“Salt air makes them big and pungent. The septic tank should be here.”
He scuffs the ground with his boot. “Or over here a bit. My brother, Joshua, kept track of that sort of thing. All the drains are backed up and the house smells bad. One of the pipes is blocked and we need to find it. According to the map Joshua drew forty years ago, the pipe runs along here.” I follow his hand with my eye to a half-dozen trees on the edge of the cliff that drops into the bay. “The outlet is between those two trees.”
The outlet? The crazy bugger is flushing his raw shit onto the beach.
“Just like in Halifax, huh?”
My voice sounds harsh, but it makes me sad to see how the city treats its harbour like a giant toilet bowl. Piss, shit, and toilet paper, bleach, paint, used motor oil, battery acid: one big cesspool. The tides come twice each day, out-in, out-in, but don’t flush it out. There are snails in the harbour that can’t decide whether they are male or female, their indeterminate sex the result of who-knows-what synthetic hormones flowing out of sewage pipes.
“No, no, no.” He laughs. “The outlet pipe is a hundred feet from the edge of the cliff.”
I’m relieved.
“If you dig here, you should find the connection. I’m going to the woods for a bit,” he says. “I’ve got a log that’s hung up in another tree.”
A mattock and shovel lie on the ground near us. Digging holes by the shore is no easier than in my so-called garden. The shovel hits rock after rock, the shocks reverberating along my forearms. I straighten my back for a rest and lean on the shovel. Trees rim the clearing in front of me. The spruce and firs are blasted by the cold winds off the sea in winter and stunted by the cool fogs of summer. They might be a hundred years old, but none is so tall that I couldn’t throw a stone over it. From my right, beyond where the trickle of the pipe overflows onto the grass, comes the sound of waves licking the cliffs along the shore. Art walks through the clearing wearing an orange helmet and face guard and carrying a chainsaw and a couple of orange plastic wedges. His gait is stiff but purposeful. Soon, the crashing of the waves is interrupted by the whine of his saw.
I go back to digging, bending down with each shovelful to remove the stones that impede my progress. It is almost an hour before I make it down three feet and feel the click-click of the shovel on the clay pipe we are looking for. Shit, it stinks out here. I dig a wider hole to locate the suspect connection, see that the outlet of the pipe is shattered, and begin to clear the soil from around and under it so it can be replaced. The lines on my fingers are traced with soil, like mini tattoos, and there is a dark rim under each of my chipped nails. My hands are never clean since I moved here.
I think back over this first summer, all the hard work I’ve done alone, and I remember meeting Art a month ago. I had spent the afternoon in the sun weeding Martin’s carrot beds. He gave me a dozen lush tomato transplants when I was done. Jen invited me to go with her to a dance at the fire hall in Margaretsville that night. I was eager to get out and have some company. Martin doesn’t like to dance and didn’t want to go with his wife. I was glad he wasn’t coming. He’s always crapping on me for not being practical enough, and I suspect he’s jealous of the friendship I have with Jen. At that point it had been so long since I’d been in a city or heard live music that I would have listened to a marching band of accordions and kazoos.
I went home and put the tomato plants in the ground late enough in the day that they wouldn’t be shocked by the sun and watered them. Then I watered myself.
Jen drove us down the winding road to the Margaretsville fire hall in her Lada. She had cleaned the dash with lavender so it smelled nice, but there was no hope for the seats. They were covered with cat fur. I never tire of that stretch of road running downhill from Victoria Vale to Margaretsville, especially when it opens up out of the trees and beyond the fields of hay the water and sky are separated from each other by the wide ribbon of land on the other shore. I was in a good mood and sat sideways so I could watch Jenifer drive while I teased her about the cat hair on the seats. She has a lovely face and is thoughtful and fun, and I was attracted to her that night.
The dance took place in a large room beside the garage that housed the fire trucks. Most of the picnic tables set up at the back of the room were filled with people drinking beer or coffee. In front of the heavy woman at the canteen counter lay brownies, date squares, and cookies covered with Smarties. I gave the woman two loonies for a date square and a cup of strong black tea.
