Ragged Rock. Their dubious fit was never more apparent than in this moment, Ben sitting studious over his notepad and Trapp sitting restless, rocking the boat, his lips skimmed back into a grin as he flicked droplets of water into the air, hunching his shoulders skittishly as they rained back onto him and Ben.
“Bugger off,” Ben muttered, brushing the water off his hair. Trapp gave his flat hahaha laugh that after all these years still prickled my skin like needles. He flicked another handful of water into the air, then crouched back with the skulking look of a banned pet as Ben leapt to his feet and grabbed a paddle, darting it threateningly at Trapp.
“Out!” yelled Ben. “Out, out,” and raised the paddle as though readying to strike. Trapp, with another hahaha, leapt out of the boat. Slipping on a sliver of kelp, he fell to his knees.
Laughing, Ben slapped the water with the broad side of his paddle, sousing Trapp’s backside and sending him skittering over the rock towards the slate ridge beyond which I crouched. I ducked down, but within the second Trapp was leaning across the ridge, his pointy face sniffing at me, his green eyes ignited by the sharp sunlight.
“Boo,” he said lightly.
I scuttled backwards, slipped, fell hard on my backside. I got quickly back on my feet, ignoring the hand Trapp offered, as unnerved as Suze by his cagey look, his skulking grin, and that long ago memory of panic he’d set off inside of me. Tossing back his head, he leapt over the rocks towards Hampden, his form lithe, his limbs fluid, his crazy ha ha ha’s caterwauling out like a rutting cat.
Ben, oblivious of my presence, was settled back into the stern of the boat, his notebook positioned on his knee, his head held back, gazing up at the sky. Curious, and disarmed by the softened contours of his face, I crept towards him, my movements muffled by the sea grappling with the rocks. I drew within an arm’s reach of his dark, curly head. From my slightly elevated vantage point I saw over his shoulder to his fingers cramped around a pencil, posed motionless over what I now saw to be a sketch pad. Centred on the page in thick heavy lines was the fat, fluffy cloud hanging overhead.
“Clouds should be shaded,” I said after a moment’s watching.
“Oh? How’s that now?” I flushed to my roots as he leaned back his head, seeing me upside down through eyes the clear grey of a winter’s sea. “Well, then?”he challenged.
“Clouds are always shifting,” I replied.
“That’s why I nail’em to a page. Else it’s the shape of the wind I’m sketching, not clouds—you think?” he asked with a grin.
I grinned in return.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Sylvia. Sylvie. Called after my father, Sylvanus.”
“Ahh—well now, haven’t you grown.” He gave me the once-over, then, with an appreciative nod, toed the thwart before him with the tip of his boot. “Climb in,” he coaxed. “Sure you can,” he said to my reluctant look. “I’ll draw your face. Or your hands. You can lay them on the gunnel, or clutch a paddle. Wonk me if I moves the wrong way. You have a brother, don’t you?”
“Two,” I said.
“Right, two. And one of them draws strange stuff. So says Mother.”
“What do you draw?”
“Stick-dogs is all. And clouds sometimes. Coming aboard? I won’t hurt you. Aren’t you our god-girl, god-baby, or something?”
“Your mother’s my godmother. And my mother’s your sister’s godmother.”
“Egads. I think I got it. So, how old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Fifteen.”He eyed me again. “You look older. All right, you can still sit aboard. He won’t be back,” he said as I looked back along the shore where Trapp had gone. “He don’t like being chased off.”
“Why are you here?”
“Visiting my aunts. And working the sawmill with Trapp and his uncles.”
“For the summer?” I asked.
“Yup. For the summer. What do you think?” he held up the cloud, thickly edged and caught in a moment’s stillness. “Think I nailed it? What about that hand of yours—gonna model it for me? Fine, then. I’ll sever me own—will you strap it around the paddle after I’m done? Can’t do much with on
e hand.”
I laughed and climbed into his boat, thinking later how easy it had been to sit chatting with him as he sketched my hand resting on the paddle, sharing with him stories of Chris, and his long, slender fingers, at the age of three, drawing ant’s tracks across his room walls, and now at the age of thirteen, drawing blue clouds on a red sky with a blazing purple sun and no fear of its right or wrongness.
“This I got to see,” said Ben, and in that creaky, leaking boat kept afloat by a mother’s prayers he rowed us around the outcropping and up to the house, where Chris was slouched, his legs dangling over the side of the wharf.
