Order of Good Cheer

by Bill Gaston

  Samuel lets the paper drop. Damp and thick from too many hands, it ignites slowly. He watches until it is ash, though this seems an elaborate precaution. No one here save he and a few others — Poutrincourt and Lescarbot, and also the carpenter Lucien, so the rumour goes — can read.

  Fish

  AS USUAL THESE DAYS, Andy Winslow hadn’t slept well but was up anyway. Deep in his morning routine and near the bottom of his first coffee, only now did he register what was happening down on the beach. Why so many people and what were they looking at? You could see in their posture an odd lean, could see care and wonder. Yes, there was that storm last night, a real pounder from the south, much howling and blow.

  Andy was sitting at his window planning the drive to Terrace but so dense with thought it was like he’d been unconscious and only now did he come to the world outside himself. What woke him up truly was the sight of neighbour Sally Kitcher down there on the beach, flopping a four-foot ling cod onto a child’s blue and yellow plastic wagon and trying to drag it away. At the wagon’s first lurch over the gravel the fish slid off, and Andy — coming to and involuntarily standing up — could see that the wagon was already full of what appeared to be dead fish.

  He also noticed that the light in his yard was different. There was more of it. He saw that this was because there were fewer trees. In fact he had a better view — more light, more harbour vista to see — and now it registered that part of his yard was gone. A corner of his lawn, where it used to meet the bank’s trees and bushes, now ended at a precipice.

  He threw on a stained grey hoodie and his workboots but didn’t bother lacing them to stride his wet lawn to have a look at his new little cliff. He didn’t stand too close in case more wanted to come down. He turned back to look at the house. Then to the lip of land at his feet. He figured that he’d lost maybe a tenth of his property. He whispered, “Holy shit,” then started down the zigzag trail to the beach. Warding off wet alder branches with his forearms, getting showered, Andy wondered — absurdly — if he would ever prune this pathway.

  Around the point from Prince Rupert proper, the shore beneath Andy’s neighbourhood kept a wilderness feel, its bank thick with trees that half hid the houses. Along the few hundred yards of gravel beach Andy could see fifteen or twenty people, alone and in groups, all looking at dead fish and dead crabs. Some pointed a finger, some nudged a creature with a foot. Closest to him, Sally Kitcher hunched over her wagon, huffing, trying to bind her heap of ling cod with a length of cast-off yellow twine she’d found.

  Andy pivoted to survey his lost yard from below. Except for one large upside-down fir, whose crown rested on the gravel, there was no evidence — no sod or topsoil or small uprooted trees. All had been carried away by the storm tide. It was simply gone!

  Andy turned back to the mystery at his feet. Over the entire stretch of beach, dead fish and crab marked the high-tide line. The crabs were Dungeness of all sizes, from keepers as big as human faces to babies the width of bottle caps, and their shells did not rock in the slight waves, suggesting they were still heavy with meat. Some fish, like Sally Kitcher’s ling cod, were spectacularly big, but most were arm-sized. Andy saw not just ling cod but also rockfish, and either flounder or young halibut, he couldn’t tell. Gulls stood and poked, and walked rather than hopped, looking unsure where to go, as if leisurely choice was a thing unknown to their species.

  He reached the water and flipped a ling with his boot. Maybe nine or ten pounds, it was sleek, firm, its eyes bright, the kind of freshness they tell you to look for in the market. The water that lapped at it, and out into the bay as far as Andy could see, appeared clean, clear, frigid. He could see no oil. He could smell nothing aside from rain on rocks, and seaweed. Weird, this lack of smell — to be standing among dead fish and not smell them.

  “Excuse me?” Andy called. “Sally?”

  The woman paused in her cord-tying to flash a palm, telling him to wait a sec. Andy didn’t care for Sally Kitcher. They’d graduated together and she hovered near forty like him, but even at age ten she’d looked dreamless, her stern lack of humour making her seem of another generation. She had those eyes you couldn’t see into, and she made Andy think “peasant stock,” or “ox,” despite her having gone south to university and returning with a degree in something. He’d known her all his life but he could feel closer to a stranger. Maybe it was also because he was so tall and thin and she was so short and round.