The fiddler was a leathery man who played jigs and reels that made it impossible to sit still. He sat stiff-backed in a wooden chair, one foot tapping the rhythm on the stage. I danced with Jen. Between sets, canned music played through the speakers. Jen didn’t want to stop dancing, so I twirled her around as best I could. I felt dozens of pairs of eyes watching us, wondering who the new guy with Jenifer was, dancing like a flustered chicken. A slow song came on and we kept dancing. Jen is almost my height and I was relishing how good it was to have a woman in my arms again when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“I’m cutting in,” a deep voice said.
I pulled my cheek away from the softness of Jen’s hair and turned to see the creased face of the fiddler, the bill of his John Deere cap aimed at my nose. I looked at her as we separated, then reached for his hands. He shoved me away.
“Not you, you fairy,” he said. “I wanna dance with her.”
I snorted, pretending I’d been joking, and found a picnic table at the back of the hall. If it hadn’t been such a long walk uphill in the dark, I would have started right then for home. When the song ended Jen came and joined me. I didn’t look at her.
“So now you’ve met Art.”
“Lucky me.”
“He’s blunt but really quite sweet.”
I grunted like a caveman. The rest of the dance was ruined for me. All I could think of was that everyone had seen me reach for his hands.
—
The screen door at the back of the house slams shut and I am woken from my daydream. Lucy comes running around the corner wagging her tail and sneezing the way border collies do when they like you. She is followed by a young woman whose motion is the opposite of Art’s: fluid, graceful, lithe. There is no wagging, no sneezing, but her eyes make up for that. Their irises are black, and huge, as she stares at me and says nothing. Unnerved, I put my head back down and poke around the pipe.
“I’ve got a strange request.”
Her voice is soft like water running through my cupped hands. I look up.
“Will you sit for me while I sketch you?”
“Your grandfather seems to think it’s important that I get to the bottom of this hole.”
She laughs. She smells of geraniums. “Art won’t mind if I borrow you for half an hour. I’ll pay you for your time.”
I lay the shovel beside the hole. “They don’t call them odd jobs for nothing.”
I reach out to introduce myself. She eyes the dirt on my fingers suspiciously.
“It’s only soil. I haven’t had to deal with the pipe yet.”
“I’m Lina.”
Her hand is cool and has the rough skin and strong grip of someone who could be digging the hole instead of me. It’s as if I’m clasping the handle of a whip that runs up her arm, coils through her core, and whose tips end in the black centres of her eyes.
She turns toward the house and I follow the thick, dark braid that flows like a tail down her back. The scarlet ribbon tied at the end, near her sacrum, sways from side to side as if flicking flies off her hips. Her studio is in the northwest corner of the house, facing the water. It smells of oil paints, turpentine, and books mouldering from the damp sea air. The spines on the shelves are discoloured from sunlight. It is a strange collection. Poetry by Hopkins and Hardy, a thirty-volume set by Trollope, and three works by Krishnamurti. Portraits are hung on the high white wall opposite the windows. The features in each one look like they are made of melted wax. Out of the to
p of each head emerges the clear and precise image of a bird, its wings outstretched in liftoff.
Lina motions for me to sit in a chair facing the row of windows and moves to her easel. I rest my hands on my thighs. My shoulders and forearms relax after their exertion. I reach up to remove my hat, with its floppy, dirty-white brim.
“Oh, leave it on. It’s what made me want to sketch your head. That and your nose.”
“It’s the hat that becomes the bird?”
“Sometimes.”
“What bird will this become?”
“Can’t say yet.”
She is quiet while she draws. She wears loose, paint-splattered jeans and a white T-shirt that hugs her breasts and accentuates the darkness of her skin. I focus on her eyes while she is intent on my portrait. Even when she looks up from the easel she ignores me, as if she is a surgeon and I am her patient etherized upon the table. When she looks back at the paper, her irises are iridescent, like the glossy purple head of a grackle. She looks up again, this time into my eyes, and smiles. Her smile is subtle, lips pressed together, corners curving up slightly. I wait for another. Her pencil scratches are punctuated by the scream of Art’s chainsaw coming through the open windows.
