by Ed Kavanagh
“But at least yours is more . . . normal.”
“You’re crazy.”
“But what if my profs don’t like it?”
“Why wouldn’t they like it?”
“Well, like I told you—I’m doing journalism. I’m going to have to speak, do interviews . . . radio programs. Not right away, I don’t think. But . . . I don’t want to stick out.”
“But you must have known about your accent before you applied.”
“It sounds stupid but . . . I kind of didn’t. Anyway, I mainly want to do print journalism—be a writer. I’ve always been a bookworm. I think I must have been ignoring the other parts of the program.” Jeannie sighed. “When I think about going before a TV camera . . . I’m not even that crazy about the radio stuff I’m gonna have to do.”
“You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”
Jeannie grinned. “You know when I first heard a different accent?”
“When?”
“I couldn’t have been more than five or six. These two little kids turned up home: Bobby and Matilda—I never forgot their names. I think they were the kids of one of the Vokey brothers who’d lived up the lane from us and had moved to the States—probably the southern states, now that I think of it. I guess he was back in Bay de Vent for a visit. Anyway, Bobby and Matilda were down on the landwash—”
“The what?”
“The landwash—the beach—and Dad told me to go play with them.” Jeannie giggled. “As soon as they started talking I thought there was something wrong with them. They just didn’t sound right. I really thought they must have been sick or something. And then I remembered the big jeer I’d hear the older kids yelling out in the schoolyard when they were gangin’ up on someone: ‘You’re friggin’ retarded.’ I always knew that was the worst possible thing you could say—even though I didn’t really know what it meant. But suddenly that’s what I thought—that Bobby and Matilda must have been retarded. Isn’t that shocking! It was the first time I ever felt pity—real gut-wrenching pity. Those poor, poor youngsters, I kept saying to myself.” Jeannie shook her head and looked at Katie. “My God. You don’t think people will say that about me?”
Katie turned over on her side and propped her elbow under her head. “If you think that, you’ll be the retarded one.”
In the evenings, Jeannie walked by the Rideau Canal, and the boats reminded her of her uncle Mike, who was a minister in Topsail and something of an amateur sailor. When Jeannie had lived in St. John’s, she’d often spent weekends with Mike and her aunt Shirl. Mike had told her once that when he first came back from divinity school he’d decided to reacquaint himself with boats. He hadn’t had too much to do with them since he was a child. “I knew most of my postings would be out around the bay,” he’d said, “and I figured that if the locals knew I was handy on the water they might pay more attention to my sermons.”
“They won’t hear any of your sermons if you end up drowning yourself,” Jeannie’s aunt Shirl had said. But Mike had gone ahead and bought a sixteen-foot rodney with an ancient make-and-break engine and enlisted a local fisherman to teach him how to handle it.
Mike would sometimes take Jeannie out on Conception Bay. And they would cruise among the islands, occasionally landing on Kelly’s Island for a quick boil-up among the sea rockets and beach pea. But even on the calmest evenings Jeannie remained vigilant. One Saturday evening, following a pod of breaching humpbacks, they had headed farther out than usual, and suddenly the waves began to froth intensely, and soon the boat was tossing so much she felt her stomach churn. The high waves pounded them side on, punishing the bucking rodney.
“Mike, I’m going to throw up.”
“What?”
“I’m sick.”
Her uncle laughed. “No you’re not. Just grab on and stare at the horizon.”
“Stare at . . .?”
“The horizon. That’s what one of the fishermen told me to do when I used to get queasy. Forget the sway of the boat. Just look to where the water meets the sky—that line. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Now breathe deeply and concentrate. Just stare at the horizon.” Mike turned the tossing rodney into the wind. “I should put that in my sermon tomorrow,” he called over the wild waves and putting engine. “Keeping your eyes on the horizon steadies you against the tilt of the world.” He laughed. “You know, that’s pretty good.”
As they approached shore Jeannie began to feel better. The wind diminished. It began to drizzle and then rain, and she closed her eyes and tasted the fresh rain on her lips.