  Andy approached as Sally stood eyeing her heaped wagon for transportability. The top ling cod was cinched down fairly tight.

  “Slime on slime,” she said, shaking her head. “Won’t work.”

  “Do we know what’s going on?”

  “It’s at least to the mouth of the Skeena, maybe farther. Ten miles. Fifteen miles.” Sally was so undramatic, this could have been a yearly event.

  “Do we know what happened? Something spill?”

  “I haven’t heard anything, no.”

  “I mean, you can’t see anything.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  As if to make sure, they both scanned the shoreline in both directions.

  Andy offered, “Can’t smell anything either, I don’t think.”

  “No,” Sally agreed.

  “Was it the storm, maybe?”

  “Maybe. I don’t see how, though. I don’t see how wind would kill fish.”

  “Well, waves?”

  “Why would they be up in the waves?”

  “Yeah.” Andy shook his head. “You know, I lost a corner of my yard last night.” He pointed up to his property. Somewhat incredibly, he yawned. And he realized that not only was his view of the water better, but that from the beach you could see more of his house.

  “Saw that.” Sally didn’t bother glancing back.

  “Tide must’ve been huge, and on top of that the waves just came in, I guess, and cut into the bank. Boom, gone.”

  Sally stood and tugged her wagon, testing. “It happens.”

  Well, no, it didn’t. That land had been there for thousands of years, through countless tides and storms.

  “Anyway,” Andy said, toeing a small rock cod, “wonder what it could be. It sure doesn’t look good.”

  “It sure doesn’t.”

  “They look so healthy. Like they were alive, and suddenly boom. Fish and crabs. Maybe some sort of military test? Naval test?”

  “I don’t have a clue. No one’s heard anything so far as I know.” Sally regarded her wagonload again, impatient. “They do look good.”

  Andy realized that of course she had plans for those fish. “You’re not going to eat those, are you? Shouldn’t you wait and —”

  “Hell no!” Sally glanced at him briefly, then away. “Jesus, no. Fertilizer.”

  “Ah.”

  “Friend in Halifax called and woke me up, she heard about these fish on the radio, said in the Maritimes they used to plow in truckfuls on the farms.” She bobbed her head at her wagon. “Back when they had fish.”

  “It was on the radio?”

  “It’s been on tv already.”

  “This?” Andy pointed at Sally’s wagon and she started tugging, a little defensively. “And they don’t know what caused it?”

  “I don’t think so, no.” Sally Kitcher’s back was to him as she hauled her load away.

  “Won’t whatever’s in them get into the vegetables?”

  “Flowers.” Sally didn’t turn to look at him. “I’m not stupid.”

  Andy pivoted once more to take in the tide line of dead fish, the white bellies and crab backs diminishing in the distance both left and right. He found Sally Kitcher’s lack of concern stunning, but oddly enough he took some comfort from it too. Maybe this was no big deal. He noted again the manner in which the seagulls poked and pulled at a fish, or waddled to the next one, all rather listlessly, he thought. He couldn’t tell if their lack of frenzy was caution or if, already full, they were bored.

  He didn’t feel that hungry himself as
he slogged back up the path to make breakfast. It was Tuesday, so the pancake batter made last night waited in the fridge. He would still drive to the Terrace library. First he’d phone his mother, in whose house the tv was never off, to ask if she knew anything. He would also break the news to her about losing some yard. And he’d phone Drew, to wake him up and tell him. He wondered if Laura had heard about this yet. And what would she think?

  MIDDAY, ANDY CAME home smelling of reeds. A subtle and creeping fug, it clung mostly to his hands but it also filled his jeans, still wet to the knees, and his poor soaked leather work-boots, which stood on their mat just inside the door.

  In his pass through the living room he turned the radio on loud, though he didn’t expect anything new. On his drive to Terrace and back he’d heard the identical story three times and “local authorities” still didn’t know the cause of the ten miles of dead fish. It was of course worrisome, but also vaguely thrilling to hear Prince Rupert as the subject of a national story.