“Where are you from?” I ask.
“Quebec.”
“And where’s your family from?”
She guesses what I’m wondering and, in a minute, says, “My mother’s Wendat.”
“Wendat?”
“Huron. I grew up on the Wendake reserve in Quebec City.”
I don’t interrupt her concentration again. Instead I imagine what she is drawing coming out of my head. Based on my hat it could be a gull or tern. A few minutes pass, and she puts down her pencil and sighs.
“Can I see it?”
“It didn’t work.”
“I don’t get to have a pileated woodpecker pounding on my head?”
“Not today, I’m afraid.”
She walks me to the door. I stand, awkward and quiet, wanting her to say more, wanting her to keep me from leaving. I want her hand in mine again.
“Let me get your money.” She turns back into the room.
“Forget it. The rest was good.”
I leave the house.
“By the way,” she says as I stand on the grass below her. “He’s not my grandfather.”
Lucy follows me back to the hole and lies nearby while I finish digging. When Art comes back I show him where the pipe is broken.
“I called down to Home Hardware,” he says. “They stopped ordering PVC pipe a month ago. Everybody’s afraid it’s gonna fall apart like the rest.”
“It won’t. It’s different plastic.”
“I have a length of the old clay stuff in the shed.”
It is suppertime when we finish, fill the hole, and stomp the ground back into place. Art helps me put the tools back in the shed.
“Will you stay for supper?”
The smell of sewage is stuck in my nostrils if not on my clothes. I look at my pants and shirt sleeves, covered in dirt, and then at him.
“To hell with that.” He waves a thick hand in the air. “I’ve smelled a lot worse.”
I wash my hands, then stick my head under the tap, revelling in the warmth and volume of water. I grab a towel from the rack and rub my hair. The towel smells like Lina. On the shelf above the toilet is a bottle of geranium essential oil. I consider putting a drop of it on my wrist but think better of it. In the kitchen, I sit on a stool at the counter where Art cuts vegetables for a one-pot chicken casserole. He pulls two bottles of homemade beer from the fridge and puts one in front of me. The cap flips off the stubby brown bottle and rolls in a spiral in front of me.
“To shit staying underground,” he says as he raises his bottle.
Our bottles click and he raises his to take a sip.
“You want a glass?”
I shake my head and tip the bottle to my lips, pretending to drink it. The pine floorboards creak at the back of the house. Lina comes into the kitchen and washes her hands at the sink.
“I was telling our friend here that you don’t care much for the sludge at the bottom of my beer.” He winks at me.
“And I told you, Art, it has nothing to do with your sludge.”
Her back is to us. I could lift that braid, feel its heft, coil it around my neck like a heavy scarf. She dries her hands on a dish towel and pours a glass of tap water. She comes to sit on the stool beside me. She smells, not only of flowers, but of laundry hung out in the sun, and when she smiles, I take a small step toward feeling human again, as if there is more to life than splitting firewood and hauling water.
“I tried to draw him while you were in the woods, but it didn’t work out.”
“He’d make a good hawk with a nose like that,” Art says.
“His nose wasn’t the issue. Some days I can draw and some I can’t.”
“On the days you can’t, you might as well lay your pencil down and take up a hoe.” He turns to me. “Lina’s here to look after Louise’s gardens for me. I can do the rough work, but it takes a feminine touch to make the flower beds look like they used to.”
“Your wife?” I say.
“She’s living in a home in Bridgetown. Her memory’s all shot to hell.”
“I’m sorry.”
He waves me off with a snort. “How can you be sorry? You never knew her.” He continues chopping the onions and carrots. “I hate this time of day. She called it entre chien et loup. Soon after Louise and I married, Joshua sold us this land at the edge of the farm he and I grew up on. There was an old house here with its roof caving in. Louise and I were up there together, into November, with the rain beating down on our backs, repairing it. She passed me boards and I’d nail them in place. We shingled the whole thing too.”