And Mike had used that idea in his Sunday sermon. She remembered him saying that the wind moulds things, gives them their shape—like the slanting tuckamore that fringes the rocky coast. And like the tuckamore, it teaches how to bend to survive. And it moulds people too, breathing some of its strength into you. And if the sea or anything else ever becomes too much, there’s always a horizon to fix your gaze on, to keep you centred and true. You just need to find your horizon.
The nagging feeling was changing shape. By Jeannie’s fourth day it was no longer a persistent tune: it had moved to her belly where it sat with the crushing weight of a beach rock. And with it came loneliness. How could someone live in a city with so many people, live in a residence filled with so many students, and still be lonely? She’d had fun during the Frosh activities, and the girls in her residence seemed nice enough—she’d never seen so many perfect-teeth smiles—but already they were clustering into cliques. So far, Katie from Manitoba was her one reliable companion. Camille was friendly enough, but she was hardly ever around. Like Jeannie, Camille hadn’t known a soul when she first arrived, but already she was friends with girls from all over their building, as well as with some exchange students from France who lived in a different residence. Jeannie wondered if Camille refused to speak French to them. And it certainly hadn’t taken long for the boys to discover her. Jeannie watched them in the dining hall, sizing her up, nudging each other as Camille made her salad—Camille seemed to live almost exclusively on salads. Jeannie had been curious about mainland boys. She’d figured they’d probably be a step up from Frankie Butt or Bobby Mercer back home, but so far she wasn’t impressed. The ones she’d met seemed dull-eyed and listless, hanging around in the residence lobbies or on the steps or bouncing basketballs in the parking lots. She couldn’t picture them being enrolled in an actual academic program. Study seemed to be the furthest thing from their minds. They looked as if they were thinking: When’s the party going to start? And Jeannie knew that whenever it did start, Camille, with her gazellelike beauty and limpid brown eyes, would be the star. Any day, Jeannie thought, they’ll be lining up outside our door. Even now, whenever someone knocked, she almost expected some flop-haired basketball star to ask sheepishly if Camille could come out to play.
The beach rock in her stomach was getting heavier. Tomorrow she would attend her first lectures. She had already visited the classrooms and mapped out the best routes so she’d know exactly where she was going and how long it would take to get there. At least that was something. And it was so hot. She had never experienced such heat before. And it was a different kind of heat. She supposed it was the humidity that people at home had warned her about.
On her last evening before classes began, Jeannie wandered the streets around the campus, feeling the stone in her stomach stirring like some fidgeting fetus. Then, while resting on a bench by the canal, watching the turgid, brown water, images of the ocean outside her door, with its whipped turquoise waves, came to her, and with them, finally, the homesickness arrived, mixing with her loneliness, forming a second stone deep in her heart. My roommate is too beautiful and doesn’t want to speak French to me, she thought. And the boys always look past me in the corridors and the dining hall. And every time I open my mouth people narrow their eyes, and I know the person will say: And where are you from? Or they’ll attempt some awful, fake Newfoundland accent and expect me to laugh. And will my p
rofessors tell me I can’t be a journalist because I sound funny? And even though Bobby Mercer is a bit of an idiot who only ever wanted to shoot things and put his hands up my shirt . . . I still kind of miss him.
Jeannie made her way through the blue, humid air, eventually finding herself before the Black Cat Café she’d visited with Katie. She thought something to eat might settle her rioting stomach, and she went inside and ordered a croissant and a latte and took them out to the terrace. There was something about this city that was just not normal. Something beyond the crowds and the squirrels and the speed and the newness. Something. She looked down at her latte, motionless in the mug, the steam rising in perfect vertical vapours. And then the something, as Joe would say, smacked her in the face. No wind. It had been dead calm all week. Suddenly she felt as if someone had pushed her from behind, and a wave of giddiness tilted her, and she grasped the arms of her chair and tried to find the horizon to get her balance. Except there was no horizon, just trees she didn’t know the names of, and brick apartment buildings with balconies hung with strangers’ laundry.