  In the bathroom he brought his fingernails to his face. He could too easily smell the cattail’s root, a swampy scent suggesting its weird pale green — and rot, the breath of turtles, the sick spirit of water bugs.

  As he often did, Andy hopped in the shower with his clothes on, standing back to get his jeans into the spray. He squirted some shampoo down there, and some in his hands, and a smell like purple candy flowers rose to overcrow that of reeds. He didn’t care to learn that he preferred this cheap chemical waft over something natural, but there it was. Still, no way he was going to consider those reeds food.

  It was why he’d stopped in the first place, to check the cattails out as a food source. Zooming mindlessly back to the coast from Terrace (where he’d returned his books and picked up thirteen fresh ones at the college library: two on climate change, one peripherally to do with shore erosion, and the one he’d been waiting for, Lescarbot’s History of New France), he’d really wanted only to savour the deep pep of his new car. Despite his sleeplessness, despite the dead fish and lost land, he was feeling fine, maybe only because he was going somewhere — a simple destination, A to B, contentment sometimes that simple. Then in the middle of high-torque hum he spotted the cattails in a hidden slough fifty yards off the road. He had to brake and back up carefully (people floored it along this stretch), park, and go to the trunk for his workboots. He didn’t know if it was because of the mountainous terrain, or because it was merely thirty miles south of the Alaskan panhandle, but you just didn’t see cattail around here.

  He slogged through brush and knee-high moss and approached them feeling a little less triumphant than foolish. This was all Champlain’s doing, of course; that is, the result of Andy’s current immersion in his Voyages, skimpy and plodding as they were. Despite the blandness, and no description whatsoever of life in New France, some small to-do was made when a food source was discovered. Or a potential copper mine, or a stand of oak. To find a new river mouth was the biggest deal, because even up rivers he was looking for a way to China. (It was hard not to marvel at the naïveté of the era, as Europeans stumbled up against the wall of the New World and couldn’t see over it.) To find a patch of decent soil in which to thumb one’s seeds was good, but even better was to come upon something edible, fruit or bulbs for the taking. It meant not just survival, and reduced labour and fret, but variety, a new taste, an expanded world. Imagine, after six months of huddling in smoke and cold, nothing to eat but hardtack and unchewable cured beef, that first fresh vegetable — the first fiddlehead shoots plucked fat and clean from the riverbank mud, then steamed and lightly salted and drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Crunch, vital little nuggets. Funny that the French had with them a cask of balsamic, a taste North America was waking up to four hundred years later. Andy loved reading that they had garlic, mace, rosewater, dried cinnamon bark, sage, tarragon, and, yes, Dijon mustard. A different book mentioned penned pigeons, or squab, and a cask of prunes. And this was two years before the landing, some distance south, in Jamestown, Virginia. Fifteen years before the Puritans and their Mayflower, who from the sounds of it not only wouldn’t have had spices, but would have turned from them, walking fast with heads down.

  So Andy stood considering his find of cattails. The gracefully tall, somewhat haremesque leaves surrounded a long, hard stem topped by its unique brown cylinder of fur. It looked designed for squeezing, like a headless and limbless mink. There were only six of them, probably not even a meal. If he uprooted even three, maybe it would fatally injure the colony. But he squatted and worked his hands into the cold black muck and yanked one out. He held a bulb of sorts, not the true pregnancy of an onion, more the swelling of a leek. But the smell. You could imagine tadpoles suckling on this rotten smell alone. Maybe it just indicated the fecund and healthy, like the reek of a clam bed at low tide, both life and death in full bloom. In any case, stooping and examining his minor bulb, Andy realized he couldn’t remember what it was you did with cattails in the first place. He’d read about it who knows when or where. It said something about making flour.

  Leaving this food source to better scavengers, Andy slogged back to his car. There was something very Robinson Crusoe about it — the joy of finding a wild fruit tree, or a bent nail with which to catch fish — but the notion was more romantic in a book than it was out here calf-deep in a swamp, rediscovering the fecal smell of mud. No doubt hunger helped.