Scoffing at Chris’s shyness, I ran inside and was back out in a second toting a stack of his drawings. Like a proud mother, Ben said of me as I stood flashing them before him, all loving and admiring, pronouncing, “See, he can draw, can’t he—and look, all dream stuff—even when he was three he was drawing dream stuff.”
“Nooo, ohhh, shut up—give them back,” Chris kept interjecting, face flushed as he snatched at the papers I was passing to Ben.
“Hold on now, buddy, let’s see,” said Ben. Holding Chris back, he peered intently at the mesh of lines on each page, their half-formed images of eyes fading through hazy skies, rain splattering into weeds amongst rocks, women raising their hands to walls of fire, and, his latest, the vein-ridden throat of a horse stretching off the page.
“Where the hell do you get this stuff?” asked Ben. He lowered the drawings, looking to Chris, staring, as I often did myself, at his wide-mouth smile, his shimmering brown eyes, his quick little shrugs. “Pablo,” Ben said quietly, “we’ve our own little Pabs.”
Given that he worked just up the hill at the sawmill, he was to return quite a number of times during the rest of that summer, loitering during his lunch hour, having a quick chat with Mother, Gran. But mostly he lazed about the wharf, eating thick ham sandwiches his mother made for him and sitting with Chris, their backs resting against a grump, sketch pads on their knees, and Ben, awed by Chris’s quick manner of sketching, making games so’s to quicken his own crude hand.
“Okay, the window by the door,” Ben would call out, pointing to the house, or “the gull on the grump” or “the can by the kelp,” and they’d hunch over their pencils and paper, drawing till I sounded a whistle, upon which they passed their sketches, without glancing at the other’s, for my judgment. Always Ben lost for his attempts at exactness, always Chris won for his embellishment.
“You favour Pabs,” Ben continually protested.
“Perhaps I’d rather the shape of the wind than a boring old cloud,” I taunted him once, after I’d given him another low grade for a particularly good likeness of Father’s boat.
“Is that right, now?” His sooty grey eyes appraised my face, and it felt like a bird fluttered to life in my chest. “Well, you listen to me, Mother Picasso, the wind’s a fine thing. But I like a clear line—everything nice and defined. Now then,” he pointed to the grump, “if you’d just sit over there and turn sideways, perhaps I could get a better look at your crooked nose. Chris, buddy, see your sister’s crooked nose? Let’s draw your sister’s crooked nose.”
I pulled a miffed look and sat on the grump, holding up my nose in an exaggerated profile. Afterwards I quickly denounced Chris’s hooklike portrayal, declaring Ben’s subtle tilt the winner.
“Proud,” snorted Chris, shunning the X drawn across his portrait, “she’s proud, Ben, that’s what she is, proud.”
“Yeah, that’s the way of women, buddy, proud,” said Ben. And then, ruffling my hair as though I were a youngster, he was off, strolling back to his summer job bundling up slab wood for the Trapps. I stared after him, the length of his stride, his tight jeans, the snug fit of his T-shirt across his shoulders, and the bird in my chest took flight.
One afternoon, after Ben had sauntered down from the mill chewing on a ham sandwich for lunch and commenting on my skinny knees, I yanked on his curls and was instantly deluged by the warm, springy feel of them. I darted inside the house with a sharp sense of embarrassment shooting through me, as though I had committed an act of intimacy against him, had touched his private self. Kyle was whimpering and snotting by the window, his face scabbed with chicken pox. I pulled him aside, taking his place.
Ben was dropping his lanky frame alongside Chris, who was slouched beneath the window, his legs dangling over the wharf, his mind no doubt engaged by his inner realm of wingless birds and feathered frogs. Disappointed that Ben hadn’t chased after me, I kept spying through the curtain, listening as he chatted with Chris, his voice rising and falling with the charm of a flute streamed by a summer’s breeze. When next I sauntered out the door, thinking of some inane thing to say, I stood before him mute, the words stuck in my throat like a river choked by weeds. Scarcely noticing my presence, Ben brushed the breadcrumbs off his mouth and took his lanky self back up the path to work.
THE MEMORIES OF BEN broke off as I cleared the path past the sawmill and emerged onto a dirt road. Chris and Kyle were still behind me, their yelps having given way to a deep quiet. Slightly out of breath, I wandered to the tip of the brow and looked down at the tiny outport of Hampden, its houses rising tidily up the side of the hill, windows glowing into the softly darkening evening.
“Nice, hey,” said Chris, coming up behind me.
“Yeah, it’s nice,” I said.
“Miss it?” he asked.
I hesitated. “Yeah, I miss it. Although it’s never felt like home. Did it to you?”