But I hate the wind, she told herself. The dizziness persisted. She got up and went down the stairs, holding hard to the rail. Look at the horizon, she heard in her head. Stare at the horizon. That line where the sky meets the sea. And that’s what she’d tried to do all the way home.
When she got back to their room, Camille, as usual, wasn’t there. Jeannie stretched out on her bed and clasped her hands over her stomach. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep.
The next morning, brushing her teeth, Jeannie looked through the small bathroom window. The leaves in the high branches of the maples along the canal were quivering, occasionally flashing their silver undersides to the sky. When she joined Katie in the dining hall for breakfast, Jeannie said, “The wind is coming up.”
Katie looked at her quizzically. “It is?”
And as Jeannie walked to her first class, she saw that the wind was indeed stirring. It wasn’t the wind of home—she knew it could never be that—but a strong breeze just the same. She felt refreshed and quickened her step. And she suddenly knew that if the wind was powerful enough to blow away Joe’s sins, even for just a little while, then perhaps this Ottawa wind could blow away some of her fears and uncertainty. That it could give her some of the lightness Joe had felt on that lonely Labrador hilltop.
In a surprise phone call that night, apparently Joe’s treat, Jeannie repeatedly told her parents that she was fine and settling in. When her father had finally surrendered the phone, Joe’s familiar voice crackled on the line.
“Jeannie, you must have seen Trudeau by now?”
“Yes, Joe. Me and Camille had him over for supper the other night. We had steak—he’s big on steak.”
Joe laughed. “Ah, you’ll see him one of these days. So Jeannie, what’s the best thing about Ottawa?”
She paused. “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that. Wait—I like lattes.”
“What’s lattes?”
“A kind of coffee.”
“Oh yeah. What’s the worst thing?”
And Jeannie answered immediately. “It’s too calm up here. I miss the wind. Most days there’s hardly a breath.”
The telephone line hummed, punctuated with pops and hissing static.
“You still there, Joe?”
“Yeah, I’m still here . . . You okay, Jeannie?”
“Fine.”
“You said you misses . . . what?”
“The wind. It’s so calm here all the time. It makes me feel unsteady—dizzy.”
“You sure you’re okay, Jeannie?”
“I’m sure.”
“You’re not after goin’ all Canadian on us, are you? Sure you haven’t been up there no time yet.”
Jeannie laughed. “No. I don’t think that’ll ever happen. It’s just a little bit too calm. But I’m okay with it now— or getting okay. I just stare at the horizon and wait for the wind. Although it’s not like home: around here you can be waiting a long time.”
One evening, at the end of her first week of classes, Jeannie went to the library and flipped through the card catalogue until she found The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. She took the book to a study carrel and leafed through its fine, glossy pages. It took awhile to find the poem she wanted because she couldn’t remember the title, but eventually the familiar lines materialized before her. Two girls in silk kimonos, both beautiful, one a gazelle. She still didn’t understand the poem, but somehow she liked it even more. And she knew that while she’d never be a gazelle, the wind had shaped her, smoothed her plain, pleasant face and strong body, coloured her eyes that particular hue of green, tuned her lilting accent.
Jeannie checked the book out and made her way down the concrete steps, keeping an eye on the cloudy horizon. She glanced at her watch and reminded herself to not forget the coffee date she had later with Katie. The evening breeze blew steadily, slowly gathering strength. She stopped and watched as the first fallen leaves skipped across the dark courtyard. Jeannie hugged the book to her chest and headed for her residence, turning her beautiful face to the wind.
Children Green and Golden
My wishes raced through the house-high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky-blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace . . .
—from “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas
Albert Murphy died last week. He was down to the blessing of the sealing fleet when he had a heart attack and dropped dead. Martha, his wife, says that all of a sudden he got this funny expression on his face, like he used to get whenever he was on a hitch at bingo, and then he just keeled over onto the pavement. It hardly took more than ten seconds. Mom says he got off easy.