He is staring through the window. It’s dusk, and though I can see his reflection, he’s looking far beyond it as though he were expecting his wife to return from the garden, a spectre holding a hoe and her gardening gloves, mind intact.
After supper, while I help Lina do the dishes, Art gets out his fiddle and plays a melancholy tune. His mood has infected me, and, given Lina’s reticence, she and I say little, listening to the plaintive singing of the sheep-gut strings under his bow. She hands me a heavy pottery plate, handmade, and our hands touch for the second time. Her tapered fingers return to the sudsy water and massage the sponge against a cup. When she hands it to me and meets my gaze I realize I’ve been staring. I look down and go back to wiping the plate.
Before it gets dark, I get on my bike for the long, slow ride uphill. Half an hour later I climb into my tent. The air is hot and the sweaty skin of my legs and back sticks to the nylon of my sleeping bag. I close my eyes, see Lina’s, and can’t sleep. I turn on the AM radio and tune in stations from the States. The baseball game from Boston, music, evangelists spouting their apocalyptic gibberish. Then, farther along the dial, a news report that makes me question if it is gibberish after all.
. . . the lack of plastic containers of many kinds has fuelled a drastic shortage of blood for surgeries in most hospitals. Authorities attribute this primarily to the loss of plastic collection bags and tubing. The dissolution of these and many other plastics has authorities baffled, but new evidence confirms the spread of a strain, or strains, of genetically engineered bacteria.
Blackouts continue to plague most cities as the coating on high-voltage power lines is dissolving or being eaten. The nylon in gas tanks is being digested from the outside and people are finding their cars standing in puddles of gas.
And while most computers continue to be susceptible as key components disintegrate, one company’s products appear to be immune to this biological threat. Horus Computers’ sales have skyrocketed. Company spokespeople say they simply can’t keep pace with the demand even with the influx of money from the U.S. and Chinese governments to expand production.
It’s only a matter of time before all this reaches out here. It’s perverse, I
know, but listening to this soothes me to sleep.
*
I am in a lake sinking and wanting to touch bottom. I empty my lungs and move my arms upwards to propel me down. Down, down to the soft bottom, where the muck oozes between my toes. My body feels weightless as I crouch, then push off, now hoping for the surface. The lack of air makes my skinny body less buoyant. I ought to feel like I am flying, but the movement is too slow, the leaden-footed escape from nightmare monsters. I am made of stone. My muscles ache for oxygen as I struggle for the surface. It is right there, the partition between water and air. The blue sky and the sun’s orange shimmering down to me. At last I burst through this limen, open my mouth, and gasp in breath after grateful breath.
It is early morning, and I have been sleeping on my back again. My sleeping bag is unzipped and covers one leg. There is the sound of rain hitting the leaves outside my tent. These drowning dreams began soon after my father killed himself. What if I did not wake up, if I continued to sink and couldn’t open my mouth no matter how I craved to inhale? That is a scab I am in the habit of picking and won’t let heal. Scabs are reminders that something’s gone wrong. In bed, I try to piece together what that something is, breathing in, out.
One night when I was a child, waking from a nightmare, I called to my father, and though my voice was hushed out of fear that the fox in my dream would get me, Dad heard and came to comfort me.
“Hey, bud, try to fall asleep on your side, O.K.? I have nightmares too when I sleep on my back.”
He sat on the edge of my bed and calmed me by rubbing my back until I fell asleep again. In the morning the daylight allowed me to wonder how I could ever have been afraid.
After he died, after he left without so much as a note explaining why, I felt him near me as a presence. For months after he died, whenever I was home from school, I’d open the door to his closet, run my fingers over his pants and his suit, and bury my face in his shirts. I slept with one of his shirts on my pillow. Over time, as I fell back into my routine at school, I was surprised when I noticed that I had a few minutes or part of an hour when I hadn’t thought of him. And then his scent faded. I couldn’t tell if he was leaving slowly or if I was pulling away from him by continuing to live. His presence dimmed as I ate and slept and lived without him, but there continue to be times, mostly at night, mostly when I dream, when he comes back.
The Rest is Silence Page 3