He gave his quick little shrug. “Never thought about it.”
“What do you think about?”
“Not much. Either I’m sleeping, or like Mother says, gone off in a trance. Which feels like sleeping.”
“You don’t really go off in trances, do you?”
“Don’t know. Don’t remember. See this?” He flashed a big-faced wristwatch. “Got it set to beep every hour—just to check the time.” He grinned. “Hates missing supper. Mother’s always at me for missing supper.”
I kicked at his boot. “Big youngster, still letting Mother cook your supper.”
“Hey, growing boy,” he replied, patting his belly. “So, what feels like home to you—Cooney Arm, still?”
I looked pensively about the outport. For sure I never felt this place was home. Never wanted to be back in Cooney Arm, either—leastways, not after that last trip with Father. “Don’t know if I’ve ever really felt at home,” I replied. “In Gran’s house I was always looking to Mother’s, and then in Mother’s I was always looking to Gran’s. No matter whose table I was sitting at, or how sweet the jam, it always felt like I was just halfways home.”
Chris looked at me with a raised eyebrow, and I was struck for a moment by his likeness to Father and the maturation of his boyish face. “That’s a queer thing to say,” he said deeply. “Can’t imagine you feeling that way.”
“Yeah, well, I still feel that way. Most times.”
He shook his head. “Can’t figure it, Sis. You always acted like you knew exactly where you stood, where you were going, how you were getting there—graduating high school, university—gonna be a captain or something, weren’t you? And travel the world?”
“Well, that kind of stuff I’ve always had clear. It’s the other stuff, I guess. The inside stuff that bothers me—always feeling haunted about something. Perhaps I crouched with the ghosts in Cooney Arm too many times. Got myself a haunt.”
“Aah,” he said knowingly, “now you’re making sense—least, the halfways home bit. Gran’s always saying haunts are them caught between two worlds.”
“So why’re they caught—she tell you that?”
“Nope.” He gazed up at the evening star, its eternal setting brightened by an invisible moon, and shook his head. “Perhaps there’s just one home for haunts, and they’re scared of going there.”
I followed his gaze. “Sometimes when I’m feeling homesick, or just missing all of you, I look up at that sky and tell myself it’s the
same sky looking down on all of you. Makes me feel better.”
“Me too,” he exclaimed. “Really. I think the very same thing when I wonders about you—that we’re all standing beneath that evening star. I calls it Sylvie. Yeah, I do,” he said to my skeptical look. Reaching one arm towards the heavens, he intoned dramatically, “‘Proud Evening Star, in thy glory afar.’”
“My lord, he’s quoting Yeats,” I said in astonishment.
“Allan Poe,” he corrected. “Come on, be no beers left.”
“Chris, we need to talk.”
“Later. Somebody’s about to make a surprise attack.” He tugged me along, looking guardedly for Kyle through the alder bed crowding the roadside.
“So what does Al Poe say about the moon?”
“That it’s me—pale beside your tiniest starlight.”
“Yeah, right.” I struck his arm. “Nothing pale about you, Chrissy, you’re brighter than all of us—just haven’t started shining yet. Proud virgin moon is what you are, on the cusp of everything.”
“Christ, here she goes, always—” He broke off mid-sentence, sniffing the air. “Little bastard’s sneaking up. Stay here, Sis, keep talking, grunt a bit so’s he’ll think it’s me.”
As Chris stole off into the alder bed I took a last look at the outport, at the orange-painted house where Ben’s aunt lived and where he stayed that summer he worked the sawmill with Trapp. He’d left for university a few weeks after that day of my self-afflicted muteness. And until he left I stayed mostly in the house when he’d visit, venturing outside long enough to beat a mat for Mother, hang out a tea towel, a pudding bag, or some such thing—staying long enough to evoke some silly utterance from him, whereupon I sped back inside. Through the white gauze curtains I’d watch when he strolled back to work, or rowed around the outcropping in his leaky boat en route to the swimming hole at the mouth of the river or to the mud flats to dig for clams. Each time I saw anew the strength of his arms as he plied his paddles and the clear evening light in his eyes, heard the lilt of his voice and his flutish laugh as he called out silly things to Chris who’d run up to the river or the mud flats to join him. Longingly I’d watch after Chris, frustrated by my self-imposed exile. Eagerly I’d await their return trip, lying on my bed, ears tuned to the window, listening for the squeaking of Ben’s tholepins, the swishing of his paddles breaking through the water. And every time I heard them I’d curl my knees to my stomach, sickened by the sweetness of my pain.
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