Mom never liked Albert. She’s not a talkative woman, but on the subject of Albert Murphy she was like a broken record. She had a regular speech about him, and she was forever telling it to us.
“I’ll never understand,” she’d say, “why that man can’t bring his cows up to the meadow, without having to beat ’em half to death with that stick he’s always carrying. Sure it’s as big as he is! And the rocks he throws at them—boulders is what you’d have to call them. Now no one can’t tell me any different. He goes past my door every morning and evening, and I sees ’im. He’s sick is what he is. Ye take my word for it: as sure as there’s a God in heaven, that man is goin’ straight to hell.”
I suppose in one way I had to agree with her. Sure didn’t I see him heave a rock at the brown heifer and nearly take her eye out, just because she was taking a bit longer getting a drink than suited him? But if we ever did anything to the cows—like make ’em run when we were taking them home in the evening—that was an altogether different thing. “Sweet honourable Christ!” he’d bark. “They’ll be losin’ milk runnin’ like that!” All the same, I never thought him a cruel man.
You see, he had another side, too—well, sort of. He used to let us kids help bring in the hay and vegetables, and he’d give us fifty cents whenever we helped him clean out the barn. Mom says he was just usin’ us to do his work, but I’m not too sure about that. And he had a sense of humour. Say a bunch of us would be in the barn during the milking? Albert would watch his chance, and then he’d turn the teat on us and just about shower us in hot milk! Well, what a commotion with everyone runnin’ out the barn doors, and all the girls screamin’ to beat the band! And he didn’t look mean. Sure Albert was only right small—not much bigger than my older brother Pat, and he’s just fourteen. Albert had white hair and this really red nose, which you’d probably think would make him look like Santa Claus. But he didn’t; he was too skinny.
And then there was the time Jerry Power nearly drowned. You see, one of our jobs when we cleaned out the barn was to load the wheelbarrow with manure, take it out back where there’s this long ramp and pit, and dump it. Wel
l, one day Jerry fell in. He says he slipped, but I knows different. He had that wheelbarrow piled up too high, so as to only make one trip—even though we were always telling him not to—and when he went to tip it out he lost control and went arse over kettle into eight feet of sh—manure. I beat it into the house to get Albert, and he came running out with his face all full of shaving cream (he was getting ready for mass) and bawling at me to tell him what was wrong.
“Jerry’s after goin’ off the end of the ramp!”
“Sweet honourable Christ!” says Albert, and the two of us just about flew out to the ramp, Albert panting for breath so it was a wonder he didn’t have his heart attack right then and there. I won’t go into the gory details, but Albert had to get pretty messy before he got close enough to Jerry to get a rope to him. But he done it. And he pulled him in, too. Well, the oaths out of Albert when he finally got him ashore! Poor Jerry was some sight. I suppose even Albert had to feel a little bit sorry for him. And the smell? I thought forty baths wouldn’t do Jerry a bit of good. And they didn’t either. I mean his mother burned his clothes, but skin can only stand so much soap.
Anyway, it was a week or so later when the dog showed up. Me and Jerry were up in the hayloft building tunnels, when little Pauly Jackman poked his head up the ladder and told us to come out and see his new dog. I never expected to see no dog—not knowing his mother. But we went out, and sure enough there was a dog—and a big one, too. He was about twice the size of Pauly. He was a German Shepherd, pretty skinny and dirty, and he had little tufts of tar on his legs and paws. I was reading Sherlock Holmes at the time, so right away I deduced that at some point in his travels the dog had made his way up to the old abandoned rock-crusher at the top of our road. There are lots of old tar barrels up there—cracked open, tar spilled everywhere. We were always finding juncos and robins stuck in the tar. They’d pitch down for a rest, I suppose, or to have a look around, or think about whatever it is birds think about, and then they couldn’t get away. It was some sad—especially if they were still alive, because then you’d have to put them out of their misery. You see, you’d never get the tar out of their feathers. Once I tried to fill in some of the more tarry spots with rocks, but I gave up. It’d take about forty years.