  In the sunlight his Mustang’s new black shone sleekly obsidian, and it was a shame to slide his muddy, reedy self into it. The car was just three months old and had its own fitting scent. He sat and grabbed the rearview to check his face for mud. He caught his eyes, his big earnest eyes, staring back. And here it was again, like waking up, like coming to. More and more these days it seemed that he forgot himself, for longer periods of time, lost in whatever — a book, a drive, hunting cattails, thinking — and then he came to. And here he was.

  HIS CLOTHES DRIPPING into the tub behind him, Andy towelled off with a grimace, scraping his skin in the way he’d read was good for you, long, cleansing strokes always in a direction away from the heart. A radio voice droned from the living room, an interview, a heavy accent, something depressing about children in Lebanon.

  And so what would Laura think of this showering with his clothes on? But how would she know about it unless he told her, and why would he? Unless she were here when he needed a shower or, for that matter, some clean clothes. He wasn’t sure when he’d started the habit, but it was indeed a habit, since he no longer really thought about it. It just made sense to stand there under the spray and soap up your clothes while they’re still on you. Then take them off, stomp on them like the tub was flat rocks and you were a bare-breasted Zambezi, and then take your regular shower, the clothes at your feet getting kicked around, properly agitated, and rinsed, then hung from the rod, to drip. Years ago, placing it just inside so the tub caught the drips, he’d installed a second shower curtain rod, the kind with the inner springs to hold itself up through its own endless tension (the thought of which could still make him mildly queasy).

  Showering in his clothes wasn’t about saving money. He had a new car that was too fast for him, he had a mortgage-free waterfront house that was too big, and if he bought a round in the bar these days he no longer gave it much thought. Nor was it about saving water, not in Prince Rupert, whose high-school team name was the Rainmakers and where, so one joke went, it rained 366 days a year. Nor was it easier than tossing his clothes into the washer. He didn’t know what it was about.

  But, to the point, what would Laura think? That her old boyfriend Andy Winslow had matured into a practical, innovative bachelor? Or that Andy Winslow was a kook, at thirty-nine owning eccentricities too ripe for a man his age? When he sees her, he’ll resist describing the experiment where he’d stacked dirty dishes in the tub and lathered up with them too.

  When he sees her.

  Since her letter, since the rumours of her return proved to be true, Andy had not only begun losing s
leep, he’d also begun seeing his world in a different way. His house, for instance. What (he found himself asking when he got home from work and parked and looked up) will Laura think of his house? She knew the house, had been in it a few times back when it was his parents’ place, but it had been his alone for ten years now. The house centred its half-acre such that neither neighbour could be seen through strategically dense trees. It had two storeys, three bedrooms, was freshly painted a nice bone white, and of course it was medium-bank waterfront with zillion-dollar view. But Laura had seen all this, so the real question was, What will Laura think of him, thirty-nine, still living in his childhood house?

  Eighteen years. What will Laura think about him still working at the grain terminal? What will she think of this shrinking town? Of the cruise ship docking here now? What will she think if she hears the wolves at night? What will she think of their mothers’ living arrangement? What will she think about the sushi and habanero peppers and acai juice you can buy in Safeway now? What will she think about Safeway’s fancy little boxes of smoked salmon, salmon caught here, shipped five hundred miles south to Vancouver to smoke and package, and then shipped back to sell? What will she think about today’s dead fish?

  Though he tried to keep it to once a day, lately he paused far too often at the bathroom mirror to ask the inevitable of his face: what will Laura think seeing this?

  HE’D BEEN ASKING that question not just of his bathroom mirror and his Mustang’s rearview, but sometimes random windows on the street, hunching to get his full six-feet-four in. Tonight, he and Drew emerged from their Tuesday-night early movie (Johnny Depp really was a good actor, despite his looks) and, ignoring the rain, Andy paused at a shop window long enough to gauge his waistline. It wasn’t really a paunch any more. And he had decent shoulders, and an appropriate haircut, and the new beard coming in oddly darker than his hair. He’d never had a beard before, had no clue if he should keep it, and he didn’t know who to ask. Drew kept walking. He didn’t appear to look back, but with the clairvoyance of best friends he knew what Andy was doing at the window. Not turning around, he said, “Be weird, eh? Laura back here?”